Epistle: Year A (I Corinthians 1:1-4:5) Year B (I Corinthians 6:12-20 -9:27 & II Corinthians 1:18-3:6) Year C (I Corinthians 12:1-15:58)
Paul wrote I Corinthians from Ephesus about Fall 54 AD. Paul was at Corinth in the winter of 51 AD. It is the second letter to Corinth, the first letter lost to history. He had been in Corinth in 51 AD.
The letter is an example of what we would describe as practical theology. He addresses in a straightforward manner a series of everyday issues with the congregation. It focuses on the day-to-day practices of the Christian life. Paul offers advice and exhortation on how to keep the community together. In the process, he presents stirring claims about the nature of Christian community that continue to inspire readers. In all his correspondence, Paul tries to provide guidance in decision-making, but he wants his communities to be self-governing. He knows that he cannot be the lawgiver and arbiter for every dispute in Greece, Asia Minor and Rome. Since Paul wants the community to be self-governing, he must combat the problem of factionalism in Corinth. For Paul, the natural law of the cosmos and the Jewish law of the Torah have been fulfilled in love, in the death and resurrection of Christ. Through prayer and life “in Christ,” Paul believes communities should be able to discern what the law of love instructs. Scholars of ancient rhetoric have classified First Corinthians as an example of a letter encouraging concord (harmonia) more than anything else, and the virtue that leads to concord is not knowledge (gnosis) but love (agape). An example of this analysis is in Margaret M. Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation.
This letter provides ample evidence to combat the widely held romantic notion that the early church was pristine and pure in its faith and practice and that the later church has fallen off the beam of Christian unity. This congregation had its challenges. The occasion for writing I Corinthians is Paul's concern over trouble brewing among Corinthian Christians now that he is away from them pursuing mission activity in other parts of the Roman Empire. The epistle records his responding to the emergence of divisiveness and factionalism, reports of lapses into moral laxity and requests for guidance about Christian conduct. Paul calls the Corinthian church back to unity and life in the Spirit, reminding them of Christ's willingness to suffer the cross on the way to transforming even the most hardened people for participation in God's gracious purposes of faith, hope and love. Consequently, he challenges Corinthian Christians to pursue freedom rooted in servanthood, greatness revealed in humility, life resulting from sacrifice.
In chapters 1-6, Paul responds to word on the street (e.g., reports from Chloe's people, 1:11), that there are divisions within the Corinthian community, and that there is a variety of immoral and unsavory behaviors in the church (5-6).
Like the Moses, Elijah, and the prophets, Paul viewed himself as called by the will of God. He also viewed himself as addressing a people whom God has called and sanctified as a holy people (I Corinthians 1:1-9, Year A Epiphany 2). This notion gave rise to the statement in the creed regarding the “communion of saints.” Paul constantly impresses on us the sanctification of life as an implication of belonging to Jesus Christ.[1] He can refer to the community as those who call upon the name of our Lord, a reference to the covenantal name of God in the Old Testament or to how people addressed the Roman Caesar, Jesus, who is the promised Messiah of the Jewish people. When Paul offers grace, an expression found in Greek letters of the time, and peace, a common greeting in Jewish letters of the time, to those to whom he is writing, he is also reminding his readers of important theological expressions within the Christian community. Grace as a Christian term is the sign of the appearance and activity of God. It signifies the antecedent act of God that is the foundation of Christian faith. This grace comes through Jesus Christ as a gift to the believer, enabling ministry to the body of Christ and to the world. Shalom refers to total well-being, wholeness, and fullness. Grace and peace invite readers to participate in the new state of salvation now available to all who confess Christ. Together, they constitute the gift of salvation. Such a greeting in a letter that contains grit and pointed reminders may have a touch of irony. However, it also contains an important theological truth, since they are from the God as the Father of our Lord who is Jesus, the promised Jewish Messiah. While Hellenistic letters often began with expressing gratitude, he will use this thanksgiving to invite the congregation to live into their calling. He will offer a thumbnail sketch of the issues confronting the congregation in the context of his thanksgiving. His thanks is to God for the greatest gift, that of the grace of God given to them in Christ Jesus, enriching them in Christ in every way, but especially in speech (λόγῳ) and knowledge (γνώσει) of every kind, a reference to some of the thorniest issues he will face. Since this congregation seems to have division due to vindictive language, ecstatic utterance, and misconstrued theology, one can sense the irony of this reference. He tries to put such extraordinary gifts in a positive light. He also connects them to their true source in Christ. Paul is emphasizing that Christ is the one who unifies them, preparing the reader for his reflections in Chapters 1-4, and especially Chapter 2 and his reflection on wisdom and foolishness. Further, in strengthening or confirming the testimony or gospel that founded the church concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Christ given by Paul. Therefore, they do not lack any spiritual gift, with which they seem overwhelmed by uncontrolled use (11-13). The human experience of feeling as if something is missing in our lives may mean that we already have something that we do not know we have. We are not good at receiving, so we perceive lack. We may feel lack when we need to see who we are in Christ. Our purpose is to show to others the gifts we have received. We often do not pay attention to the gifts we have received. Is it because we take them for granted? Is it because we do not perceive them as gifts? The gifts we have may derive from the way we faced difficult circumstances, and thus all we see is the challenging work. Yet, if we could pause long enough to reflect upon them, we would realize that we already have what we need to meet the challenges of this day or of the net stage of our lives. You lack nothing because God has given you the gift of life in a world that is teeming with life. Such life has its beauty and love to offer, but it also has its dangers and risks. You are part of humanity, uniquely related to God. You are part of a nation, a community, an ethnic group, a family, each of us has unique gifts for you to learn, appreciate, and embody in your life. For the Christian, becoming part of the people of God makes us part of the Body of Christ, inviting us to fellowship with each other and with Christ. Such persons also have the Spirit of God at work within them. My point, of course, is that none of this are alone in this thing called life, and certainly not Christian life. The resources we need to face the challenges of life are not simply within us. If that were so, we would also lack. We ack nothing because we are more intimately bound together with others and with God than we may even know. Therefore, we truly lack nothing.
All this is occurring now, but in a way that shows they are waiting for the revealing (ἀποκάλυψιν or revelation) of our Lord, Jesus, who is the promised Jewish Messiah, an unusual phrase for Paul. The apocalyptic context of the term shows it is provisional until that final revelation, suggesting that faith and hope that looks toward that final revelation will be important qualities of a Christ life. [2] This notion still finds expression in hymns. Even the title of O Come, O Come Emmanuel gives expression to this hope. Charles Wesley (1744) could write Come, Though Long Expected Jesus and say:
Him the people to deliver, born a child and yet a King
Born to reign in us forever, now Thy gracious kingdom bring
By Thy own eternal Spirit, rule in all our hearts alone
By Thine all sufficient merit, raise us to Thine glorious throne
Paul emphasizes his eschatological outlook. The Spirit now at work in the gifts is a foretaste of what shall come. Their spiritual gifts today do not mean the eschaton has already appeared. Such gifts are an earnest of what is yet to come. Such gifts provide the community with a glimpse into the future glory that awaits them. The gifts are not fully present. If a day is coming for a revealing of Christ, then the present is a time of some hiddenness of whom Christ is. The present is a time of waiting for the fullness of revelation. The present is a prolepsis of the fullness of future revelation. They can exercise their gifts in the present as they look forward to final revelation. They can look beyond their present poverty, slavery, and victimization by evil and see the glory to come. In fact, Christ strengthens them to the end, stressing that the grace of God will not run short and will bring them home. Christ gives the prophetic announcement of the Day of the Lord, a day of judgment and liberation, further content as our Lord, Jesus, the promised Jewish Messiah. Christ ushers in the fulfillment of the promised eschatological era. Such eschatological imagery from the prophets finds its home in the New Testament as well. The Day is a time of judgment in which Christ has victory over sin and death. Until that Day, all believers live on the wings of grace. Paul is quite aware that he and his fellow Christians live between two advents or comings of Jesus Christ. The event to which Paul in his time bore witness continues. He is still in his time, as are all the apostles. They are such only as they are in the time of the revelation, declaration, and realization of their time in its hastening towards the end that has already come. What is at issue is the manifestation of the beginning of time posited in Christ, as well as its goal and end.[3] God will not break this promise, so Great is Thy Faithfulness, as the hymn puts it. The promise to Israel and the church remains stable (Romans 9-11).
Thou art the Lord who slept upon the pillow,
Thou art the Lord who soothed the furious sea.
What matter beating wind and tossing billow
If only we are in the boat with thee?
Hold us in quiet through the age-long minute
While thou art silent, and the wind is shrill:
Can the boat sink while thou, dear Lord, art in it?
Can the heart faint that waiteth on thy will?
--Amy Carmichael
Paul wants them to remember that God has called (ἐκλήθητε) them into being, and he will urge them to live into that calling. God has called them into the fellowship (κοινωνίαν) or partnership of the Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. The evidence of their calling is partnership with the Son. This word is rich in meaning, pointing us to the quality of the relationship within the community. The word has a basic meaning of sharing possessions. The fellowship shared in the community is to reflect the fellowship they have with Christ. They are to have unity in action and concerns. Such partnership has its root in grace. Such partnership unites the congregation to the Father, Son, and Spirit. Christ is our partner in human nature, so we are partners in the divine nature (II Peter 1:4). Thus, the call of the gospel is toward the faith of the recipients and therefore at their participation in salvation in fellowship with Christ.[4] For Paul, this focus on partnership also serves as a bridge to a discussion of the division experienced by the community. Their identity is communal. Their calling is to live into a unique relationship with the Son. They belong to God, and thus, as we look ahead to the difficult matters Paul will address, not to any group of believers.
The first major section of I Corinthians focuses on divisions on scandals (1:10-6:20). It begins with a discussion of the dissension within the community (I Corinthians 1:10-18, Year A Epiphany 3). From this point to 4:21, Paul delivers his choicest rhetoric against the divisiveness shattering the community and calls for unity to prevail.
Paul will begin by focusing on false loyalty or a party spirit, illustrating and elaborating on the dangers to a Christian community of schism, division, and disunity. The greatest challenge of this community is to overcome dissension and division to present a united front of faithfulness to the world. As a skilled orator, Paul crafts a guarded argument in this passage against those who would challenge either his authority or the integrity of the Corinthian faith community itself. He begins by making a strong and urgent plea to his brothers and sisters, borrowing language from the household, found more frequently in Paul than anywhere else in the New Testament. He makes his appeal in such a way it is the Lord, Jesus, who is the Christ, is making the appeal for the reconciliation of believers. [5] Such language lends weight to the appeal he is making. Paul distinguishes instructions and exhortations of his own (e.g., I Corinthians 7:10, 12, 25) from those he perceived to be based on teachings of Jesus (e.g., I Corinthians 11:23; 14:37), and his invocation of the name of Jesus maintains this distinction while simultaneously enhancing the moral authority of his own opinions. His plea is that the various groups will knit themselves together and settle their dispute. His appeal is that there be no divisions (σχίσματα) among them, united in the same mind (νοῒ), sensitive to the nature and will of God, and the same purpose (γνώμῃ, judgment), the same outlook and value system. People associated with Chloe, a woman head of household and thus a widow and of sufficient means that she supported the missionary work of Paul, have reported of quarrels (ἔριδες), in that some they claim to belong to certain leaders, such as Paul, Apollos, an effective witness in Ephesus and Corinth (Acts 18:24-28), Cephas, suggesting that those taught by him disseminated his teachings in the area, and even Christ. In Greco-Roman culture, people would attach themselves to wealthy patrons. In return for flattering behavior and public attention, these patrons would give their “clients” credibility and social status they could never gain on their own. Particularly when speaking for a patron, a client would enact the authority that the patron possessed and, therefore, could wield great power. While there may have been competing communities arising around Paul, Peter, and John, we need to remember that all find their way into the rule of faith for Christians as part of the New Testament. Later generations would see the underlying unity. These divisions amused Paul, wondering if Christ is divided or if Paul was crucified for them, or baptized in the name of Paul. He did baptize the household of the synagogue official Crispus (Acts 18:8), Gaius (the name is in Acts 19:29; 20:4; Romans 16:23; III John 1 as well), and the household of Stephanas (16:15), and he is not sure if he baptized others. His language regarding baptism here suggests the possibility that baptism in the name of Jesus may have preceded the Trinitarian formula.[6]Although Paul would certainly not have repudiated Christian baptism per se (cf. Acts 18:8, above), he may not have attached the same degree of importance to that initiation ritual as some of his contemporaries and followers. Paul’s words concerning baptism may reflect an early division of labor among various functionaries in the Christian movement, with some specializing in preaching, others in liturgy (including baptizing), others in administration, others in charitable works, etc. Whatever Paul’s understanding of baptism in general may have been, the situation in Corinth, and the role baptism played in it, was his overriding concern, and he may be expressing simple relief that he personally played so small a role in what had developed into a toxic situation in one of his churches.
The diversity of early church reminds us that there is no reason why everyone should be Christian in the same way and every reason to leave room for differences, but if all the competing factions of Christendom were to give as much of themselves to the high calling and holy hope that unites them as they do to the relative inconsequentialities that divide them, the church would look more like the rule of God.[7] For our ears, such an affirmation of unity is difficult, given that we live in the period of the divided church and denominationalism. Yet, such a statement makes it important for the church and its leaders to find ways of affirming unity within the diversity of the global church.[8] Our denominational age makes it difficult to relate to this appeal to unity. The presence of denominations has led to greater freedom and mobility, allowing the church of Jesus Christ to accomplish its mission in the historical setting in which it finds itself. However, a divisive and hostile spirit within the Body of Christ is offensive to the mission of the church.
The basis of one of the sermons of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism in England, received attacks from many quarters. His response was to deliver a sermon concerning what we as Christians do when we disagree with one another. In part of that sermon, this is what he said:
But although a difference in opinions or modes of worship may prevent an entire external union; yet need it prevent our union in affection? Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion? Without all doubt we may. Herein all the children of God may unite, notwithstanding these smaller differences. These remaining as they are, they may forward one another in love and in good works.[9]
Our differences may be deep enough that we cannot be in the same organization and organized by the same denominational discipline. Yet, we should be able to unite in our love for each other as children of God. The churches need to beware of the temptation to refuse love, especially if one uses spiritual motives to do so. People who claim to love God can also release themselves from the obligation to love the other. Such people have become spiritually sterile. They remain in their inert and stunted little circle of abstract, petty concerns involving themselves and a few others as sterile as themselves.[10]
Paul concludes this section by reminding his readers that Jesus as the Christ is the heart of Christianity. He stresses that Christ did not send him to baptize. Here is a reminder that only in Matthew 28:19 is there a commission to the disciples to baptize. Given his exposition in Romans 6, he had a profound understanding of the theological significance of baptism, but Paul as the head of a team of missionaries was not usually the one who baptized. We can infer that his associates did that. Christ sent him to proclaim the gospel (εὐαγγελίζεσθαι). He admits he does not preach with the eloquent wisdom of Apollos. However, the limitations of his style of preaching enhance the power of the cross of Christ. We tend to want general truths to which we can reason. The model is science, for its conclusions, which mathematize the movements of nature, apply to every culture and time. Yet, the claims of religions, as with the claims of economic and political theory, do not have that type of certainty or universality. When the truth becomes specific, something disclosed in a moment or event, it requires a response from us. Do we see this Moment as a disclosure of truth we did not discover, but rather, that God revealed? This Moment discloses what we know concerning God. We get a lesson in the dialectic within Paul between revelation and culture. What may feel natural given certain cultural settings contrasts sharply and dialectically with the moment of revelation. Preachers and teachers of Christian faith must never back away from the dialectical tension in trusting revelation. Paul turns toward those of us who respond with faith in the wisdom of the cross. The rhetorical tradition of Hellenism that championed the abilities of human wisdom and power and glorified the pride and prestige of knowledge appealed strongly to the Corinthians.
In I Corinthians 1:18, Paul states strongly that message [λόγος] about the cross, which is the gospel,[11] the story of the self-sacrifice of a man whom the church believes is the Son of God, the supreme event that is a divine intrusion and disruption, is foolishness [μωρία] to those who are perishing, but to us who God is saving, it has set in motion the power of God. The bridge between the event of Jesus as the Christ in its time and our appropriation of that event in our time is the message and proclamation of the gospel. Time does not trap Christ in the past, for the word or message of the cross is the vehicle through which Christ becomes present in our time. Here is an amazing claim for the power of language. The saving power of God comes in something as vulnerable and foolish preaching. If preaching has this power, it has the power to break the grip of sin and bring us to God.
There was no worse way to die. Romans flogged victims just short of death, then nailed their hands and feet to the wood. Crucifixion proved to be particularly effective in subduing restless colonies, thus the Romans used it widely in Judea. Though widely used, classical Roman literature downplays its role, stressing that government authorities used only on barbarians and then, only in the most rebellious of them. In crucifixion, it was not only the physical pain, but also government authorities hanging up a body naked for all to see and mock. No wonder that crucifixion was especially popular torture for robbers, rebels, and other disturbers of the peace. Yet, God has showed up in this world in the strangest way possible – the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross discloses the folly of the wisdom and strength of this world. One of the paradoxical statements of Paul is that the folly of the cross is wisdom. God has abandoned the wisdom of this world. At the heart of the Christian gospel is the word of the cross. As in other places (such as the wonderful hymn of Philippians 2:5-11), Paul delights in the paradox of the cross and how its offense and weakness reveal the power of God, thus exposing the foolishness of this age.
Paul will contrast the foolishness of the cross with the wisdom of the world (I Corinthians 1:18-2:16, Year A Epiphany 4 and 5), beginning with looking back to the cross (I Corinthians 1:18-31). He refers to Isaiah 29:14 (LXX) to defend the foolishness of preaching with the reminder that the Lord will destroy what humanity considers wise and discerning. He reminds his readers of the sharp distinction between the wisdom contained in the plan of God and the wisdom of human beings. Human beings did not know God through their philosophical or religious search, so God decided through the foolishness of apostolic proclamation to save those who respond to that preaching with faith or trust in its validity and truth. The danger of all preaching and apologetics is to falsify the gospel by presenting in an acceptable and tolerable form for the current age. The Moment of revelation places Jew and Gentile on the same footing. Both conflict with revelation! To their credit, both Jew and Gentile want to know God. Their inability to know God by their chosen means to do so is part of the divine plan. We will need to trust something beyond our ability to control or toward which we could reason. We will have to direct our attention decidedly not us to learn who God is. If revelation conformed to our expectations, we would hardly have needed revelation. The experiences of the early Israelites in the wanderings in the wilderness consisted of demanding signs that the Lord would deliver them. Some Jews expected signs from Jesus (Matthew 12:38). They wanted tangible demonstrations of power. Such a sign would be dramatic intervention in the sky and the earth. The Jews demand a victorious Messiah. The contrasting desire of the Greek for wisdom is a demand for an approach to the ineffable that is intellectually cogent and philosophically sound. They want any talk of God to have intellectual respectability. The Greeks wanted to weigh the pros and cons of a new system. Paul is combating an inflated view of wisdom and knowledge. Human knowledge creates the obstacle here. If one measures revelation by the standards of human reason, revelation will come up short. To put it another way, we do not need revelation to teach us what we can learn through experience and reasoning. If revelation occurs in the cross, then it moves against human presumption. The cross moves against our natural tendencies. It refuses to conform to our standards of experience or reasoning. Revelation in the cross stresses what God has done there rather than that which we can know through the exercise of our reason. They want divine truths in the same way they get scientific truths. They want to observe and come to their conclusions. The demand for logic and reasons can blind one from seeing the moment of revelation. The apostolic proclamation is an offense to the Torah, and foolishness to those who think nothing significant can happen through something so vulnerable and prone to misunderstanding as preaching.
The Moment of revelation goes against the expectations of Jew and Gentile. Revelation in the cross is not glory as the Jew would understand it, nor wisdom as the Gentile would understand it. Both Jews and Greeks, as Molly Marshall-Green puts it, are looking for God in all the wrong places. They shall have neither signs nor wisdom. Paul is stressing that the difficulty in discovering the presence of God is the preconceived expectations of who God is and how God ought to behave. Sign-seeking Jews and wisdom-desiring Gentiles denounce the gospel because it does not meet their norms of godliness. The prophetic work of Jesus Christ has the form of passion. Yes, he is Jesus Christ the Victor, but through Gethsemane and Golgotha. In this form of suffering, as the Rejected, Judged, Despised, Bound, Impotent, Slain, and Crucified, we see the Victor who marches with us and to us through the times, alive in the promise of the Spirit. In this form, he is at the core of the kerygmatic theology of Paul and the kerygmatic accounts of the Gospels. In this form, as an obstacle to Jews and foolishness to Greeks, he has addressed his own, his community, and through this the world, from the time of his resurrection onwards. He encounters humanity in this form, or not at all.[12]
Paul condemns arrogant human wisdom. He does not condemn genuine knowledge. He suggests the deepest human need is to know God, but the quest for knowledge could not fill the void. However, that inability was part of the plan of God. Nevertheless, one does not find here a biblical warrant for abandoning the study of wisdom and enshrining ignorance on the altar of spirituality. Are we to disregard the idea of philosophy as the handmaid of theology? Does Athens have nothing to do with Jerusalem? Early theologians (Clement of Alexandria, for one) were quick to rehabilitate Paul on this point, arguing that Paul, influenced by the Greek philosophical setting, is not railing against philosophy, but against bad philosophy, particularly philosophy of the Epicurean and Stoic variety. He himself quoted the philosophers to make his own theological point, although without much success (Acts 17). A preacher wrote John Wesley: Dear Mr. Wesley, the Lord has directed me to write you to say that he don’t need your larnin’ to spread his word.” Wesley wrote: “Dear Sir, I received your letter in which you observed that the Lord directed you to inform me that he does not need my learning in order to spread his word. I reply, not by the Lord’s direction, but on my own to inform you that while the Lord does not require my learning, neither does he require your ignorance.”
Here lies the heart of the distinction that Martin Luther drew and famously expounded in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 between theologia crucis and theologia gloriae. Martin Luther considered a theology of the cross to be a new principle of theological epistemology. He links those who embrace the wisdom of the world to a theology of glory, an ontological enterprise in which one presumes to be able to discover the transcendent, majestic reality of God through natural signs and wonders and intellectual pursuits. A theology of the cross, on the other hand, seeks not the glory of sophistry but the humiliation of the cross, to recognize God where God has hidden himself, hidden under the cloak of incarnational darkness and the scandal of the cross. The cross of the outcast and forsaken Christ is the visible revelation of the being of God for humanity in the reality of a human world. He understands the cross in an unmystical way as the protest of God against the misuse of the divine name for the purpose of a religious consummation of human wisdom, works, and the imperialism of ecclesiastical society. It is a protest for the freedom of faith. The theology of the cross begins the Reformation struggle over the true or false church and over the human liberation of enslaved humanity under work and achievement. He criticizes natural theology as found the Sentences of Peter Lombard. This method begins from the works of God and draws conclusions from the effects to the cosmos, based upon Romans 1:19-20. Lombard expressed this natural knowledge of God as humanity perceiving the Creator in what is created by virtue of the excellence of God. The cosmos is permeated by the divine Logos and the seed of wisdom is innate in all people. Since like is known only by like, he thought of the analogy of being bridging the gap between creation and the Creator. The excellence of humanity is of greater importance than the commonality of humanity with the rest of creation. Aquinas would add the notion of a community of being that allows logical inference from what one experiences in the world to the divine. At this point, Luther shifts attention to I Corinthians to contrast such natural knowledge of God from the knowledge of God gained through the cross. The natural knowledge of God is potentially open to humanity, but humanity misuses it in the interest of their self-exaltation and their self-divinization. Humanity misuses the knowledge of God to serve human pride. Knowledge of God gained in this way is useless. The knowledge of God gained in the suffering and death of Christ takes the perverse human situation seriously. Such knowledge is descending and convincing knowledge. Therefore, God wants something on earth. Such knowledge shatters pride and kills gods made by humans. The theology of the cross has God revealing who God is in the contradiction and the protest of the passion of Christ to be against all that is exalted, beautiful, and good. This knowledge is achieved through contradiction, sorrow, and suffering. The theology of the cross begins with that part of the being of God that is visible and directed toward the world. This visible being of God is the passion and cross of Christ. One can know the being of God only in the cross of Christ, knowledge of God being therefore real and saving. The theology of the cross recognizes that one knows God in despised humanity and calls human things by their real names.[13]
Like all symbols, the cross evokes more than one can explain. It condenses death and life into one symbol. It enfolds some of the deepest fears of humanity - vulnerability, betrayal, pain, forsakenness - and transfigures them into expressions of hope. When Christians proclaim the power of the cross, they are voicing their confidence that death is not the end, that God has broken the grip, and that God will banish the powers and principalities who control this world. When Christians proclaim the power and wisdom of the cross, they declare with trembling voice that at times one must simply endure suffering, that one must bear certain things in life. Moreover, they are declaring that in the passion of Jesus we find a model for our fidelity.[14]
George Bernard (1873-1958) wrote a hymn that expresses something of the Christian devotional approach to the cross. He refers to the cross as the emblem of suffering and shame. Yet, we love that old cross, where the dearest and best received the punishment of death for a world of lost sinners. The world despises the old, rugged cross. Yet, it has a wondrous attraction for us. The dear Lamb of God left the glory of life with the Father, bringing that glory to dark Calvary. Yes, the old, rugged cross, stained with blood so divine, has become beautiful in our eyes. Jesus suffered and died on that old cross for you and for me. Thus, we will be true to the cross and gladly bear its shame and reproach. In addition, Keith and Christin Getty have written a popular praise song, In Christ Alone. It contains the notion that Jesus received scorn from those he came to save to the point where he died on the cross. Yet, since the Father laid the sins of humanity on the Son, the wrath of the Father against sin received satisfaction. Here, in the death of Christ, we live.
However, God is the one who calls from among both Jew and Gentile to receive Christ as the expression of the power and wisdom of God. To believe or trust in its wisdom and power is to accept the paradoxical way of God in this world. The march of world occurrence hides the reality of divine wisdom. Only at the end of history will the divine counsel that underlies what takes place be knowable. The dawning of such revelatory events of the end-time in the person of Jesus initiated the definitive revelation of God and showed the goal of the divine counsel, leading Paul here to regard Jesus Christ as the embodiment of the divine wisdom.[15] Paul is combating an inflated view of human wisdom and strength. The event or Moment of revelation would be nothing without a corresponding event or moment in those who hear the calling of God in it. The moment/event of faith and the Moment of revelation bring an intimate connection that realigns a human life outside itself and allows the event of revelation to determine the course or direction of one’s life. By human standards, believers of his time were hardly wise, powerful, or noble. Throughout much of this world, this observation remains true. Of course, the church in the history of West became wise, powerful, and noble in the ways of this world. Many of its sins arose in that part of its history. God chose the weak and shameful path of the cross to bring salvation to humanity. In this, the event of our calling from God in Jesus Christ cuts across the various spheres of human life. In the Son is in all things human quite different from all human beings, even while nothing human alien. Christ finds humanity as it is, in various vocations. The event of the shaking of the divine calling occurs in the context of human beings as they are.[16] Election involves the improbable exception becoming the intimation of a new norm, a new creation. In that sense, we as modern readers can see an analogy with the evolutionary process, which relies upon certain unique mutations becoming successful as a new pattern for a species.[17] God chose the Christian community, the nobodies of the world becoming somebody to God. This God is the source of their lives in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom (σοφία)from God. Jesus Christ became our righteousness (δικαιοσύνη), meaning that our righteousness or justification has a historical center in the revealing work of God in the event of the cross.[18] As those who are of like humanity with Christ in him as Head and Representative, we are righteous, acceptable, and pleasing to God even as we are. As our Brother and with the forgiveness of sin, God accepts, loves, and blesses the children of God. Jesus Christ is also our sanctification (ἁγιασμὸς) referring to a divinely effected state, made possible in a way that has the historical center of the event of the cross of Christ, and it is by Christ that it comes into effect in Christians, so that the sanctifying effect is the living form of the Christ life.[19] This means that as those like him in humanity, God claims us as those who are regenerate, converted and already engaged in turning to God, and therefore as Christians. Because we are in Jesus Christ before God, we are righteous and holy before God. Such sanctification has its roots in the life of the community and in love.[20]Sanctification is a necessary consequence of justification as the subjection of humanity to the divine direction. Sanctification is the presupposition of all Christian ethics. Sanctification is the claiming of all human life, being, and activity by the will of God for the active fulfillment of that will. As such, sanctification is a form of the atonement, of the conversion of humanity to God, and an element the divine activity of human reconciliation with God. Sanctification is by and in Jesus Christ.[21] Jesus Christ is our redemption (ἀπολύτρωσις), in that he set us free for a ransom, namely, the giving of his life, providing the historical center of our redemption in the cross of Christ. The word in a secular setting meant paying for the freedom of slaves, those in prison, and prisoners of war. In this passage, it refers to the present reality of the Christian, implicitly equating it with the forgiveness of sins. We can speak of the historical reality of redemption if we remember Jesus Christ is the Crucified and Risen Christ proclaimed in the Gospel. We need to think of more than redemption as part of the historical life of Jesus that works its historical influence in those who continue to follow him, taking us up into the power and blessedness of the consciousness Jesus had of God (Schleiermacher). Rather, Paul has in mind the work of God toward humanity in Jesus Christ. Redemption in Jesus Christ means Jesus Christ is the middle point of the history of God with humanity. God has bound up redemption with the person of Jesus Christ. Such redemption occurs within the circumference of faith in Jesus Christ. Redemption derives from God at work in Jesus Christ, for God has made Christ our redemption. The focus is the act of emancipation itself, rather than the secular notion of payment for ransom.[22] No one can boast in the presence of God (Jeremiah 9:23-24). When we embrace the Crucified One, we set aside anything in which we could take pride. Christ alone is the source of our life, and thus, our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. All claims to a sectarian loyalty that places allegiance to a human agent of proclamation above allegiance to the message of the cross itself is the ultimate folly. The reality of divine revelation is here, as the New Testament, in this constant reiteration of the name of Christ. Every part of the Scripture has significance only as it relates to this Word.[23]
Paul invites us to consider the significance of the event of our calling. Such an event may lead us to dangerous and unexpected places. However, it may lead us deeply into the commonness of daily life. David, the youngest of many brothers, was tending sheep when summoned by Samuel. Abraham was minding his own business in Ur. Jeremiah was a shy and unwilling youth. God often calls us when we are running errands, doing the mundane, thankless chores of life. When we least expect it, God elects us.[24] Here is Moses, hiding out on the backside of Midian desert. He is running an errand when a bush started burning. Isaiah was in the temple, performing his regular priestly duties, when he had a heavenly vision that commissioned him. Amos herded sheep and tended to sycamore trees when the Lord told him to go and preach. Andrew and Peter were fishing when Jesus called them to fish for people. Our calling or vocation is to become a Christian, regardless of our stage in life or our circumstances. Many of us find all of this a difficult process. We have to discover our identity, filtering out all the chatter that tells us to be someone we do not really want to become. Your calling to be a Christian and your vocation in which you express it is not some kind of destiny. We may have to test certain things, sometimes for years, before we discover what truly brings fulfillment in our lives. We might be in a career for years, experiencing its weariness, until we have the courage to make a change toward transformation and significance. While some know early, the answers do not come easily for most of us. Usually, we have some pain, risk, adversity, and struggle. In fact, we often see the divine pattern only as we take a retrospective look at our lives and see how a divine purpose has woven into our lives something beautiful and purposeful.
We will need to learn to turn from our natural love of human wisdom (I Corinthians 2:1-16, Year A Epiphany 5). Paul contrasts how he frames his message with the style of contemporary rhetoricians the Corinthians would have known. He also offers a memorable summary of the gospel whose source is rooted in the ancient plan of God that earthly rulers did not recognize. Finally, he affirms that the disciples in Corinth could believe his message because the Spirit of God had revealed the gospel to him. Among the issues I am sorting through is that Paul is aware of classical Greek philosophy in general and its rhetorical theory in particular. We see this in his letters. Thus, his self-deprecation of his preaching style may be a tool he uses to make his point. In any case, in the process of making his point, in an important way he clarifies the event nature of truth as he understood it, revealed in the cross of Christ and to which we turn because the Spirit has opened us up in a corresponding event in us.
The preaching of the gospel of salvation contrasts with human wisdom. Paul did not want to enter a competition with master orators. It was more important to proclaim the mystery of God. He did not rest his preaching on the false wisdom of the art of persuasion. He decided to know nothing among them, in terms of the content of his message, except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. The person and work of Christ comprise the essence of the preaching of Paul. He “bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness” (1 Peter 2:24). He gave himself for our sins to set us free (Galatians 1:4). God reconciled all things to himself through Jesus, “by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20). Looking toward his own death, Jesus said, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). He did it to show us how much he loves us, saying, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). The aorist tense may suggest the decision was made in Corinth. The experience of Paul at Athens, where philosophers gave him a hearing and largely rejected him, had nothing to do with what Paul says here.[25] If we are going to be ignorant of something, we who preach and teach must not be ignorant of this. If you know the Crucified, you know enough to find your place in the plan of God. If you do not know this, all of the other knowledge you have may not be able to keep you from misery.[26] The church that takes offense at the cross thinks it must come up with some philosophical grounding for the readiness of humanity for God. He admits that he came to them with a preaching style of weakness. In I Corinthians 4:9-13 he acknowledges that all apostles have become weak and considered rubbish. In II Corinthians 6:4-10 he acknowledges that he has come to them in the midst of persecution and as having nothing. In II Corinthians 12:7-10 he points out that one affliction, his thorn in the flesh and a messenger of Satan, he prayed intensely for its removal, but the answer was the grace of God was sufficient, so that when he is weak, he is strong. He understands his experience with personal weakness as part of his identification with Christ. Further, he came to them with a preaching style that was in fear and in much trembling. One possibility is that Paul appeared “weak” and fearful when the Corinthians compared his oratory style to that of contemporary philosophers. Another possibility to consider is that Paul is speaking sarcastically or tongue-in-cheek, to use a familiar metaphor, due to a label that some antagonistic members in the Corinthian community had applied to him. Thus, rather than debating his accusers Paul cleverly adopts the opinion of his opponents to press his case that the gospel is not dependent on skilled rhetoric. Paul will acknowledge he is a fool for the sake of Christ while they are wise (4:10) and that he came to them with truthful speech and the power of God (II Corinthians 6:7). He dismisses any personal claims to eloquence. His authority was solely of the Spirit and of power, so that their faith would rest upon the power of God. he is making use of their specious characterizations to bolster his assertion that the foundation of their faith is the power of God and the revelation of the Spirit. Paul is setting up his readers for the point that they may not be as spiritually advanced as they think, and that Paul may have more wisdom than they think. His readers may not be as wise and sophisticated as they think, and Paul may not be as devoid of wisdom as some of them think. The spirit of God moved hearers, not eloquence. The words of the apostle against "lofty" speech suggest that Paul is arguing against the allure of eloquence. The entire wisdom of God is the cross. The cross stands alone against any attempts by sophia or any other human wisdom to make sense of God's ways and means in the world. The cross epitomizes the saving power of God, a concept human wisdom just cannot grasp.
Paul attacks wisdom in a subtle way. The mature will acknowledge that the apostolic proclamation has wisdom. Paul is recognizing gradations in Christian experience. He at least opens the door for a discussion of stages of spiritual growth, even as human beings go through stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adult, older adult, and even various stages of retired life. However, his wisdom is not one derives from the political, economic, and religious forces that govern this age, which are doomed to perish. Wisdom requires a spiritual state in which we hold out for meaning rather than settling for mere answers. Wisdom is partially hidden, revealing itself only to those who want it and will not try to make a commodity of it.[27] The apostolic proclamation is the wisdom of God that has an eschatological dimension. Yet, in a preposterous way, this eschatological wisdom has appeared here and now. The political, economic, and religious rulers of this age unwittingly serve the eschatological plans of God. Paul is using the apocalyptic term “mystery” for the plan of salvation in accord with the wisdom of God. The term would become important in the notion that Paul had of revelation.[28] “Mystery” is the divine plan of history that God kept hidden from humanity and will receive final revelation but is now open to believers.[29] Paul is identifying the mystery with the gospel, the word of the cross, and not some secret teaching. The “mature” believer understands this. If the wisdom of this world understood the wisdom of God in Christ, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. We can see the divine attribute of patience here is close to the wisdom of God that is at work in the sending of the crucified Lord of glory. The wisdom of God hidden from the world finds expression in the historical plan that through the Spirit whom Christ gives is manifest in anticipation of the outcome of history. We know the wisdom of God as we know this counsel of God and its past and ongoing execution.[30] God has prepared marvelous things for those who love God (Isaiah 64:4 or the Apocalypse of Elijah), a rare moment where a mark of believers is their love for God. [31] Those who have this faith are lovers of God.
Paul uses wisdom language to spell out the function of the Spirit in revealing the ultimate plans of God. If the event nature of truth focuses upon an historical event, the crucified Jesus of Nazareth who was also the Lord of glory, then a corresponding event needs to occur in some persons who hear this kerygma or preaching. God has promised that there would be such people as Paul describes here who have faith in the Word.[32] God has revealed such things to us through the Spirit, who reveals the redemptive resolve of God to those who hear. The Spirit is the bridge between humanity and God. Some of the thought processes of God actually enter the person so that people can comprehend at least some of the purpose of God. The Spirit is the one who enables hearers to trust human words. Paul directly implies the deity of the Spirit here.[33] The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God, the work of the Spirit leading people into the truth of God that is manifest in the Son.[34] Without this revelatory event in the hearer, the revelatory event of the crucified Lord of glory would have been an abstract and empty event of the past. The human spirit (πνεῦμα τοῦἀνθρώπου) is an element of the natural constitution of every human being. [35] Within every human being is the human spirit that is the basis for human beings to know what is human. Distinguished from the human spirit is the Spirit of God who is working upon us. The human spirit derives from the life-giving Spirit of God. This connection suggests that the Spirit of God comes in a friendly way to the human spirit to lift up the human spirit toward God. Paul is suggesting that as "like reveals like" it takes the Spirit of God working in those who hear to reveal the inner workings of the mind of God. These insightful verses also move us toward Trinitarian reflections. The Son is the revelation of the mystery, but the Spirit is the one who opens human beings to receive its truth. Thus, one cannot arrive at the Trinity by an abstract rational principle, but only based on the revelation of the Son and Spirit. Yes, the Trinity is part of the mystery of God, but that does not absolve us from the duty of finding a basis for the doctrine in the witness of scripture to revelation.[36] He contrasts the spirit of this world with the Spirit from God, which allows us to understand the gifts God has bestowed upon us. The Spirit teaches spiritual matters to those who are spiritual, while the unspiritual see all this as foolishness. He emphasizes the immediacy of each believer to God that empowers an independent judgment, becoming the basis for the notion of the priesthood of believers in Martin Luther. [37] The Spirit enables us to discern ourselves and others.[38] The kerygma focused upon the crucified Lord of glory has dignity and validity in itself. God is knowable because of the revelation of who God is in the cross and because the life-giving Spirit of God has kinship with the human spirit. The point is that the knowability of God does not rest in our hands, but rather, in the working of the Spirit of God.[39]
In I Corinthians 3:1-23, Paul discusses the leadership of the church and its nurture.
Paul explores evidence for spiritual immaturity (I Corinthians 3:1-9, Year A Epiphany 6). When Jesus said that unless one becomes like a child one will not enter the rule of God, he was directing us to the playful, open to the world, open to forming new friendships, and trusting aspect of childhood.[40] The concern Paul has here is in matters of spirituality, we will have a needed stage of spiritual infancy, but we must not stay there. We need to embrace the challenges of a mature faith. He contrasts spiritual people (πνευματικοῖς) with people of the flesh (σαρκίνοις) or infants. They are human beings under the power of human impulses, thought, and ideals. Physical rather than spiritual concerns dominate them. They live for themselves, seek their own pleasures, and regard others as a means of satisfy8ng their own desires. Their desire to gain superiority over others arises from their lack of submission to the Spirit. The imagery suggests Paul is casting himself in the role of nursing mother or even the servile role of wet nurse. If so, how does this milk differ from the solid food? The nutritional and spiritual content is the same. What differs is the way they receive the truth of the gospel. Whether milk or solid food, Paul feeds them the true gospel, but they seem fascinated with synthetic substitutes. Hebrews 5:12-14 uses the imagery as well. Once the Corinthians grow up by putting aside their rivalries rooted in dependence on others, they will not only be able to receive the gospel as solid food but will be able to feed it up themselves and in the natural order of things feed others as well.[41] Such an approach to the text allows us to look upon the role of parenting. If our infants remain dependent upon us as parents throughout the stages of a human life, we have not done our job as parents. Paul is preparing them for the time when he will no longer be present. Thus, there is an irony to Paul’s choice of metaphor here. The Corinthians are acting like babies (who are, by definition, a part of a family), but they are not acting like a family. The evidence shows that they are still of the flesh (σαρκικοί), given the evidence of their jealousy (ζῆλος) and quarreling (ἔρις), both examples of the works of the flesh (Galatians 5:19-20), thereby behaving according to human inclinations (κατὰ ἄνθρωπον περιπατεῖτε). They put their extreme immaturity on display in this way, showing themselves to be nothing more than squabbling infants and toddlers. They gain their perspective by their fleshly orientation, showing themselves to be distinguishable from the world around them. hus, another irony is evident: Where the Corinthians suffer from divisions within their own congregation, they are simultaneously perfectly united to the non-Christian segments of the population of Corinth. They dissociate from the group with which they are to have cohesion (themselves) and bound to the group from which they are to look and act differently (the non-Christians at Corinth). Yet, because they are so young in terms of their spiritual maturity, they are not even ready for the disciplinarian who might sternly and authoritatively instruct them. They are still in need of one who would nourish and serve them in the way that mothers and wet nurses serve infants far too young to care for themselves. Such service is the mark of an apostle.[42] They are merely human (ἄνθρωποί) when they divide into groups that think they belong to either Paul or Apollos. They thought they could decide for themselves which of their leaders was better qualified or were truer to Christ. However, one does this by submitting to human standards, rather than the Spirit. Such factionalism is harmful to the community of believers, and they need to eradicate it through putting their spiritual immaturity behind them. Both leaders received an assignment from the Lord and thereby are servants. They seem guided by the way leaders impressed them, appealed to their feelings, excited their interests, or confirmed their prejudices. They thought they could decide for themselves which of their leaders was better qualified or were truer to Christ. They do this by submission to human standards rather than to the Spirit. The proper view of Paul and Apollos is that they are not authority figures asserting power over the Corinthians. Rather, they are servants. His point is that who Paul and Apollos are as individuals is not important. What is important is that they are in their role as vessels for God to use. When one views the matter in this light, Paul points out, any difference between Paul and Apollos becomes negligible.
If we play with the imagery here, children are the guests of their parents. They will be guests in the home for a while and leave to create their own space. Parents will refer to “our son” or “our daughter,” but they know their children are not their property. Parents know them well. Parents may have the experience that their children become strangers, as if they allowed another to parent them. Such a result is painful, but you as a parent have taught them to make their own decisions. The greatest gift parents can give their children is to love each other. Throughout that love, they create an anxiety-free space for their children to grow and mature.[43] As parents give their children the help they need at the various stages of life, they know their lives have meaning in that fact that someone else needs them. Helping an infant mature through the stages of life also helps us to learn an important thing about ourselves. Regardless of our imperfections and weaknesses, we learn that we are competent and loving.[44]
Maturing through stages of life is a helpful image. However, adulthood is not a threshold we step across at some predetermined age. Biological maturation does not automatically equal emotional or spiritual maturation. A person may be able to vote, drink and drive; does not mean he or she is mature. Even adults can act like kids. It is common to see in adults such childish behaviors as selfishness, tantrum-throwing, impatience, name-calling, bullying, gossiping, keeping score and getting even, over-dramatizing, shirking blame, avoidance behavior and problems with impulse control. That is the point Paul is making here. Doing spiteful things, making excuses, disregard for the feelings of others, manipulating truths within an argument by leaving out vital facts, hypersensitivity and over-reaction to trivial things, and refusing to accept logic, are signs of emotional immaturity.[45] The behaviors of the Corinthian congregation are suggestive of signs of spiritual immaturity. The way Paul deals with them is suggestive of what spiritual maturity looks like. An aspect of that maturity is to focus upon the hindrances within us that hold us back from maturing spiritually. The reality is that if primary task is to discover and grow our true self, our souls, then we are often clumsy stewards of our spiritual maturity.[46]
Such recognition of the process involved in maturing can lead to a gentler approach to ministry. When Pope Gregory I (A.D. 540-604) commissioned 30 monks to preach the gospel in Britain, he told them to be patient with the new converts, since some of the desired changes in their habits and lifestyle would come about only gradually. Elsewhere, Gregory wrote, “He who endeavors to ascend to the highest place rises by degrees or steps, and not by leaps.”[47]
In any congregation, there are always people at different stages of the Christian life. To use the parallel with human growth, each of the stages of human development are within us. The child, adolescent, young adult, mature adult, remain within the older adult. The pluses and minuses of each stage can emerge. If we think of stages of spiritual growth as something like seeker, follower, adult, and reproducer, for example, we can see that while not exact, general human development and spiritual development follow a similar pattern. Such development occurs as we face the unique challenges and problems of each stage. So let our final words here be these from Hebrews 6 (as rendered by The Message): “So come on, let’s leave the preschool finger-painting exercises on Christ and get on with the grand work of art. Grow up in Christ. The basic foundational truths are in place: turning your back on ‘salvation by self-help’ and turning in trust toward God; baptismal instructions; laying on of hands; resurrection of the dead; eternal judgment. God helping us, we’ll stay true to all that. But there’s so much more. Let’s get on with it!” (6:1-3).
Paul will use an agricultural metaphor that includes images of growth, an apt image, given that Paul has a concern for their spiritual immaturity. Paul admits Paul and Apollos had differing roles, but the congregation has received the benefit of the service of each, for God is the one who provides the growth. If they remember this, they will not place so much emphasis upon either Paul or Apollos, who cannot create either the seed or the ground. Regardless of the role, each of us are leaders in small or great ways. Each of us has a common purpose, which is not to build up personal followings. We are servants on behalf of God. We are partners with God, but the congregation is God’s farm. Each worker receives their (eschatological?) reward. Serving God, as they work with the congregation they work together in God’s field. The Corinthians belong to God, while Paul and Apollos have served God by watering the field. He hints at another image in saying that they are God’s building. The congregation is a building that belongs to God, and Paul and Apollos have only assisted God in the constructing. We are dealing with a community of faith that does not yet have the hierarchy in place in which Paul could act with unique authority, since he has placed himself and Apollos in distinct roles rather than distinct levels of hierarchy. [48] Paul is calling on his readers to rethink their relationship with him and with the other servants in God’s field. They serve a common purpose.
Each person in the church has a role. Using the image of a theater, our role is not in the auditorium, but on the stage. We are not the spectators, but we are intimately involved in the play. God is the one who will use us in the most profitable way. She goes on to describe the many ways in which God might use us. We might be like tools, taken up when wanted, used in ways we had not expected, and then laid down. Sometimes we are the money used in some great operation which we do not fully understand. Sometimes we are the servants who have the same monotonous job year after year. Sometimes we are consciously working with God as a partner in building the kingdom. No matter what role we discover ourselves to be in, however, we are in the position of being faithful daily to what God has given us to do in life.[49]
Paul uses the powerful metaphor of Christ being the foundation of the church (I Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23, Year A Epiphany 7). His concern for unity amid the divisions occurring in the congregation gives rise to the solution that they are the body of Christ, they are grounded in Christ, and therefore, they are one. The fullness of Christ includes the community of people who belong to Christ. With all its weakness, need, and dubious quality, it remains a provisional representation of the goal set by God in Christ. The congregation is God’s building. Paul laid a foundation, others built upon it. The image suggests that God is the one who integrates the various roles involved in constructing the church. The only foundation Paul could lay is Jesus Christ. Only the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ is fundamental.[50] The ministries of the church are to serve the unity they have in Christ. The ministries of the church can only be signs of this unity.[51]
Paul will refer to the congregation as God’s temple, which means the Spirit of God dwells within them, suggesting the tension between divine transcendence and divine immanence, for Paul is implying the deity of the Spirit.[52] The life-giving Spirit, the Spirit through whom the Father raised Jesus of Nazareth to new life, dwells within them and gives them new life. They are the temple of God and therefore holy, so anyone who would destroy them is under the threat of judgment. As the temple of God and because the Spirit dwells among them, the congregation is holy, given the priority God is to have in it.[53] The Spirit dwells among them to lift them toward others and toward God.[54]
Paul addresses those who think they are “wise” by furthermore insisting that God chose the foolish to shame the wise. Paul reiterates the theme of unity in saying that all are one in God. The paradox is that if one thinks of oneself as wise according the values set by the economic, political, and religious rulers of this age, one needs to become a fool by those standards to become wise with God, supporting this notion from Job 5:13 and Psalm 94:11. The point here is that if the way of thinking of this age gets in the way of seeing the wisdom found in the cross, then the intellect needs to humble itself to see the wisdom found in Christ, who is our wisdom. He now adds to the theme of unity the riches they have in Christ. Paul, Apollos, and Cephas belong to them, as well as the world, life, death, present, and future, since they belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. Thus, they should not cling to just a piece when they can have the whole. The argument of Paul is that if they have all these things, why would they be so eager to claim only one apostle as “theirs”? The apostles, in turn, belong to Christ. Christ owns and possesses them, and in this fact in a paradoxical way, they have their secure freedom, whether in relation to human teachers or to the world around them. He is letting Christians know who and what they are.[55] We can think of Paul as attacking the human tendency to snatch at that which one thinks gives honor. One can seek honor in a futile way by basking in the reflected glory of another, whether in Paul, Apollos, or another apostle. One seeks honor from the one who plants or waters rather than from the God who gives increase. Paul thinks of it as self-deception if they think they receive honor in this way. They belong to Christ alone.[56] Stressing unity, Christ is the foundation on which the church is built; indeed, each individual person, as well as the collective community, represents the temple of God. The wisdom of this age is nothing, and to become wise one must seek to be a fool. And in Christ the church has all things. Therefore, there is no cause for division but only unity.
Since the Lord is the judge, Paul encourages his readers to think of his missionary team as servants (ὑπηρέτας) of Christ and stewards (οἰκονόμους) of the mysteries of God (I Corinthians 4:1-5, Year A Epiphany 8). The emphasis is upon the subordinate nature of the position of an apostle, so elevating one apostle about the other is inappropriate. A steward or manager is literally a divider of the household. The term goes back to the practice of assigning to one servant the responsibility for distributing supplies, tools, and food to the workers on estates. The parable in Luke 16:1-8 is an example of this. They were slaves in relation to their masters but overseers in relation to the other slaves. In addition, the term designated business agents, political administrators, city treasurers and treasurers for private societies or guilds.[57] The apostles are guardians of the mysteries of God and must handle the mysteries with care. Any leader of the church is only a servant, a steward. With this language, Paul emphasizes that God is the primary actor, while he and the others are merely God’s assistants in performing their secondary role. Such a subordinate status precludes any boasting on the apostles’ part, as well as that of the Corinthians on behalf of the apostles. Such mysteries involve the the historical plan of God, summed up comprehensively in Jesus Christ and which God has already proleptically revealed in Jesus Christ.[58] Thus, God’s mysteries consist of the salvific purposes of God as found in the gospel — indeed God’s wisdom, which was secret and hidden and not understood by this age’s rulers yet revealed by God’s Spirit to Paul and all those who are spiritually discerned (2:10-12, 14-15). God requires faithfulness or trustworthiness of stewards. Faithful stewardship means taking care of God’s estate, or the Corinthians, who are God’s field and God’s building (3:9). Their faithful stewardship reflects the God called them (1:8-9). Therefore, Paul considers it of little consequences that this congregation examine and investigate him, as if questioning him to elicit some truth from an unwilling witness. It matters little to him what they think of him and less what public opinion might be. He does not even trust his judgment of himself. A dimension of his thinking here is that being a faithful servant and steward carries the risk of loss of honor. Honor is a matter of human judgment and our desire to receive respect from those we deem significant. We value their opinion of us. Yet, the follower of Jesus must be willing to lose much of this type of honor. The Christian is aware that only one judgment truly matters.[59] Their judgment of him is not where he receives his sense of personal self-worth, as we might say today. In his time, the honor and shame culture prevailed, but he wanted them to know he did not receive honor or shame from the results of their examination of him. For Paul, the divine origin of his call and the mysteries with which God entrusts him makes human judgment irrelevant to him. Because neither his apostleship nor his gospel derives from any human being (1:1; 2:1-5), no human can adequately judge him. Indeed, he acknowledges that he cannot even judge himself, demonstrating that all human judgment — even that of an apostle — becomes irrelevant in the presence of God. Our judgment of ourselves should not guide us because we may be too harsh, and we may be blind. Paul admits that while he is not aware of any charge against him, even this knowledge does not count for anything. Again, his view of himself remains immaterial. The only judgment that counts is the Lord’s. Paul has been pointing the Corinthians to God and away from human personalities. Paul now explicitly points readers to the Lord as the final judge, indicating his recognition that the rivalries around apostolic personalities involve the Corinthians passing judgment for or against apostles, including him. If we are Christian readers, we need to hear Paul clearly here. None of us can overlook or avoid this judgment, for even Paul will experience this judgment. [60]Thus, such judgment on the part of the Corinthians is not only wrong but audacious, in that it presumes to take God’s place and to usurp God’s timing. The “end” will bring judgment, so do not judge now. Thus, Paul admonishes the Corinthians to stop engaging in their present behavior and to wait for God’s timing. Jesus Christ, consistent with the theme of the Son of Man sayings, is the one who executes judgment. Paul, and therefore all Christians, will stand before the judgment of Christ, responsible for what they have done with their lives.[61] God is the true judge because only he can see the inner recesses of a person’s heart and know his or her true motives and purposes. God sees the inner parts of a human’s soul and, as the only true judge, God is able to unmask before all whatever humans beings try to hide the dark. God will try every apostle’s work by fire (3:10-15). The purposes of the heart may be hidden for now but will be revealed in God’s own time. The relief this brings is that God’s truth judges created things out of love, and Satan’s truth judges them out of envy and hatred.[62] The judgment from God has already been set. God looks at us through Jesus Christ, and sees a forgiven person, not a perfect person. You have your commendation, not because of what you have done, but because of what Christ has done.
We often complain about judging, but the reality is that judging or evaluating people, performances, and events are an important way we learn what is important to us. The Academy Awards are an example of those who work in movies judging the movies and those who worked in them during a calendar year. We know who is judging, even if the standard of judgment might be vague to outsiders. The same is true, however, as we interact with neighbors, as we relate within our work environment, and even in the context of family. Others judge us in terms of our achievements, our competence, our personality, our looks, our social status, our children’s accomplishments, our bank accounts. Given that reality, what are we to do? We still need to discern spiritual truths (2:15), evaluate ungodly behavior (5:12), decide between two options (7:37), evaluate the truth of teachings (10:15), and even discern our own sin and motives (11:31). We need to people who evaluate what is best and make wise decisions. However, some matters are inappropriate for human judgment. When we face the inappropriate judgment of others, we need to acknowledge that we have more faults than they could know. Each of us has need of periods of evaluation and examination, discerning the difference between fair and unfair judgment, but always mindful of who the real judge is. This awareness of divine judgment can help the judgment of human being lose its grip upon us. As players on the field, we are not competent to judge how we are playing the game. Reminding us of how focused upon Christ he is, the Lord is the one who judges the heart, intent, and purpose of our lives. We play to an audience of one, and God is that audience.
Human beings are always judging. If society has become incredibly permissive, one could make la case that it needs more judgment. Yet, in the ways in which American society seems increasingly divided into tightly knit honor and shame tribes, we could also make the case that people could use less judgment.
Paul will sum up his argument concerning sex to this point and provide a transition to the next two chapters (I Corinthians 6:12-20, Year B Epiphany 2). Paul has a concern for a specific type of sexual relationship. However, he will direct us to several solid ethical principles that have broad application. He first addresses a phrase used by some in the community to justify behavior with which Paul does not agree. In fact, Paul may have said this phrase while among them, discovering now that they are misusing what he said. Yet, even in dealing with the difficult moral issues involved in this context, Paul goes back to the freedom of Christians.[63] Yes, all things are lawful, but not all things for the common good. Here is one ethical principle. As we appreciate our freedom in Christ, we still have a moral obligation to consider the common good. A second ethical principle is that he refuses to allow anything to dominate him. While proclaiming our freedom, Paul points out how easily appetites and their immediate gratification enslave some people. He notes that those who consider "all things lawful" may soon find themselves dominated by the pursuit of pleasure. The stomach and food go together. Yet, God is the agent of final judgment. Paul counters that just because one can do something does not mean that one ought to do it. Such a slogan became the basis for some believers to argue that frequenting prostitutes was simply a way for them to meet physical needs in a way that did not affect the soul. Pointing to his principle regarding the body, Paul reminds his readers that the body is meant not for fornication (πορνείᾳ refers to the practice of prostitution, although in Jewish and Christian circles it could refer to any sexual activity by persons not married, which seems implied in Matthew 19:9, quoting from Deuteronomy 24:1-4. The closes Hebrew equivalent is “zonah,” which has the wider connotation of unfaithfulness). If the body is not for πορνείᾳ then, sharing a third ethical principle, the intent is that the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. God intends us to use our bodies in ways that please the Lord, not in the random and potentially damaging ways represented by the term "fornication." He bases the importance of the body on the resurrection of Jesus. This fourth ethical principle relates specifically to the Christian community. In our consideration of what we ought to do and to avoid, we need to consider its relation to the fellowship we have in the body of Christ. To participate in prostitution and other sexual violations, then, involves Christ in those actions because we now constitute Christ's own body. The point appears to be that some in Corinth wanted to regard physical sex relations as something morally neutral and sexual intercourse with prostitutes as something quite simple, on part with the satisfaction of other physical needs.[64] Paul is referring to the impossibility in the sexual sphere of the Christian, one spirit with the Lord, is joined in body with a harlot, and therefore at root frivolously, unfaithfully, and in sheer lust.[65] Bringing us to a fifth ethical principle, we find it said in Genesis 2:24 and Mark 10:8 that “The two shall be one flesh.” Sexuality, states Paul, should be seen as what God intended in the forming of man and woman. Food is important and we can meet that desire in many ways. However, sex is different in that we can meet sexual desire in one way. We are not to treat it casually. “We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”[66] Those who engage in sex become part of one another - physically part of one another's bodies, but also part of one another's families. In Hebrew, the phrase has the double meaning of physical union and the union between family groups. Thus, the one with whom you engage in sexual activity should become by rights a member of your family with all the attendant rights to shelter, support and protection that family relationships imply. To have casual sex, and no doubt, to produce casual children, is a great social injustice. It denies the women affected, and the children of these women, to a legal place within society. This is an offense against human society. It is an offense against the community. It offends both the heavenly Christ, as a spiritual being thus linked to corporeal irresponsibility, and the earthly body of Christ, namely the community, whose standard of love does not allow for disposable relationships between its members. Christians will enter sexual relationships with a concern for the whole being of the other, symbolized in the image of the two becoming one flesh.[67] In distinguishing union to the Lord and becoming one spirit with the Lord, he makes a distinction between the exalted Lord and the Spirit, thereby ruling out full identity.[68] The power of the Spirit incorporates Christians into the body of Christ.[69] He then brings us to the sixth ethical principle that as a member of the Christian community, the body is, suggesting the deity of the Spirit, [70] a temple of the Holy Spirit who resides within them. Paul is also offering an important word for our time. As with many of these principles, they have application beyond the sexual encounter. We have freedom in the Christian life, yet, that freedom places upon us the responsibility of considering a variety of factors that should affect our sense of what we owe to each other. The rationale here is that since the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, what we do with our bodies is important to God. Just as the Spirit of God, while no one can confine to any one earthly place, took up residence in the temple in Jerusalem, so God's image, and Christ's Holy Spirit, reside within each human body. Just because the human soul will one day leave its earthly body does not make the "temple" that once contained it any less holy. The seventh ethical principle is the wonder and amazement of enjoying a relationship with the Father through the price paid by the death of the Son. The one who gave his life for them is also the one to whom they owe their lives. The Father has bought them by the death of Christ into a new love relationship with God, with the death of Christ being the fitting example of that love. In the brief time we have on this earth, we are to bring glory or honor to God. This suggests that we are to make the human venture a success. We need to be part of making the real world a better place. Abuse or misuse of the body will mean I am less able to fulfill my calling in life. Any immorality on my part hurts me, those who love me, and those whom my life touches. God has paid a great price to make this unity between God and humanity a real one. Therefore, one should take this unity seriously and use one's body only to glorify God. Collectively, the Christian community is the body of Christ, the physical presence of the risen Christ in the world. This limits individual freedom. They are not free to do as they please because of their relationship to Christ and one another.
To focus on the sexual encounter, Paul warns against the kind of sexual intercourse in which man and woman turn to each other merely for the satisfaction of sexual needs. The principle is that the Lord intends a union of two persons into “one flesh.” The Christian couple as “one flesh” corresponds with the fact that they are one spirit with the Lord. Belonging to a partner in marriage needs to correspond to the fact that both belong to Christ. They would contradict this if either of them belonged to a prostitute. The reason is that Christ is the faithfulness of God in person, whereas the prostitute personifies human unfaithfulness. Sexual intercourse with a prostitute can only be a sorry distortion of the completion between man and woman. Such intercourse does not complete the divine plan for human fellowship. It cannot complete self-satisfaction. It betrays such fellowship. Individuals do not seek the other in the totality of his or her personality. They seek only the sexual being as an occasion for self-satisfaction. One treats the other as an It. The other treats you as an It. Neither seeks true connection. They merely answer to the legitimate sexual impulse or desire they have.[71]
If sexual satisfaction becomes our primary concern, then we have made it a god that rules the consideration of what we do with our lives. However, what intrigues me is the insight Paul has into ethical behavior. He is not laying down a law. Yet, those who do not approach legalistically still have to consider how they use their freedom. None of the principles is an absolute. Rather, they are insights that ought to guide us in our discernment of what we ought to do, how we ought to live, and what we owe each other. The overarching theological principle is that the Father raised Jesus from the dead through the power of the Spirit. Paul is extracting from this act of the Father the importance of what we do in the body. Given the resurrection of the body and the hoped for resurrection of the dead, we know the body is important to God. Thus, we need to consider prayerfully how a specific action contributes to the benefit of the community or how it might lead to our enslavement to immediate gratification. We are to offer our bodily activities in ways that bring pleasure to the Lord. We need to remember that our bodies are part of another body, the Body of Christ, a community that is the physical presence of the risen Lord in this world. As each part of our bodies affect and influence the other part, so what we do affects those with who we are in fellowship. We need to remember that thoughts and actions relate to the friendship we have with Christ. Specifically related to sexual encounters, we are to remember what God intended in creation, in which man and woman become one flesh, a view Jesus endorses in Mark 10:8. If more men and women honored this principle, many of the problems related to Hollywood and politics would not have happened. The point here is that sex is different from other desires. For most people, sexual desire is so strong that it can rule. Of course, other legitimate desires can gain a sinful place in our lives, but sexuality is something that touches everyone. Freud, for all his faults, rightly raised the pervasive nature of sexual nature to our consciousness. To broaden the discussion beyond sexual encounters again, as we consider how we ought to live, we need to remember that as free as we are, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who lives within us. In another moment of amazement and wonder for the believer, the Spirit as the third “person” of “mode of being” of the Trinity lives within us. Therefore, it matters to God how we care for the temple in which the Spirit dwells. We could apply this principle to many areas of our personal and corporate behavior. Finally, we need to consider the death of Christ on the cross, part of the point of which was to deliver us from the forces that enslave us and bring us freedom. If we pause here for a moment, amazement and wonder is the proper response to the story that anyone would die for us so that we could be free and enjoy life with God here and forever. In this case, the “story” involves the Son of the Father. Those being the case how ought we to live. What do we owe to each other? From the perspective of the believer, our lives are an offering to God. Our lives ought to bring glory and honor to God. When it comes to ethics, we might consider other matters. However, I find these insights from Paul offering much upon which we might want to ponder. Prayerfully, humbly, I conclude, let it be so, Lord Jesus, in my life and in the lives of anyone who might read this.
Paul continues the conversation he is having about sexuality, focusing on marriage and virginity (I Corinthians 7:29-35 Year B Epiphany 3). They have asked him concerning people who choose to remain virgins. He has no direct advice from the Lord, so he can only offer his opinion as one who faithfully follows the Lord. He points to stress that is weighing upon “us.” Paul speaks of an ἐνεστῶσαν ἀνάγκην "present necessity." The NRSV translates this phrase "impending crisis." This present necessity entails Paul's view of the imminent day of the Lord that for him shapes the believer's life, relationships, and perception of the world. Paul gives us an opportunity to reflect upon the critical nature of this moment. To look back, he invites us to consider the moment in history related to the coming of Christ as critical for the dealings of God with this world. He also invites us to reflect upon the critical nature of this moment in our lives.
Paul thinks the appointed time (καιρὸς or season) has grown short (συνεσταλμένος). Whether we think the time is short because of the soon return of Christ, or the time is short because death always looms before us, if we do not have a sense of urgency regarding the decisions we make, we do not realize the nature of our situation. the urgency of the time relativizes all relationships, situations, and conditions. Given this reality, he thinks it good for people to stay as they are. If married, do not seek release. If single, do not look for a spouse. Of course, marriage is not a sin. They will have the hardships that result from human nature, and the advice Paul offers is to spare them all of that. Thus, the recognition that the present form (σχῆμα) of the world is passing away creates a freedom that does not allow the structures and institutions of this world to trap one, allowing this world to become a cage or prison. Such a realization shapes not only how one sees oneself but also how one relates to the world around one. The point here is the people who are sojourners in the world will not treat the world as if it were everything. Human beings are in obvious fellowship or communion with the world but must not cling to the world too tightly. Yes, if nothing else, the world will go on, and we will lose our grip on it through our death. We must not cling to it as if this world were everything for us. Throughout the letter, Paul faces the serious challenge of transforming the thinking of the Corinthian believers. They must allow the Lord to transform their minds to perceive and understand the new way of being and knowing that God has called them to in this new age inaugurated by Christ. The question Paul addresses to them is simple: to what age do they belong? Most of us live our lives as if tomorrow will come. Most of us hope this world will not pass away soon. We invest ourselves in the continuation of this world at some level. That is why we have legacies, build monuments, start businesses, and start families. That is why we continue to find solutions to personal and communal problems that we want to lead to human flourishing. The pursuit of happiness is important to us. Christians are to differentiate themselves from the world and live in communion with the world. We live in that tension. God in Christ has shown supreme communion with this world. We need that communion as well. Yet, God is not identical with the world process. Rather, God is ahead of us, moving us toward a new and transformed world. We ought not to let our communion with the world to blind us to the new world God wants to bring. Thus, we need a sense that as God steadily transforms us into the persons God wants us to be after the pattern of Christ, so God envisions a new age, the redemption of creation, and we long for and pray for that redemption.
Considering the critical nature of this moment, Paul invites us to reflect upon singleness as an opportunity rather than a problem that needs marriage as a solution. We can open our eyes to the myriad of needs, crises, and challenges in the world around us. God is calling us, single or married, and God has many ways to answer that call faithfully. He will not disparage marriage, but he will invite us to consider the possibilities contained in the single life. They can focus their proper concern upon the things of the Lord, which will lead to them to being holy in body (σώματι) and spirit (πνεύματι). Singleness has its struggles, but one has an opportunity to give priority to the things of the Lord. He is not attempting to bridle them, but to offer wisdom for their benefit, promote good order, and offer unhindered devotion to the Lord. His point is that serving the Lord is the priority, regardless of your marriage or singleness. Every moment is critical because we may not have many moments left. Even if we do have many moments, we need to treasure and use each minute to honor the Lord.
Paul is also going to provide us with an opportunity to reflect upon the relationship between man and woman. Clearly, the relationship between man and woman is larger than that of marriage. Marriage is a form of the fellowship between man and woman. Marriage is the free, mutual, harmonious choice of love between a particular man and woman that leads to a responsibly undertaken life-union that God intends to be lasting, complete, and exclusive. Paul has told us that marriage is a gift (7:7, 17). Paul is aware of the need to bring sexual pleasure to each other (7:3-5). He has stressed the importance of becoming one flesh (6:17).[72]
In dealing with the question of Christian freedom, Paul deal with the issue presented to him by the congregation regarding food offered to idols (I Corinthians 8:1-13, Year B Epiphany 4). The concern is for the meat left over from sacrifices offered to the gods. Edible portions of these sacrificed animals are a common source of meat for Gentile butchers to sell at market. Interestingly, Paul will not appeal to the council decision in Acts 15:20, 29, where it prohibited eating food offered to idols. Strangely, Paul's voice in this dispute is not the church's voice for the next several generations. Note the Apostolic Decree in Acts 15:29, Revelation 2:12-17 and 18-29, Didache 6:3, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, were all against eating meat offered to idols.
The discussion of food offered to idols is extensive, beginning here at 8:1 and extending until 11:1. Meat ordinarily was part of a sacrifice in the ancient world, and not a regular feature of the ordinary person's daily diet. That the Corinthian Christians would regularly continue, at least for a period, to be present at pagan worship, even though they had converted to Christianity, one should not wonder at, since such occasions served important social, domestic, and economic functions as well as religious ones. Moreover, based on passages from the Mishnah, the meat left over from pagan sacrifices was routinely available for merchandising afterward. The cultural context of this issue is important: The partial sacrifice of meat before consumption was a universal practice in the ancient Mediterranean region. The Corinthians were not doing something different from their neighbors. Human life and nourishment always were uncertain, subject to the vicissitudes of nature and the gods. They considered meat from animals a pre-eminent gift from the gods, and so they offered the animal in sacrifice and thanksgiving by different forms of ritual slaughter. They burned some of the animal on an altar (for the god) and the rest they distributed among the participants or the local community. This was by far the most common way of acquiring meat. One can see, therefore, why the Corinthians, living in a diverse city of many peoples and many gods, had questions about the application of their new monotheistic views. New Testament scholar J. Paul Sampley explains that the tradition in Greece was to sacrifice an animal to a pagan god, burn some of the flesh on the altar, and then eat the rest of the meat in a festive meal. Like a worship service followed by a barbecue. That is not all. They then sold the remainder of the sacrificial animal to the meat market, and merchants would turn around and sell it to the public. For most residents of Corinth, this was no problem. Nevertheless, for Christians who did not worship pagan gods, there was serious discomfort about eating a top sirloin that pagan priests had sacrificed to idols. Unfortunately, these rump roasts popped up all over the place: In the market, in the homes of non-Christian neighbors, and in public festivals that were important places to make personal, political and business connections.[73]
Such a context is of interest, but even for Paul, the specifics of this matter are not particularly important. The fact that it raises a question regarding Christian freedom is important. The freedom granted to the Christian from, on the one hand, the Jewish law, and, on the other, pagan superstition, required an enormously skillful balancing act on the part of Paul if he were to convey its true meaning to the first Christian churches. Paul will take the specific issue and elevate into a discussion of Christian principle and community. In the process, Paul will tackle one of the most delicate and difficult issues in the Christian church: whether to eliminate voluntarily from one's behavior, regardless of one's beliefs, those actions that, committed by other, weaker members of the Christian community, would constitute sin. Two issues form the crux of Paul's argument: the subjective nature of sin and the indispensability of building up the community of faith. Both issues were topics Paul addressed repeatedly in his correspondence. Faced with another source of division among the Corinthian Christians, Paul offers counsel that underscores unity while clarifying the essential moral issue at stake.
Christians possess knowledge, language Paul used when he was among them, but he adds that knowledge puffs up (φυσιοῖ or creates pride as a transient condition in individuals) in a way that appears impressive but may have no substance. His imaginary dialogue partner here may be a form of Gnosticism that claimed specialized knowledge available only to the enlightened. He contrasts such knowledge with the higher principle of love that builds up the community. When he compares knowledge and love, knowledge loses. Love is the determining factor rather than what you know. People who claim specialized knowledge do not know what they think they know. Thus, knowledge of God is love of God. Love is more valuable than knowledge. In fact, knowledge of God can occur only when there is love for God. We have the rare reference in Paul to love for God, seeing such love as a mark of believers.[74] Suggesting what later generations would refer to as prevenient grace, the ability to love God is evidence that God knows us. Knowledge does not produce the bond that love can love bring. Christian maturity will show itself in concern for others in the community. Such self-restraint is a small price to pay for the edification of the church.
Today, we can see such specialized knowledge that some think they possess in matters related to hybrid vehicles, vegetarian, sexual behavior, gender identity, or a special evil attached to whiteness, maleness, income level, and many other topics. Such knowledge one thinks one has that distinguishes oneself from others often leads to an alienating smugness that has no regard for the values, practices, and reasoning of those who differ. If one is right without love, one has gained nothing. Love builds up community rather than surrender to the forces of disintegration.
Paul is directing us to a problem of the human heart that can be profoundly disruptive to all human relations. Pascal said that human beings never do evil so cheerfully, as when they do it from religious conviction. Self-righteousness may well be the curse of all human relations. It blocks our capacity for self-criticism, destroys humility, and undermines our sense of oneness with others. Self-righteousness is at the heart of many religious atrocities, whether crusades, hatred of Jews, or Islamic militancy.[75] In many ways, the worst pleasures are spiritual. We might think of the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, the pleasure of power, and the pleasure of hatred. Human beings have a battle within. Yes, we may give in to the “sins of the flesh” that receive so much attention. Yet, the cold, self-righteous prude or killjoy who goes regularly to church may be nearer to hell than the prostitute. Of course, spiritually, it would be best to be neither.[76] C. S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce (1946), had a wonderful image of the afterlife. His main character, in a dream, is on a journey of the afterlife. He is on a bus, about half full, with everyone arguing with each other. He seeks a space where he can be alone, but someone sits next to him. He explains that people in this place can imagine anything they want, and they can have it. It sounded nice. Later, he would discover the place is hell. Eventually, he mentions some historical persons, and comes to Napoleon, the nearest of the older persons who had come here. Some people visited him. He built himself a house, all empire style, away from everyone. They looked through the window and saw him parading up and down the great hall, declaring that the reason for his defeat in battle was his officers, Josephine, the Russians, or the English. Yet, in his self-centered approach to life, Napoleon got what he wanted. Imagine a world where you get everything you want. It sounds like heaven. However, it might be hell.
