The Theology of the Perpetrator: Why Paul Thinks in Terms of Election, Plan, and Divine Necessity

Paul’s theology cannot be understood only by asking where his concepts came from. Greek Philosophy matters profoundly. It gave him the intellectual world of universals, absolute categories, invisible realities, predetermined purposes and a method by which particular events could be absorbed into a larger conceptual system. Paul was a philosopher, and Philosophy gave his theology the architecture through which Adam could become universal Man, one act could become the condition of humanity, sin could become a universal power, and Jesus could become the universal solution to a universal problem. But Philosophy alone does not explain why Paul’s theology takes precisely this form. Why does he repeatedly place election before action, purpose before history and divine necessity behind human events? Why does personal responsibility repeatedly encounter a higher level at which God has already chosen, called, foreknown or purposed what history will become? The answer may lie much closer to Paul himself.

Chosen Before the Crime

Paul does not hide his past. In Galatians he acknowledges that he violently persecuted the assembly of God and attempted to destroy it. Yet almost immediately he places that history inside another story: God, he says, had “set me apart from my mother’s womb.” The importance of this statement is difficult to exaggerate. Paul does not describe himself as a persecutor who later became chosen. The choice precedes everything: birth, belief, persecution, violence and conversion. Whatever he did occurred inside the biography of a man who, according to his own interpretation, had already been selected by God before he had done anything at all.

The persecution therefore remains a crime, but it no longer remains simply his crime. It becomes one episode inside a history whose final meaning had supposedly been determined before the actor even entered the world. Paul can say, in effect, that he persecuted and that he had nevertheless always been chosen. He tried to destroy the very movement he would later proclaim, yet even this catastrophic period could not invalidate an election that preceded his actions. Here we encounter the pattern that will later dominate his theology: human action remains visible, but divine election becomes the deeper explanation of history.

This is already a profound departure from ordinary moral responsibility. Responsibility says: I chose, I acted, therefore the act belongs to me. Paul adds another level: I chose and acted, but before any of this God had already chosen me. Once that principle is accepted, even the darkest acts of the chosen can be absorbed retrospectively into a larger providential story. The deed remains wrong, but the chosen person remains inside the plan.

Election Above Responsibility

What Paul says about himself he later turns into theology. Romans 9 makes the structure explicit through Jacob and Esau. Before either child had been born, before either had done good or evil, the distinction had already been made so that “the purpose of God according to election” might stand. The order is therefore not action followed by judgment, but election followed by history. Human conduct does not establish the choice; the choice precedes conduct.

The obvious moral problem is raised inside the text itself. If the decision precedes good and evil, is there injustice with God? Paul answers by appealing to divine sovereignty: “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy.” When the objection becomes sharper—“Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?”—Paul does not actually resolve the contradiction between responsibility and predetermined purpose. He terminates the argument: “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” God is the potter and man is the clay. At that point sovereignty replaces explanation.

The same pattern appears in Paul’s treatment of Israel. They can stand in opposition to the Gospel and yet remain “beloved for the sake of the fathers,” because the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable. Present conduct cannot finally destroy what election has established. This creates a special theological category: the history of the chosen. Their actions still matter, but those actions are interpreted within a status that precedes them and ultimately determines the outcome.

This is more than predestination as an abstract doctrine. It creates an asymmetry of responsibility. The one outside election stands before his deeds. The chosen one stands before his deeds and also behind them, so to speak, inside an earlier divine decision that guarantees that the story will ultimately lead somewhere else. Paul can therefore confess guilt without allowing guilt to become the final explanation of his own history. Above the deed stands purpose; above purpose stands election; and above election stands the sovereign will of God.

That is why this theology can function psychologically as a flight from responsibility without ever openly denying responsibility. The perpetrator can say, “I did it,” while simultaneously believing that his life had already been enclosed within a divine purpose before he acted. The crime remains his at the immediate level, but history itself becomes God’s. The deed is confessed, yet its ultimate meaning is transferred into providence.

From the Persecutor to the Cross

Once this pattern is recognized, Paul’s theology of the cross becomes much easier to understand. Jesus was rejected and killed by human beings. Religious leaders plotted against Him, political authority condemned Him, soldiers executed Him. The Melek was murdered. In a moral world based on freedom and responsibility, that should be the decisive fact: human beings chose the crime, therefore human beings bear responsibility for it.

Paul does not leave the event there. The death becomes necessary, salvific and universal. Jesus dies “for our sins.” The Righteous One becomes “a curse for us.” His blood becomes part of the mechanism of reconciliation, and the death of one becomes the means by which the many receive life. The perpetrators remain guilty, yet their crime simultaneously becomes indispensable to salvation. Human beings perform the act, while God owns the plan.

This is the same displacement seen in Paul’s own biography. He persecuted, but he had been chosen before birth. Israel can resist, but election remains. Jacob is chosen before action. At the cross, men murder the Innocent, but the murder itself becomes necessary to the saving purpose of God. Responsibility is acknowledged on one level and then absorbed into purpose on another.

The central error appears when divine non-intervention is transformed into divine intention. If God could have prevented the crime and did not, the event is reinterpreted as something God must have wanted. Yet that conclusion destroys the very meaning of human freedom. God also did not prevent the murder of John the Baptist. Jesus says plainly that men “did to him whatever they wanted,” and then places His own coming suffering in the same line. If divine non-intervention proves divine intention, then the Father must also have wanted John’s head on a platter. The same logic would have to be applied to every prophet murdered by those who rejected God’s message.

The simpler explanation is also the morally coherent one: God permits human beings to exercise the freedom He gave them, and the fact that He does not prevent every crime does not make Him the author of the crime. Permission is not intention. The perpetrators remain responsible precisely because their actions are genuinely theirs.

This is also what makes the transmitted Gethsemane scene so revealing. Men are preparing to arrest and murder God’s Anointed One, yet at the decisive moment another will is placed behind their action: “not as I will, but as You will.” The crime remains historically human, but the theological meaning changes. What men want to do becomes what the Father supposedly wants to happen. Human violence acquires divine necessity.

The same pattern continues when suffering becomes something the Son of Man “must” undergo, when the cup is described as given by the Father, and when the transmitted Gethsemane formula places another will behind the intentions of those preparing the crime. Yet at the cross, the comparison between the Gospels exposes the textual operation by which divine abandonment was finally inserted into the event. Luke preserves the original final declaration: “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.” Jesus dies trusting the Father, not accusing Him of abandonment.

Matthew and Mark originally ended the scene with the same final cry and contained no “Eli/Eloi” episode. Their present forms preserve the marks of the alteration. Mark retains the final loud cry but no longer gives its words, revealing that the authentic declaration was removed while its narrative frame remained. Matthew says that Jesus cried out “again,” exposing the second cry created when the “Eli, Eli” speech and the accompanying Elijah misunderstanding were inserted before the original final declaration was suppressed.

John independently confirms the character of the older ending. Jesus remains lucid, speaks to His mother and the beloved disciple, acknowledges His thirst, receives the sour wine, declares “It is finished,” and gives up His spirit. Luke preserves the words of entrustment; John preserves the clarity and composure of the final moment. Even the sour wine belongs to the original event and was later appropriated into the fabricated Elijah scene.

The interpolation did not merely add another expression of suffering. It transferred the decisive abandonment from human beings to God. Jesus had been abandoned by disciples, rejected by His society, condemned by religious authority, and surrendered by political power. The Father had not abandoned Him. Yet the edited narrative makes the victim Himself testify that God has forsaken Him. Pauline theology had already turned the executed Innocent into “a curse for us,” but Paul possessed no declaration from Jesus confirming that the Father had withdrawn from Him. The later editors supplied the missing narrative witness.

The canon could then preserve two contradictory realities: Luke’s declaration of trust and the altered Matthew–Mark declaration of abandonment. Philosophy converts that contradiction into paradox, calls it mystery, and gives the interpreter authority to explain how Jesus could remain united with the Father while simultaneously being forsaken by Him. Once the editorial layer is removed, no such paradox remains. Human beings abandoned Jesus; the Father did not.

