Conversion is vocation

[Warning: This post is probably not interesting to anyone but me.]

I am writing the following down just because they struck me strongly while reading for the Introduction to the New Testament course I am taking online from MSR. They are two related sets of quotes from the course textbook and the book I've chosen for my book report.

Today, in spite of important connections between Paul's own words and the accounts of Acts (e.g., Paul's having "seen the Lord" and the link with Damascus, we need to recognize the sharp distinction between "apocalypse" and "conversion," at least as generally conceived. The term "conversion" usually implies both a moral turnabout, so that one ceases doing evil and starts leading a "good" or upright life, and/or a change of religions, say, from Judaism or no religion to Christianity. On both counts "conversion" is inadequate to describe what Paul says happened for him. Before he encountered Christ, Paul was, "as to righteousness under the law, blameless," so it would be wrong to say he became morally upright only after becoming a follower of Christ. And although it is common to think that, on the road to Damascus, Paul stopped being Jewish and became a Christian, as if he were changing religious affiliations, Paul never stopped thinking of himself as "Jewish." For him, becoming an apostle of Christ Jesus in no way meant changing religions.

Where "conversion" suggests a significant change within a linear progression of events, like the peripeteia or "turning point" in a Greek drama, "apocalypse" connotes a radical disjuncture in time and space, like the discovery of an entirely different plot. Apocalypse is the word Paul chooses to describe the sudden encounter with the risen Christ that transformed him into Christ's "slave" and "apostle," commissioning him to proclaim the gospel of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles.

- Richard E. Sturm, Chalice Introduction to the New Testament (Dennis E. Smith, ed.), p 33 [scripture references elided, emphases in the original]

And:

There was a point at which Paul the Jew became, without ceasing in his own understanding to be a Jew, a Christian. The point is traditionally referred to as his conversion. It is often said now that this is a misnomer; the event was not a conversion for Paul did not take up a new religion with a different God. He continued to worship the God of the Old Testament; the event was not a conversion but a vocation. He was called to become a missionary of the Christian way of understanding the God and the religion of his fathers. This distinction is unreal; no one has ever made clearer than Paul himself did that to become a Christian is at the same time to receive a call to some kind of Christian service - for Paul, the call to missionary work among the Gentiles. Conversion is vocation.

- C.K. Barrett, Paul: An Introduction to His Thought, p 10 [emphases mine]

"Conversion is vocation." Hmmm...I am going to have to chew on that one for a while.