Paul has no problem with wealth, yet he advocates positions that work against his personal economic interests. He notes that, while advocating the closing of tax loopholes, he has no difficulty taking advantage of those that remain. Fundamentally, Paul represents a middle path, as expressed in the ancient dictum that "men with vision walk in the middle."

Paul was undeniably sincere. He believed that in reinterpreting the Christian faith so as to make it acceptable to the Romans he was doing that faith a service. His make-up was imperial rather than democratic. Both by birth and training he was unfitted to enter into the working-class consciousness of Galileans. He was in culture a Hellenist, in religion a Pharisee, in citizenship a Roman. From the first strain, Hellenism, he received a bias in the direction of philosophy rather than economics; from the second, his Pharisaism, he received a bias toward aloofness, otherworldliness; and from the third, his Romanism, he received a bias toward political acquiescence and the preservation of the status quo.

I leave it to you to compare this Christian hero <nowiki>[</nowiki>Paul] with some of the 'freethinkers' of our own day, who, 'more intolerant than the intolerance they deprecate,' flaunt in public their cheap and trumpery theories of the great Apostle and the Master whom he served.

Some have criticized Paul for not trying to reform the social system. We realize, however, that Paul used the worst social system as an opportunity to charge the believers to live a Jesusly human life in the midst of it. If the saints could live such a human life in the worst social system imaginable, then we should be able to live such a life in any kind of circumstances today. (...) by the divine life we can have the highest human living even in the worst social system!

Speaking as a Christian, I find the Apostle Paul appealing and the apostle Peale appalling.

The position of Pope Paul came close to being a pan-Deism, and pan-Deism is the logical development of the virus of Hellenic thought.

Paul was a stockholder in Rome's world corporation. And that stock by slow degrees had blinded him to the injustice of a social system in whose dividends he himself shared. This explains in large part why he accepted the political status quo, and preached its acceptance by others.

Indeed, Paul’s capacity for irreverence and wit is true to the John Maynard Keynes maxim: "Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking"