The Gospel According to Paul—or Jesus?

This week, a viral video captured NYC-based pastor Brandan Robertson—known as “the TikTok pastor,” at least according to his website—making a peculiar argument: that St. Paul and Jesus “are preaching two different Gospels.”

Robertson’s comments came in response to this question: “What do we know about Jesus and the actual teachings of Christ, and how do we divorce this from the usually hypocritical Paul-centric teachings of a typical church?” Robertson proceeded to explain that “Paul and Jesus often come into contradiction with each other,” and that whereas conservative evangelicalism often chooses what Paul said “to the detriment of what Jesus said,” Christians really ought to err in the other direction, choosing Jesus’ message over Paul’s.

What, according to Robertson, separates Paul’s Gospel from that of Jesus? It is that Paul’s is “primarily theological”: he is sharing the story of Jesus with the wider Greco-Roman world. Christ’s, on the other hand, is “primarily social and ethical”: he is sharing “a new way of living, a new standard of justice: How do we live in a more just and generous world?” St. James and St. Peter, who knew Jesus intimately, mirror their teacher’s emphasis: faith is good works. Paul, who “never met Jesus,” disagrees: faith, not works, is what saves us.

Now, to Robertson’s credit, he does say that both “Gospels” are necessary, and both are important to Christianity. But his analysis makes a decisive and dangerous cut right through the New Testament—and it didn’t take long for a flood of criticisms to roll in. Some sighed, pointing out that this “Paul vs. Jesus” trope is an old and tired one; others raged, treating Robertson’s ideas as a dangerous and even demonic innovation of progressive Christianity.

From a Catholic perspective, it is helpful to take a step back and see the way the conversation itself moves. Robertson may be reacting to a real dysfunction in “Paul-centric” conservative evangelicals, but even as he opposes it, he falls into their same cast of mind. In either direction, the debate is framed as an “either/or.” A dilemma is being posed—a zero-sum game in which, at certain junctures, one side has to cede to the other.

What is the dilemma? It is not between Paul and Jesus themselves. A saint vs. the Son of God is no match at all for any Christian. Rather, it is between the spiritual and ethical emphases of each person as recorded in Scripture. In Robertson’s reading, Paul’s message is a more “heavenward,” vertical one, whereas Jesus’ is more “earthward” and horizontal. The first is focused on God and paradise, the second on man and the world. The former is the Gospel of faith that saves us from the world, the latter the “Gospel we live by” to transform it for the better, here and now. The dilemmas in play—God or man, paradise or the world, faith or works, theology or social justice, the not yet and the already—are familiar ones.

The problem, of course, is that they are all false dilemmas—and we see that in the light of Christ himself. Christ is both God and man; he dwells in both paradise and on earth; he is both the model of trust in the Father and the model of service to his brothers; he is the inspiration of both the highest theological tomes and the grittiest works of mercy; he orients us to both the kingdom to come and the kingdom that has arrived. The principle becomes even clearer where Scripture and Tradition flow together as one source of divine revelation. Christianity is a faith of the both/and—not the either/or.

But is Robertson right, at least on biblical grounds? Do St. Paul and Jesus/James/Peter contradict each other? One way to answer the question is by looking at how the atheist Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism who dreamed of a “religion of humanity,” read the same dilemma.

Henri de Lubac in his Drama of Atheist Humanism paints the picture: Comte agreed with Robertson that there was a clear division between St. Paul and Jesus. But in Comte’s reading, the two messengers effectively swap places: Jesus, despite his emphasis on works, was the vertical messenger—a “religious adventurer,” a “suppositious founder,” even “a charlatan,” whose theological tunnel-vision focused on God above and the ego below. “The incomparable Saint Paul,” on the other hand, despite his emphasis on faith, was the great harbinger of the horizontal—a founder of Western civilization who captured a broadened “conception of Humanity” in his great metaphor: “We are members one of another” (Rom. 12:5).

How can St. Paul and Jesus be seen—depending on the position and angle—as falling on opposite sides? Because neither is on either side at all; both are on both. St. Paul did indeed meet Jesus on the road to Damascus, and it was no longer Paul who lived, but Christ who lived in him (Acts 9; Gal. 2:20). Like his master, the defining move of his preaching was drawing the vertical and the horizontal together—a communion culminating in the cross.

St. Paul and Jesus are not preaching two different messages, but rather the same old rich, full, paradoxical Gospel: Christ himself, who always shows us the Way.