The structure is therefore consistent: Gethsemane places the Father’s will behind the road to the cross; the fabricated cry places the Father’s abandonment inside the experience of the victim; Paul transforms the executed Innocent into the bearer of curse and guilt; and resurrection is then presented as the completion of the very transaction that the human crime supposedly accomplished. What began as murder committed by perpetrators has been transformed into divine plan.

Philosophy Gives the Inversion a Universe

Philosophy does not merely decorate this system with sophisticated words. It gives Paul the conceptual world in which such an inversion can become universal theology. The concrete moral question—who chose to do this?—is displaced by a larger question—what eternal purpose is being fulfilled through what happened? Once history is interpreted through universals, particular responsibility can be subordinated to a metaphysical narrative.

Adam becomes more than a man; he becomes the universal condition of humanity. Sin becomes more than individual wrongdoing; it becomes a power. Humanity becomes trapped inside a structure that precedes the individual. Election, foreknowledge, predestination and calling become categories through which history is read from above rather than from the concrete moral act upward. Jesus then becomes the universal answer to the universal condition.

This philosophical architecture fits Paul’s own way of interpreting himself remarkably well. He had already learned to see his personal history from the standpoint of prior election. Philosophy allowed that personal logic to become a cosmic system. The contradiction received vocabulary. The irrationality received architecture. What might otherwise have remained a personal theological explanation became a universal theory of God, humanity, history and salvation.

And this is precisely where Paul’s world collides with Genesis 1.

Genesis 1 presents humanity in the Image of God as capable, free and responsible. Human beings are not introduced as actors trapped inside a predetermined metaphysical drama. They receive authority over the Earth and the creatures, but they also receive the burden that comes with real agency. Their choices are theirs. God does not need to become the hidden author of evil in order to remain sovereign.

The moral sequence is simple: freedom produces action, and action produces responsibility. If a man murders, the murder belongs to the murderer. If a persecutor persecutes, the persecution belongs to the persecutor. If a crowd demands the death of the Innocent, the guilt belongs to those who made the demand. God’s refusal to abolish their freedom does not transfer their responsibility to Him.

The resurrection shows how divine sovereignty can coexist with this freedom without making God the secret author of the crime. Men are allowed to arrest Jesus, condemn Him, beat Him and crucify Him. Their will reaches its full consequence. God does not stop them by turning their freedom into theatre. But when their act is complete, their authority is complete as well. They can kill the Melek; they cannot determine what God will do with the One they killed. Beyond death begins territory that human will cannot control.

Resurrection is therefore not part of the murder. It is God’s answer to the murder. Humans own the crime; God owns the resurrection. Nothing requires the Father to have secretly planned the violence in order to overcome it.

The Theology of the Perpetrator

Seen from this perspective, Paul’s theology begins to reveal an internal psychological coherence. The same man who says that he persecuted the community also says that God had chosen him from his mother’s womb. The same theologian then makes election precede good and evil in Jacob and Esau, preserves Israel’s status despite opposition, and places the chosen inside a purpose that ultimately guarantees the outcome. When the moral contradiction becomes explicit—if God’s will determines the purpose, why does He still find fault?—the answer is not freedom and responsibility but sovereignty: who are you to question God?

The pattern reaches its most consequential form at the cross. Human beings perform the crime, but the crime becomes part of God’s saving purpose. The perpetrators remain guilty enough to need salvation, yet the very act for which they are guilty becomes the instrument through which salvation is produced. Responsibility is never denied outright. It is displaced upward until the ultimate explanation belongs to God.

This is why “divine plan” can become such a powerful refuge for the perpetrator. It permits confession without allowing the act to remain entirely one’s own. I did it, but God had a purpose. They killed Him, but He had to die. The crime was ours, but the necessity was God’s.

MEKORAH returns to the moral simplicity that this structure obscures. God gives freedom because humanity is made in His Image. Freedom makes genuine action possible, and genuine action makes responsibility unavoidable. God does not become responsible for evil merely because He refuses to abolish the freedom that made evil possible.

Paul’s philosophical system reverses that order. Election precedes action. Purpose precedes history. Human deeds become moments inside a larger necessity, and when responsibility collides with the divine plan, the plan wins.

That may explain more than the content of Pauline theology. It may explain why Paul needed a theology shaped this way in the first place.