relationship with God and of a personal salvation which makes the apocalypse superfluous and irrelevant: the soul has its individual drama with God in addition to the vast collective performance on the eschatological stage, with its terrifying scenery and sound effects, its dues ex machina descending for the second Coming, the parousia. But this remained to be discovered and interpreted: one of the hidden matrices of Jesus’ gospel. The prima facie view of the Jesus mission was that it was an immediate prelude to a Last Judgment. Hence the urgency of the Pentecostal task, an urgency which Paul shared throughout his life, so that his final hope was to carry the good news, while there was still time, to Spain - for him, ‘the ends of the earth’. It was this sense of urgency which gave a twist to Paul's theology. To him it made the accumulated apparatus of Jewish legalism particularly intolerable. Before his conversion he had been, he thought, a righteous man, keeping the law. The blinding insight of truth showed him this was a complete illusion. He realized he had not begun to live until he saw God through Jesus Christ. And the relationship was absolutely direct. As he put it: '| am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present or future, nor powers, nor any created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.' Or again: ‘If God is for us, who are against us?’ So for him the coming of Christ automatically ended the old Jewish law. For him the law became a curse, for no man could fulfill its 613 commands and prohibitions completely; thus it made sinners of everyone. In some ways it was a direct incentive to sin. Paul did not preach license. On the contrary, he constantly urged that the commandments must be kept. He advocated activism, especially in charity. And he told his converts to work. As a budding rabbi he had been taught a trade: he was a tentmaker. This was a practical as well as symbolic sign of the great, central therapy of work: one Jewish concept he triumphantly transmitted to Christianity. But Paul knew it was madness to suppose that salvation lay through the law and such externals as circumcision. The law was formal; its observation was perforce based on a degree of hypocrisy; indeed, all the systems of its interpretation were necessarily an attempt to refashion something originally inspired by God in man's distorting image. Good works were important, indeed: ‘God will repay each in accordance with his works.’ But salvation came primarily through faith (which was a rebirth and an identification with the true righteousness of God), so perfect that it can only be bestowed by God, who in doing so makes man righteous. The Jews had taken the false direction by believing that their works would establish their righteousness. They believed themselves chosen so long as they kept the law. However, the mark of election is not birth, but God's promise as enacted through the grace of faith. It applied to all, without respect of race, sex or status. Of course if all Israel became zealous for the conversion of the Gentiles, it would fulfill its role as the elect nation. But the prime object of the gentile mission was to set the machinery of God's election in motion. Paul noted that the scriptures adumbrated a system of predestination, and he quoted the case from Ezra: 'And thou didst set apart Jacob for thyself, but Esau thou didst hate.’ The concept was made far more terrifying in the Qumran texts. But there is no mandate in Paul for the Calvinist insistence on the eternal predestination of the individual to Salvation or damnation. Paul saw damnation as the shadow that was cast by election from grace; it ensures the purity of the gospel message; he did not put forward a theory about God's system of selection, but an explanation of what happens to a man when he hears the gospel - he chooses, and so he is chosen. This tremendous attack on the whole Judaic concept of man's relationship with God, and its replacement by a new Salvationist system, was summarized in Paul's great essay in determinist theology, the epistle to the Romans. What an extraordinary document to be received by a young congregation who had never met the apostle! No one has ever fully understood Romans. No one can remain undisturbed by it, either. It is the most thought-provoking of all the Christian documents. It has a habit of forcing men to reconsider their whole understanding of religion even when they have spent many years in theological inquiry, Thus Romans profoundly changed Augustine's thinking in the last years of his life. It was the 24