For I Did Not Receive It From a Human Source

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.
(Galatians 1:11-12, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

The church is made up of people who have been surprised by God and accordingly know that we live through such surprises.” —Stanley Hauerwas

Somewhere in my personal library, I have a copy of a novel by Johnny Cash I found in a small bookstore a few blocks from my college campus thirty years ago. Man in White tells the story of Paul the Apostle’s conversion experience, expanding on events described in the ninth chapter of Acts. 

“If no hidden grain of truth is illuminated in this book,” he wrote in his introduction, “it will still have served its purpose. It kept me going back to the Bible—searching, meditating, envisioning, and talking about it for the better part of ten years.… something I should have been doing anyway.”

This slim book had a profound impact on my spiritual development.

Now, at the time, I heard a lot of criticism of Paul from certain Christian circles. Jesus came to us with a revolutionary message of love, the argument ran, and then Paul showed up to impose his own agenda of authority and control. I bought into that argument at first.

Johnny Cash didn’t write about that Paul. He wrote about Saul of Tarsus, a man convinced of his purpose as a zealous defender of his childhood faith who had his life upended by a direct, unmediated revelation from the resurrected Christ. At the very moment Saul set out to take his persecution of the Christian community to the next level in Damascus, Jesus chose to make of him “an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel.” 

Jesus doesn’t actually tell Saul that, though, at least not in Acts. It’s how he explains to Ananias, a disciple living in Damascus, why Ananias should help Saul despite everything he’s heard. Acts tells us only that, blinded by his encounter with Christ, “for three days [Saul] was without sight and neither ate nor drank.” Cash turns those three days into an ongoing series of instructions from “the Man in White” in which Saul accepts his new identity as Christ’s instrument, Paul.

I didn’t pick up on all the theological nuances of Cash’s dramatic embellishments back then. I did, however, grasp enough to appreciate the portrait of a man transformed by contact with the divine. I felt I knew Paul better after reading Man in White, and I could approach his letters in the New Testament with greater empathy and understanding.

(I told Cash that the one time we met, after standing in line for him to sign the novel for me. He seemed genuinely pleased to hear it, and do you know what he wrote below his autograph? “Look to the Light.”)

A man stands, perhaps atop a mountain, with his back to us, facing the sun which rises (or sets?) just over his shoulder. He is a silhouette against a golden brown sky, his arms stretched out as if to prayerfully greet the sun.
Photo: Zach Durant/Unsplash.

Beyond its immediate effect, Man in White planted a seed in me. 

Decades later, as I read about the spiritual revelations that changed George Fox’s life, I could see how Fox’s experiences echoed Paul’s. Not just the moments of conversion, either, but the years of traveling ministry that followed, and the strength of their ministries. I had some broad notion of Quaker faith going into that, but these insights helped me connect with the Religious Society of Friends at a deeper level—and to stick with it.

All of this might make me sound like a Christ-centered Quaker, but I would describe my faith more as Christ-informed. I believe Jesus gave us a compelling roadmap to the blessed community, and I want to at least try to make my way there in solidarity with others. Not all of those Friends will believe wholeheartedly in Jesus as the divine messiah. I don’t, either, thought I remain open to the possibility—not least of all because I too have lived through surprising encounters with something that resisted mundane explanation

Well, I’ve resisted the mundane explanations, at any rate. But I keep them in mind; as Addison Hodges Hart has written, “Skepticism is… the act of looking hard at things for the purpose of discovering and understanding what may be true about them.” And when we think we may have had an encounter with God, we ought to look at that real hard.

I say we because I firmly believe the Quaker principle that all of us have potential access to such “surprises,” on our own, independent of rite or ritual. We won’t all see the resurrected Christ that Paul saw or hear the Spirit that George Fox heard—but we can, if we pay attention, receive something more than we might have learned from any human source. If we choose to act on that knowledge, and seek out others who’ve had similar experiences, it will surely transform our lives.

Ron Hogan

Ron Hogan is the audience development specialist for Friends Publishing Corporation and webmaster for Quaker.org. He is also the author of Our Endless and Proper Work.

1 thought on “For I Did Not Receive It From a Human Source

  1. First, Ron, I love that you reference Johnie Cash, a favorite of mine, and that you share his experience. I have had several such experiences. I told a Friend today that the power of our connection to Source via Jesus, if that is your way, is something we can rely on daily, moment to moment. I made a concerted effort to run my life by that still voice within, and when able to do it, it gave me an extraordinary sense of calm, peace, and stability. So much needed right now. It does not have to be earth-shaking, as some striking events, but it sustains a life virtuously led through the tough spots.

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