The knowledge Paul expresses is not specialized knowledge, but rather, common to the Jewish and Christian communities, both of which know that no idol exists in any meaningful sense of the term (Isaiah 46), and in agreement with the Shema of Israel (Deuteronomy 6:4), that there is but one God. The panoply of Greek and Roman temples seemed no more than an illusion. From this perspective, eating meat left over from sacrifices is a neutral activity. He grants a subjective aspect to his argument in that such gods and lords are so in the minds of adherents, but for us there is one God, a unique statement in the writings of Paul. However, expressing the knowledge available to all Christians, this one God is the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. Even without the mention of the Spirit, this early confession of faith involves the distinction between and the fellowship of what later generations of Christians would develop into the doctrine of the Trinity.[77] Given the participation of the Lord, who is Jesus as the Christ in creation, it was reasonable for later generations of Christians to connect the origin of divine sonship in the eternity of the Triune God.[78]
Paul acknowledges that some Christians think of the idols as real in such a way that it affects how they think of the meat offered to them. If some Christians are weak, it is because they attribute moral value to what is morally indifferent. Thus, food is morally neutral. Jesus himself taught that “whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile ... It is what comes out of a person that defiles” (Mark 7:18-20). In the Jewish setting, Jesus and the early church had already set aside the ritually significant distinction of clean and unclean foods as being indifferent regarding our relation to God. Paul applies this principle to the Greek and Roman setting. Christian freedom is not a license to disregard others by creating an obstacle to others. Context is everything when we consider proper Christian behavior. Eating or abstaining from sacrificial food is of no consequence to the standing of the believer before God. However, some other Corinthians must have disagreed with this argument (or at least been confused about it). They witnessed their Christian brothers and sisters dining with non-Christians on food obviously sacrificed to Demeter, or Zeus, or some other deity. In addition, they saw the matter differently. Thus, the problem for cosmopolitan Christians was that non-Christians had partially offered and consumed virtually all meat to some deity besides the God of Israel. How should a Christian receive hospitality in the home of a non-Christian? Alternatively, how should an upper-class Christian attend any public banquet, participation in which was indispensable to their social status? The significance of the issue lies only in its effect on other members of the community. The starting point for unity is Paul's recognition that exercising liberty to eat and observing scruples against eating are equally valid practices concerning the consumption of meat from sacrifices. The matter then turns to what most edifies and sustains the Corinthian church amid differing viewpoints on sacrificial food. First, Paul acknowledges that there are Christians who, as a matter of conscience, believe that eating meat left over from sacrifices is tantamount to condoning idolatry, if not indirectly practicing it. At the same time, the Christian who refrains from eating meat sacrificed to idols may reinforce the idea in some that idols are real, which Paul denies categorically. Second, the other danger is that by eating such meat, other Christians, for whom such an act would feel sinful and, as beginners in Christian maturity, be part of the destruction of their faith. The issue, on both sides of the problem, is that members of the community may misunderstand the actions of one another. Paul underscores the seriousness of such misunderstanding when he declares that such harmful misunderstanding injures a member of the family and therefore injures Christ. We can see here how profoundly believed that the Christian community is the body of the risen Christ in the world. The ecclesiology of Paul has its basis and understanding in his Christology. Paul enters the most difficult aspect of his argument, namely, the advice to some Christians to refrain from exercising their freedom in Christ to prevent other, weaker Christians from sinning. One may be on the right side theologically. However, how one uses that knowledge and even power is instructive.
O! it is excellent
To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.[79]
The essential moral issue at stake, then, is not so much a question of whether to eat sacrificial food per se as it is pursuing Christian conduct in a manner that upholds members of the body of Christ.
How Paul dealt with an issue that today is irrelevant is the significance of this text. within the Christian community love is to take precedence over the exercise of individual freedoms. The Pauline ethic is not without principles, but always love for the family member within the body of Christ takes precedence over principles. This means of course that the health of the Christian community becomes a priority. To put it another way, leaders have the responsibility to maintain carefully and deliberately the diversity of the church. What concerns Paul is community, building it up and protecting it from dissension. Careful consideration of Paul’s argument through all three chapters can yield a powerful reflection on the interactions between individual decisions and communal health, between what Christian discipleship permits and what it encourages, and between the basic ideas of freedom and responsibility.
Paul invites us to reflect upon the importance of the gospel and the commission to proclaim that gospel (I Corinthians 9:16-23 (Year B Epiphany 5). If he were not proclaiming the gospel (εὐαγγελίζωμαι) it would open him to the woe pronounced upon disobedience. Jeremiah characterizes his call to proclaim the divine word in similar fashion, where it becomes something like a burning fire shut up in his bones. He is weary holding it within. In fact, he can do so no longer (Jeremiah 20:9). A moralist or philosopher can keep truth within by forever pondering it from its many dimensions, whereas the apostle must be a missionary for the truth.[80] The apostle must witness or confess in public to the work of God.[81] The origin of his commission to preach the gospel is God. The notion of a commission (οἰκονομίαν) derives from the notion of the management of a household or of household affairs; specifically, the management, oversight, administration, of others' property; the office of a manager or overseer, as in the steward of the property of another). The word relates to a term Paul uses in 4:1-4, where he discusses stewards and stewardships. Stewards were often slaves who were house managers. Thus, they were slaves of a master but simultaneously a supervisor of other slaves.[82] In 4:1-4, Paul characterizes himself as one of the stewards of God's mysteries. Paul's use of “commission” suggests that Paul is making a similar move here. Paul sees himself as one whom God has entrusted with the task of proclamation. He is a slave to God, and thus, a slave to all (9:19). His statement in these three verses echoes 1:17, where he asserts that Christ did not send him to baptize but to proclaim the gospel (εὐαγγελίζεσθαι). Moreover, in 1:21, Paul states the importance of proclamation since it is through the foolishness of proclamation that God saves those who believe. From the outset of the epistle, Paul maintains that the power of the proclamation does not rest upon eloquence or human wisdom but in the content of the proclamation which is Christ crucified (1:17, 23-24) for Christ himself is the power of God and the wisdom of God (1:24). Here is the basis for thinking of the apostolic gospel functioning as a given norm in the process of developing the episcopal office, a norm that alone could give validity to the office.[83]
Given the priority of the gospel, Paul explains he is adaptable to a variety of situations for the sake of that gospel. He has a saving purpose in relation to people and groups. His freedom allows him to be a slave of all, suggesting that he does not belong to any group but all groups, for the sake of the gospel. He can be at home anywhere. His apostolic life becomes an example of the Corinthians can use their sense of freedom for the benefit of others. Though he is free, he makes himself a slave and though as an apostle he has the freedom to charge for preaching, he utilizes this freedom to make the gospel free to all. He was born a Jew and followed Jewish practices prescribed by the Mosaic Law. Nonetheless, Paul does not clarify further what he means by providing a list of specific Jewish practices he continued to follow.[84] While claiming to become under the law, Paul simultaneously maintains that he is not under the law suggesting the voluntary nature of his "becoming a Jew." It is important to note here, that for Paul the law is not evil or even impossible to keep. In fact, Paul has positive views of the law elsewhere such as in Romans 7:12 where he states that the "law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good" (NRSV) and in Philippians 3:6 where he contends that "as to righteousness under the law" (NRSV) he was blameless. For Paul, then, one of the problems with the law was its inability to save or give life (Galatians 3:21-22). Yet, he believed that by allowing himself to follow the practices of the law, he would be able to save those who lived under the law. When he refers to those outside the law, he is reiterating his claim elsewhere that he is an apostle to the Gentiles (Romans 11:13; Galatians 2:9-10). Despite his willingness to be among those outside the torah, he is not free from the law of God but is now under the law of Christ (ἔννομος Χριστοῦ), for in Christ something else confronts the Mosaic Law so that its validity is at an end.[85] Behind both Torah and Christ’s law is the saving action of God. God has a “law,” but has moved from Torah to Christ for its expression. Paul discusses law and gospel in a broader context, stating that the proclamation of the gospel is above all dispute about the law, which moves on a different level. In Paul, we have in the law on the one side, and faith in Christ on the other, two realities in salvation history that belong to two different epochs in what God does in history.[86] He refers to the weak in conscience, the overly scrupulous, as among those to whom he became a slave, to win them to the gospel and that he might become a participant or fellow partner (συνκοινωνὸς) in its blessings. The gospel is precious to him and places the primary role in his life. Here is the reason for all that he does and all that he endures. In 4:11-13, Paul presents a brief résumé of an apostle who makes himself a slave to all: He is hungry and thirsty, poorly clothed, beaten, homeless, reviled, persecuted, slandered, and considered rubbish of the earth. Thus, he participates in suffering which is at the heart of the gospel message. The dual reality of suffering and blessing goes hand in hand for Paul and sheds light on his statement later in the letter in which he writes, "Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain" (15:58, NRSV). Remaining steadfast during suffering for the sake of the gospel ensures that one will participate not only in suffering but also in the gospel's ultimate victory.
Paul urges consideration of the need for self-control in pursuing Christian freedom by using a metaphor of athletes preparing for competition (I Corinthians 9:24-27, Year B Epiphany 6). The use of a metaphor is an attempt to express some image of life that others will find inspiring and practical at the same time. The point of a metaphor is gaining an insight into life, an insight that may bring change to our lives, if we are open to it. As Robert Frost put it, “Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.” Exploring some context will be beneficial.
Historians of the period offer some assistance with the context in Corinth. When he was in Corinth, around 49-51 AD, the city hosted the Isthmian games. The city had many visitors. Athletes were everywhere. Paul uses the sports metaphor to communicate some truths concerning the practice of the Christian living. He articulates the need to develop self-control, develop a goal orientation, have self-discipline, and to grasp the purpose. Clearly, underlying such practices must be a passion to pursue excellence. Paul encourages the people of the church to remain focused by pursuing the best in the Christian life.
The city hosted the Isthmian games every two years (akin to the Olympic Games in Athens). Although Hellenistic literature commonly employed athletic imagery, the running and boxing metaphors of Paul were especially poignant for his Corinthian audience. Since 582 B.C., Corinth had been the home of the Isthmian Games, one of four Panhellenic festivals. The Isthmian Games ranked below the Olympic Games in prestige, but above those of Delphi and Nemea. After the Romans sacked Corinth in 146 B.C., the neighboring town of Sicyon, situated about 10 km (6.2 miles) northwest of Corinth, hosted the games, but coin evidence reveals that Roman Corinth reclaimed the games by 40 B.C. Although it is not certain that Paul attended these contests, he and his audience would have been aware of them. The games took place in April/May A.D. 49 and 51 when he was visiting the city. During this festive time, the city teemed with visitors, and this influx forced many non-Corinthians to pitch tents along the roadways. Thus, the games made Corinth a popular spot to visit and to work, especially for tentmakers (see Acts 18:1-3).[87]
We can also appreciate the place of these few verses in the context of the letter. One can appreciate these instructions better if one sees it as consistent with the argument in 8:7-13 not to cause another to stumble in the faith and in 9:19-23 to become all things to all people to share the gospel. In fact, these few verses occur in the context of the advice that Paul gives regarding eating meat sacrificed to idols in 8:1-11:1. Familiarity with the message of the section is important for an understanding of these few verses. In 9:19, he will say that while he is free with respect to such moral matters, he makes himself a slave to all to win more of them to the way of the gospel. Standing on any principle of rightful personal freedom is secondary to the priority of bolstering the community. The essential moral issue at stake, then, is not so much a question of whether to eat sacrificial food per se as it is pursuing Christian conduct in a manner that upholds members of the body of Christ. Such forbearance requires that the exercise of liberty have some discipline. The image is like that of Philippians 3:12-13, but here, the emphasis is on the effort and training demanded of those who win. The Christian situation is a provisional one, in which we can only run to the utmost of our resources.[88]
We engage in athletic competition to win. The runner in competition will exert oneself to the point of exhaustion to win the race. The race has multiple runners focused upon a single prize. However, Paul refers to the congregation as a body running together to win an imperishable crown. He presses the metaphor by using it to point to the need for self-control. He stresses the all-encompassing commitment of the athlete by referring to the athlete having self-control in all things. The object is a wreath in both cases, but the contrast is between a perishable and an imperishable one. The fruits of this discipline may seem meager. Why should one exert all that effort for a wreath, even if it is an imperishable one? Remember that, like adhering to the Olympic ideal, the goal of the Isthmian athlete was not to receive the reward of monetary compensation, but to receive recognition for excellence in a worthy athletic endeavor. The victor's wreath was valued specifically because it signified that its recipients had conducted themselves very honorably. The contrast of the perishable with the imperishable crown would have conjured images of the wreath of celery bestowed upon victors at the Isthmian Games. The Isthmian victor’s crown had a reputation for withering in comparison to the Nemean crown composed of fresh celery. Nonetheless, athletes still subjected their bodies to intense training for the fleeting honor of wearing a crown that had already begun to die. Another part of the metaphor is that just as a race is not a matter of aimlessly runner around, but rather, has a purpose and direction, so the Christian life has a direction and purpose. Just as a boxer is not simply punching at the air, but desires to land a punch, he punishes his bodily existence, his day-to-day life, and enslaves it to the demands of his calling. His example is one the congregation in Corinth needs to follow. By living with this priority he will show himself not to be disqualified, even as participants in athletic games can be disqualified. The metaphor is lacking in that Christian life is a cooperative effort and that the goal is discipline oneself for the sake of others. One receives honor by conducting oneself in a way that honors others.
The popularity of sports today makes this imagery easily relatable. Such imagery continues the challenge Paul offers to exercise self-control by considering the needs of other brothers and sisters in Christ. Any of us who work at physical fitness are aware that there is no shortcut to fitness. If you have trained for a marathon or gone on long bike rides, you know the work required to become ready. Is that not true of everything? To graduate with honors, you must study late at night. To play good golf, you must spend hours on the driving range and the putting green. Whatever it is you wish to excel in doing, you must work hard and faithfully. There are no shortcuts to a successful life. We have much to learn from such persons. We need to think of the Christian life and discipleship as something like the athlete who wants to be the best at what he or she does through self-discipline rather than through cheating.
In I Corinthians 12-14, Paul begins a protracted section that considers spiritual gifts, particularly how they are to function in the gathered community. The passage can be an aid as we reflect upon the general notion of balancing disciplined congregational prayer on the one hand and free, hearty, and spontaneous prayer on the other. Paul wrestles with order and spontaneity in these chapters. The solution is for the minister to prepare for “extemporary” prayer, with due attention to connecting to the congregation, the historical connection to tradition, and to the need for stability of form.[89] In 12:13, the power of the Spirit through baptism does away with the distinctions of race or social status by the power of the Holy Spirit through baptism. Paul's use of the metaphor of the body makes this plain (12:12-31), as does his insistence that love is the greatest gift of all (chapter 13). Furthermore, in chapter 14 Paul argues that the gifts of prophecy and tongues are only useful if the community of faith, rather than the individual, benefits.
Paul begins his discussion of spiritual gifts (I Corinthians 12:1-11, Year C Epiphany 2). Paul is connecting some quite practical matters that ought to lead us to a deeper appreciation of the love that binds us to each other and to Christ through the Spirit. An issue the congregation has raised in its correspondence to him is spiritual gifts. He does not want them ignorant in this regard. He begins by reminding them of their former attachment to the gods of other religions. The idols that represent such gods do not speak. What Paul says about idols is consistent with similar Old Testament traditions. For example, Psalm 115:4-7 declares idols are nothing more than silver and gold shaped by human hands, with mouths, eyes, ears, noses, hands, and feet that do not function.[90] If Paul has this passage in mind, Psalm 115:8 expresses the concern that those who make idols and those who trust them become like them. For example, Christian speech and hearing are truly relevant. The letters suggest the Corinthian congregation used excessive speech, but it was less than helpful. Therefore, those who are still worshiping the pagan deities are allowing noisy, sensational self-delusion to entice them and carry them away. The pagan gods are powerless and voiceless. So, not only is the pagan experience an individual one, it is also nonsense, having nothing spiritual about it. By means of these antithetical declarations, Paul makes the following point: Whereas some speech is compatible with the Spirit, other speech is not. To paraphrase, since you Corinthians are no longer pagans, and idols are lifeless and cannot speak, when you speak by God’s Spirit — who is and gives life and speaks — there are acceptable and nonacceptable forms of speech. The general concern, however, is that Paul desired Christians to become like Christ. Thus, the first comment of Paul starkly reminds readers just how diverse and deeply pagan the environment in which the early Christians lived and learned. He wants it to be clear, then, that one who says, "Let Jesus be cursed (Αναθεμα)" is not speaking by the Spirit of God. The Spirit does not tear up the historical roots of faith. The Spirit does not set out to undermine the foundations of the institution, the church, the Bride of Christ, which Jesus the Christ called into being. It may be hard to imagine just what circumstances could lead the Corinthians to query Paul about the spiritual pedigree of those who curse Jesus' name. Two suggestions are worth pondering. First, this statement could have been uttered in the pagan assemblies they formerly attended. Paul would then be setting up a stark contrast between the inspired speech of their former and present lives. Second, some in the Christian assembly, as an expression of the complete freedom of the Spirit, could have been uttering this phrase. In this case, Paul is giving the Corinthians practical instructions to discern the spirits and test all forms of that in which inspired speech consists.[91] If this is a Gnostic offshoot, emphasizing the spiritual nature of the all-powerful risen Lord, they may well have rejected any need for or recognition of the human side of the man Jesus. In this state of self-delusion, the pagan adherent is liable to say anything, even something that is blasphemous to a particular pagan deity. To Paul, this is unimaginable for a Christian. Christians might experience moments of spiritual power, and even speak in unintelligible tongues. However, these experiences never carry believers away from their confessional foundation or lead them astray from the community of the faithful. It would be impossible for the Spirit to lead a believer to utter a curse on Jesus. However, one who affirms "Jesus is Lord" will do so by the Holy Spirit.
It may well be that part of the modern frustration is that we have relied upon gods rather than God. We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the technical ability to destroy ourselves, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate. We have worshipped the god of pleasure only to discover that thrills play out and sensations are short-lived. We have bowed before the god of money only to learn that there are such things as love and friendship that money cannot buy and that in a world of possible depressions, stock market crashes, and bad business investments, money is a rather uncertain deity. These transitory gods are not able to save or bring happiness to the human heart. Only God is able. It may well be that even we modern people need to find a way to rediscover faith in that which is reliable.[92]
The same Spirit and Lord is the source of the varieties of gifts (χαρισμάτων), varieties of services (or ministries, διακονιῶν), and varieties of activities (or workings, ἐνεργημάτων), with the same God activating all of them in everyone. The Spirit develops the flowering of uniquely individual expressions and experiences. To use an analogy from the arts, the artist is nothing without the gift he or she has. Yet, the gift is nothing without the work of the artist. The gifts, services, and activities have the purpose of mutual edification. His point is that benefitting individually is not enough. The work of the Spirit is not simply for private use. The sign the Spirit is working is that it connects with others and benefits others. The diversity of genuine spiritual gifts works toward unity and harmony. The working of the Spirit will not disintegrate the bonds of faith that hold together the community. The work of the Spirit is that of a community in a specific place. The gifts of the grace granted to this community do have variety, but they all have one thing in common that guarantees their co-operation and the unity of the church. The real point is that they are all gifts of the same Spirit, who divides to every individual severally as the Spirit will.[93]
Paul expresses his concern for unity by using Trinitarian language with this reference to Lord, Spirit, and God. The teaching of the church concerning the Trinity suggests a relational image of God. As persons made into the image of God as Father, Son, and Spirit, we also need relationships with others. We are not complete until we enter that kind of relationship. Such statements by Paul will become the basis for the orthodox teaching regarding the Trinity. One who prays to the Father, believes in the Son, and in whom the Holy Spirit moves, is a person whom the one Lord meets and unites to the Lord. The presupposition and goal of the church in the development of the doctrine of the Trinity is the unity of God.[94]
Paul will then list several gifts that relate to the situation in Corinth. He stresses that each gift is in accord with and activated by the same Spirit just as the Spirit chooses. The first two gifts are important because they serve the church in the practical manner of building up the community. He refers to the utterance of wisdom, such as practical exhortation. He refers to the utterance of knowledge, such as exposition of Christian truth and an intelligent grasp of the principles of the gospels guided by reason and led by the Spirit. The gift of faith here suggests the confidence in God to do great or extraordinary things, such as a faith to move mountains (13:2). He envisions that the Spirit gives to some a particularly strong measure of faith so they might encourage the rest. Those who receive the gift of healing is the power to help those with sickness of mind and body. Others receive the gift of the working of miracles, such as mighty deeds like exorcism. Others receive the gift of prophecy, something like Old Testament prophets who spoke as messengers of God. God inspired them to utter the deep things of God for the conviction of sin, edification, comfort, and sometimes predicting the future. Others receive the gift of the discernment of spirits, an intuitive discernment of whether the spirit of God inspires a person. Others receive the gift of various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues, ecstatic utterance, and its interpretation.
Paul spells out some of the diverse expressions the Spirit can take in the lives of different believers. However, the tasks are always changing with changing situations. Paul does not claim the list fixes the number or types of gifts, but rather, stresses the unity of the gifts amid diversity. In fact, the intent of the diversity is to serve the one body, and therefore unity.[95] Paul is making the multiplicity of expressions of the Spirit a theme of theological reflection in this entire passage. He did so in debate with some people in Corinth who lifted one experience of the Spirit up as authentic. Paul opted for no one form of authentic spirituality. He found justification for the multiple expressions of the Spirit working and the mutual need to embrace the way the Spirit was at work. He stresses that the variety means that the Spirit does not work equally in all. His concern was to see to it that the differences in gifts did not occasion conflicts and schisms. Instead, all should recognize that the same Spirit is at work in all these gifts, imparting the gifts as the Spirit will, and that the proper concern for all with their different gifts should be what contribution they could make to the upbuilding of the community. Thus, the individual gifts of the Spirit supplement each other in the life of the church. The only criterion of authentic spirituality is the relation to confession of Christ (verse 3), and the relation to the one Lord means commitment to the unity of Christians in the fellowship of the church by mutual participation and love in the unity of the body of Christ. These thoughts on the theme of multiplicity and unity point the way for the church in every age.[96]
If we were to discuss the ministry of the community, Paul makes emphatic use of the image of the body and its members. Throughout this passage, he addresses gifts, services, and workings of the one Spirit. Paul affirms that the body is one, and that as such it has many members. The one body lives in the plurality of its members. In addition, the many members are one body. Therefore, the plurality has no right alone, but exist for all. Yet, this image is something real for Paul, for the vision he has before him is the body and members of the Head Jesus Christ. Paul is thinking of the one ministry and witness of the one Son. He thinks of the fellowship that the Father has in the Son with humanity.[97]
Paul carefully addresses the still confusing fact that while there is only one genuine Spirit, it manifested its presence in a variety of ways. This diversity in unity is, in fact, the greatest strength, the unique gift, of the Holy Spirit. Instead of forcing an unvarying unity of experience on believers (as required by so many other first century cults), the Spirit of God allowed for, indeed helped develop, the flowering of uniquely individual expressions and experiences within the faith community. The freedom of individuality occurs within limits. Our vocation or calling is from God in a way that concerns the individual and is for the uniqueness that everyone represents. Such a calling is not strange to the individual. The balance here is between one Spirit and differences in the distribution of the gifts.[98]
Paul offers the metaphor of the human body to help us grasp how the diversity and individuality with which the Spirit works in the community of believers is a benefit to the community (I Corinthians 12:12-31a, Year C Epiphany 3).
As a metaphor of how all this works, a body is one, but also has many members. The members of the body are many but are part of one body. Christ is the same way. His point is that the aim of the Christian is the well-being of the whole body. One meaning of this description is that the existence of the church involves a repetition of the Incarnation of the Word of God in the person of Jesus Christ in that area of the rest of humanity that is distinct from the person of Jesus Christ.[99] The term “body of Christ” stresses Christ is a body. The “being” of the Christian community is this “body.” Christ is one in many. Jesus Christ is by nature body. Such a statement is why Paul will stress the necessity of unity and plurality in the community. The gifts, services, and workings have a bodily nature that recognizes the order and freedom needed within the community. The resurrection of Jesus is what allows Paul to tell the Corinthians they are the body of Christ in verse 27. The body of Christ as seen in the community points like an arrow to the unity of humanity in Christ. The exclusiveness of referring to church as the body of Christ is relative, provisional, and teleological. To use the language and theology of Karl Barth, the community is the body of Christ in the election of Jesus Christ from eternity. It became the body of Christ and individual members of it due to their election in the death of Christ on the cross and proclaimed in his resurrection from the dead. The work of the Holy Spirit is to realize subjectively the election of Jesus Christ and to reveal and bring it to humanity. The Holy Spirit awakens the poor praise on earth.[100] We may also find a kind of representation in a broader sense in any social group in which individual members have special functions that both single them out and enable them to contribute to the unit as a whole and to the other members, this passage being an example. In a working society, the different members do jobs for others, and all the members relate reciprocally to each other. They are “for” each other and must act in solidarity in this sense.[101]
Baptism occurs in the one Spirit and we all drink in the Lord’s Supper of one Spirit. Regardless of our differences in social standing, wealth, gender, or ethnic background, Christians are one in their reception of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Both sacraments remind us that Christian life is about Christ. Here is our unity. The Spirit is the means through which the reconciling work of Father and Son find completion. For Paul, the fellowship of Christians with God and each other rests on their participation in the one Jesus Christ to whom each of them is related by faith, baptism, and the Supper.[102] Here, Paul describes as a work of the Spirit the incorporating of believers into the one body of Christ by baptism and reception of the Supper, by which they also receive sonship.[103] The Holy Spirit binds believers together in the fellowship of the body of Christ and thus constitutes the church, as the Spirit is present as its lasting gift.[104] Baptism incorporates individuals into the body of Christ and thus relates them to the unity of the body. Baptism establishes the identity of individual Christians and integrates them with their separate individual qualities into the fellowship of the church.[105] As such, the church becomes a provisional sign of the eschatological fellowship of a renewed humanity in the future reign of God.[106] The redemptive work of the Spirit is present in individuals and society. Individuals receive the gift of the Spirit in baptism, but the gift is not in isolation. It binds them to fellowship with each other. All this points us toward the goal of the work of the Spirit, renewing individual life and corporate life.[107]
The church has always been a very human, and therefore weak, frail, and imperfect. One of the ways we demonstrate this reality is in our rebellion against affirming our oneness amid our diversity. The gift of Protestantism has been ever new diverse forms of expressing the Christian faith. The sadness I have is that the church could not figure out a way to experience that diversity while also affirming unity. The church is not the presence of the rule of God. One does not need to experience any congregation or denominational family before one realizes that. The church is not New Jerusalem. Pastors are not saviors. Yet, the church is to be a sign or pointer toward the real thing.
Paul offers the metaphor of the human body to help us grasp how the diversity and individuality with which the Spirit works in the community of believers is a benefit to the community. To view the church from this perspective is a humbling act. The most gifted in time, talent, or treasure, still needs other members of the community to grow in their faith, love, and hope. However, this view of the church is also an encouraging one. Every follower of Christ is important to the pattern of life the church is weaving.
We are individuals with unique capacities and gifts. We are part of a community of believers in whom the same Spirit, the same Lord, and the same Father is at work. This mixture of our individuality and community brings tensions. We might find ourselves wondering if the community really needs certain types of individuals. We may view ourselves as in competition with others in terms of influence, power, or prestige. Some persons may seem more important than others are, stronger than others are, more “needed” than others are. Such thoughts are the source of much divisiveness in the church.
What impresses me is how deeply embedded community appears to be in both the human and natural world. Even the atom is a community of particles. Each cell is a community of interacting parts. The human body requires genes and cells, with interacting electrical charges in the brain, to work together for the good of the body. We do not understand the parts fully until we see how it all comes together in the body. Each part has its place in the whole.
William Klink, physics and astronomy professor at the University of Iowa, says one key reason to create models is to provide an explanation of how things work. They enable the one making the model to understand why some parts of nature behave the way they do. The one making the model puts it together in a way that one can change and control in a workable fashion. What distinguishes a model from pure speculation is that one can test a model.[108] Based on such an understanding of a model, we could ponder what God is testing in the church. Will the church be a means of grace in this world? Will the church be a place where the world can see and experience the love God has for the world? If the church is to be a place where the mission is to love God and neighbor as well as make disciples for Jesus Christ, will the church be its statement of mission? Will the church be a place where faith in Christ, love from God that flows to others, and hope in the future rule of God and destiny of humanity empower its life?
Another metaphor that would communicate what Paul is saying here is that the community of faith is not a one-person band. Everyone is in the band, and all have an instrument to play. The quality of the music depends on each of us, as individuals, using our gifts for the benefit of the whole.
Another metaphor involves a customer-related business. Starbucks puts its employees through rigorous training to ensure that every venti, nonfat, no-whip, sugar-free Caramel Macchiato is precisely the same as the next. It wants loyal customers to get the same exact drink at a neighborhood store as they do at the airport Starbucks as they do at the Starbucks in Manhattan while traveling for business. I think this is a good image of what Paul writes here. Many people working toward their common goal, giving people the best cup of coffee they can, along with the best experience they can.
The metaphor of the body helps explain, by use of analogy, what Paul has said in 12:4-11, particularly as summarized in verse 4, “there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.” Paul holds together diversity and unity in his imagery of an individual as part of a collective, working together for the same purpose. He delicately balances the genuine uniqueness of each part against the organic result that these parts produce a functioning, unified body. Paul moves his readers from this general body imagery to their own body of Christ experience. At this point Paul sketches out fully the metaphor of the body.
The metaphor of the “body” that Paul uses in I Corinthians 12:12-26 was a common analogy in ancient rhetoric. For example, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (60 BC-7 AD), a Greek historian and orator, compared the human body to the polis, or commonwealth. He urges that each part of the commonwealth have respect for the other. Each part is important, and no part can become the whole. He urges that each part needs to behave in ways that benefit the common good. He uses the image to caution against inappropriate demands for liberty and for each class to respect the other class. Of course, notably, Paul has said in verse 13 that such class distinctions are gone in Christ. In contrast, the point Dionysius is making is not, however, that all people (members of the body) have equal value. Rather, his point is that those parts that have less honor, such as the belly, should not object to the parts that have greater value, such as the brain, to rule over them. In other words, his analogy concludes that the plebeian classes in the Greek commonwealth should have no objection to rule by the Roman Senate. Just as in antiquity, using the human body to illustrate the unity and diversity of a group may seem like a common rhetorical trope with little new to say.
Thus, while Paul uses the same “body metaphor” that others did, he does it to accomplish quite different ends. Furthermore, he works with spiritual, rather than primarily political, connotations. By marking his explanation with comments about Christ, then God, and finally back to Christ, he frames the discussion of the body of Christ with those who create, empower, and sustain this body and its gifts. Paul uses body imagery to affirm both the diversity and the unity inherent in Christ, without ever wholly subsuming one aspect within the other. Unlike some other pagan political writers who compared the parts with the whole to repress individual expression and personal freedoms for the sake of a communal good, Paul celebrates the diverse gifts present in the body of Christ as present at Corinth.
The human body has many parts, so Paul demonstrates with humor in imagining the parts of the body (foot, ear, eye, hand, less honorable) having a conversation with each other the foolishness of a body that does not work together. God has arranged, designed, and organized the diversity within the Body of Christ to serve the purpose God has provided. God has given the greater honor to the inferior member so that members may have the same care for each other. The purpose of the design is unity in common life that shows itself in having no dissension. The congregation has only God-given functions as Christ blends the whole together. He urges the celebration of all the gifts. Paul argues that contrary to appearances, the members that would appear to be "weaker" and "less honorable" than others are clothed with greater honor in the church. What one part of the body feels all parts will feel when we view each part as connected to the one Body of Christ. If each part fulfills its work, then the whole body can achieve a greater good. Just as the individual parts of the body do not comprise an entire body without all the other members, nor are they able to achieve the more holistic purposes that the body can accomplish, so, too, does the analogy apply to the way God calls believers to live out their lives in Christ.
If we apply the metaphor broadly, we can think of the social interactions of human society. In a working society, the different members do jobs for others. They are “for” each other and must act in solidarity, for if one member suffers, all suffer together. The benefits that the acts of some confer and the harm that the failings of others cause all affect the society as a whole. The solidarity in good and evil that is basic to us as social beings has become alien to us in the West due to our increasing individualism. Yet, the social nature of humanity can open the door for another key area of Christian theology as it considers the classical Christian teaching of representation or substitution.[109]
Paul makes the declarative statement that they are the body of Christ and each individual is a part of that body, and thus, they need to behave individually and corporately as if they are. Unity seeks inclusion of the diversity of God's gifts but demands an ethic of personal accountability. Paul is stressing the union of all Christians for fellowship with each other in the unity of the body of Christ, stressing here that the individual members of the one body have specific gifts and functions that supplement each other. All the members are to care equally for each other.[110]
Paul refers to the diversity of talents in the congregation. As leaders of the house churches. [111] There are gifts given to people, not offices. God has appointed in the community apostles first, acknowledging his personal authority in the congregation. This ministry, and its successor ministry of the episcopacy, consists of responsibility for the unity of the community in the faith of the gospel despite all the differences among members and among the gifts conferred on them by the Spirit.[112] The mention of prophets sets the stage for his assertion in Chapter 14 that they should value the gift of prophecy as more valuable to the health of the community than the continued expression of unknown tongues, especially if tongues occurs without the accompanying gift of interpretation. Third is teachers, (4) deeds of power, (5) gifts of healing, (6) forms of assistance, (7) forms of leadership, and (8) various kinds of tongues.
In urging that they strive for the greater gifts, the surprise, given what Paul has discussed thus far, is that he will not lift up one of the gifts already listed as superior. Rather, he will move them forward to a discussion of a new quality and “gift” that all members are to possess and exercise toward each other.
Regardless of the metaphor, how do we relate to each other and how do we present ourselves to the world? The human body requires genes and cells, with interacting electrical charges in the brain, to work together for the good of the body. We do not understand the parts fully until we see how it all comes together in the body. Each part has its place in the whole.
Paul will make clear that the more excellent way is that of love (I Corinthians 12:31b-13, Year C Epiphany 4). Paul has used the pattern before in this letter, where in the middle of a discussion of a specific issue raised by the church, he inserts a reflection on the general principle involved in his response to their issue. It is at the heart of the exhortation toward harmony and reconciliation we find in this letter. Love is to guide them in their decisions. There are no hymns of praise regarding either faith or hope, but we could characterize this text as a hymn of praise on love. Some gifts attract more attention, but the gifts that do the most for the common good receive higher commendation. They are to exhibit a self-sacrificing love, love that "seeks not its own." for the benefit of the whole body, distinguishing this agape love from the love shown in the culture. This congregation can live out of the purposes of God in the world in the power of such love. Paul, through the metaphor of the body of Christ, has managed to assure them that they live within this love now, and to exhort them to extend humility and grace toward each other. Love is a way of life. The way of Christ is the way of love.
We have so many songs today that express the difficulty of love. “What the World Needs Now is Love, Sweet Love.” “I'll Never Fall in Love Again,” “Goodbye to Love,” “Lady Down on Love,” and, of course, “All You Need is Love.” Foreigner had a hit single in 1984, “I want to know what love is.” The imagery of falling in love suggests nothing could be easier or more natural. Yet, hardly any human enterprise begins with such hope and expectation, and which fails so regularly, as love. So we must be clear that love takes time, effort, and training. It is not for novices. Love is an art. In our society, despite the deep-seated craving for love, society considers everything more important than love. It will take an act of will and decision to put oneself on the way of love. Love is a choice. Our choices define us. We need to learn the art of loving.[113] This need to train ourselves in the way of love invites us to look upon our difficulty in loving from another perspective. Love is a learning opportunity. Learning can be enjoyable and a source of personal satisfaction. We will learn to love by engaging other human beings in relationship.
This Chapter describes the Christian way. The movement is away from self and toward others. Such love is of another who is different and simply because the other is there and valuable. One offers such love freely. Such love is far from merely another form of self-expression. It seeks a genuine regard and respect for the other. [114] Love alone counts, love alone conquers, and love alone endures. While Paul is concerned with proclaiming Christian truth, here his concern is practice in that he wants the congregation to adopt a way of living. Our participation in the body of Christ signs us up for a lifelong character-formation course. Paul offers guidance on what Christian love will look like and invites us to make these qualities part of our daily actions and attitudes. In this journey, we learn that self-discipline is love translated into action. If we genuinely love another, we will order our behavior in such a way as to contribute the most to the spiritual growth of the other. The more we love, the longer we live, the larger we become. Genuine love is self-replenishing. The more we nurture the spiritual growth of others, the more we discover that we also nurture our own spiritual growth. In a sense, doing something for somebody else is a way of doing it for ourselves as well. As we grow through love, so grows our joy.[115]
Thus, in verses 1-3, all other spiritual gifts we may have are worthless in comparison to love. Our actions are empty if done without love. One must have love if any spiritual gift is to lead to a well-lived Christian life. The believer who acts without love is repellent. Regardless of the other activities of a Christian community and in a Christian life, what must take place is love. Even tongues (γλώσσαις), the highly esteemed gift within this congregation, becomes as disturbing as a noisy instrument without the concomitant possession of love (ἀγάπη). Prophetic powers (προφητείαν) understanding all mysteries (μυστήρια)(2:7; 15:51) and all knowledge (γνῶσιν) (8:1), and having all faith (πίστιν), so as to remove mountains, to which Jesus referred in Mt 17:20 are nothing without love. Thus, gifts like teaching, prophecy, knowledge, wisdom, and apostleship need love if they are to contribute to the common good. One must have love if any of the gifts are to lead to well-lived Christian life. Even giving up all possessions, as the first disciples did when they followed Jesus, is nothing without love. One who lacks love is engaging in futile activity in terms of the common good of the body of Christ. Thus, such love is decisive in determining human life in the Christian community as a distinctively Christian one. Love alone counts.[116] Paul makes it clear that our faith may be great and strong and still not lead us to eternal life with God and holiness of heart and life. Love is the path by which God wants to save us from our pride, unholy passion, impatience, arrogance, anger, bitterness, discontent, complaining, and worry. Yet, some Christians think they are on the way to heaven without fighting this battle for love.[117]
In verses 4-7, we find a list of the fourteen descriptive statements that characterize the one indispensable virtue of love. What is love? Love is passive in that it is patient (μακροθυμεῖ) and not short-tempered. It receives injury without paying back or complaint. Love is kind (χρηστεύεται) and therefore active in its desire to decrease suffering and increase joy, thereby contributing to the happiness of others. Love is not envious (ζηλοῖ), refusing to focus on the status of the self in a way that leads to division in the body of Christ. Yet, the Corinthians have exhibited jealousy and strife (3:3). Love is not boastful (περπερεύεται), refusing ostentation, pride or arrogance (φυσιοῦται), behavior the congregation exhibits in their rivalry (4:6-7) and in boasting in human leaders (1:29, 3:21). It rejects any action that is unbecoming or rude (ἀσχημονεῖ) and is therefore tactful and presentable, which will be the opposite of the behavior he notes in the next chapter. Love refuses the childish way of selfishly seeking its own way, the opposite of what the congregation is doing regarding meat offered to idols (8-11). Love rejects irritability (παροξύνεται), the path of being easily provoked, and hasty anger. Love absorbs and forgives rather than store up grievance or resentment, which they have not done in bringing cases to civil court (6:6-7). Love does not sympathize with injustice or sin, which they have tolerated in the form of divisions (1:10) and fornication (5:1). Such love unites with goodness, truth (ἀληθείᾳ), which they have rejected in the denial of the resurrection (15:12), and justice. Such love makes allowance and keeps confidences. Such love believes and hopes the best. It endures. Such love overcomes despair, fear, and hate. Although pastors often read such things at weddings, we can see that its application is far broader than the marriage relationship. We live a victorious Christian life when love determines the course of our lives. Love gives us victory over the impulse toward sin and self-destruction. It may take common courtesy to love in the way Paul writes here. It will also take heroism and courage to fight the inward battles over arrogance, pride, stubbornness and the need to control. Evidence of these qualities appear in Paul’s life. He and his associates have borne all things in their ministry (9:12). Paul confidently affirms his hope and faith in his assertion of the coming resurrection and reign of Christ (15:19, 24-26, and 51-57). How is it possible that this man, the least of all the apostles (15:9), can exhibit these amazing qualities of love? From where do they come? Given the context, such love is a gift of God. Thus, love alone gains victory over the forces that menacingly resist its fulfillment as self-giving to God and the neighbor. Love alone conquers.[118]
Finally, in verses 8-13, love is for eternity. We can trust the permanence of love. Childish and immature ways of selfishness give way to the maturity of love for others. We will no longer need prophecy, tongues, and knowledge when the complete comes. Thus, while we rightly value knowledge, Christians have too often claimed to know more than any human being could know. Paul acknowledges that our knowledge of God is partial in comparison to the coming fullness of revelation. We shall receive a full vision of God. Paul uses an analogy of the growth from childhood to adulthood, which requires putting aside childish ways. A second analogy is how the mirrors of the day reflected the image in it dimly, but when in that day we will see with the clarity of a face-to-face encounter. We can only have partial knowledge now, but in that day, we shall know even as God has fully known us. For those who enjoy theology, here is a good reminder that the knowledge of Christian theology is always partial in comparison to the definitive revelation of God in the future of the reign of God. Recognizing the finitude and inappropriateness of all human talk about God is an essential part of theological sobriety. Such recognition is a condition of the possible truth of what we say. This recognition also means that our talk about God becomes doxology. One can expand this notion to that of the confession of faith, which also occurs in this eschatological situation. The provisional nature characterizes the present confession. The Christian community can expect a more profound instruction on the content of their faith based on its faith and confession that comes from the revelation of God that took place in Jesus Christ. We should note that the Roman Catholic Church in Vatican II adopted the reformation that the church in its confession always stands in need of reformation. Faith or the confession of faith always stands between an initial and a deeper knowledge until we reach the full and final vision of God. Paul is aware of the difference between the present life of the Christian life and the ultimate future of God that has already dawned in Jesus Christ, but whose consummation is still ahead for us. Only in the eschatological consummation will there be full knowledge of the Father, the vision of God.[119]
For now, what we have are faith, hope, and love. Such qualities will be the primary marks of Christian community and of the Christian life. Recognizing we are on the way to fullness calls us to participate in the love God has for this world by loving in thought, word, and deed. Love forms the vocation and discipleship of the Christian. Such love encapsulates the balance between time and eternity, which is vital to the practice of hope. Such love is for the persons we encounter in daily life. Love locates us in a time and place. Each neighbor we encounter represents every human being. Such love immerses us in this time and place and orients us toward eternity.[120] The ministry of the pilgrim people of God will find completion, but in its love it is already participating in that completion. Christian love pre-figures the return of Jesus Christ, which brings the consummation and redemption of this time. Love is the form faith and hope take in the Christian community.[121] Every other gift, talent, or passion abides only as one does it in love. Love is an ethic that will abide into the future, but one we can practice in the present as well. Love takes up the believer into the act of the nature and operation of God and participates in the movement of the love for the world. For this reason, Paul could call love the greatest among the gifts of the Spirit, for it not only mediates but also already constitutes the relationship with God.[122]
Like most matters related to virtue and the formation of character, the best any writer can do is offer the reader an opportunity to pray, meditate, and reflect upon the pattern of life one is weaving, the story one is telling with one’s life, the musical piece one is presenting, or the painting one is creating. A well-lived human life is more like an art project than a treatise. Our nearest neighbors, family, co-workers, and friends, need to feel the effects of the work of art our lives are making. Even when we are engaging people in social media, it would be well to consider how the work of art we are forming is touching them.
The resurrection of Jesus was an issue for the first century church (I Corinthians 15:1-11, Year C Epiphany 5). Paul refers to the the good news (εὐαγγέλιον) that he proclaimed (εὐηγγελισάμην) to them. They received that message, they stand upon it, and they are being saved, but if they hold firmly to the message (λόγῳ) that Paul proclaimed to them. If they do not hold firm, their belief has been in vain. His priority in preaching and teaching was message he had received. Paul also received the message about the Lord’s Supper (11:23). Thus, we learn that Paul received what he has delivered to them concerning the death and resurrection of Jesus. He would have received this teaching in the first years after the crucifixion and the proclamation of the resurrection. To expand upon the modern historical credibility of the material, the earliest account we have of the appearances is in I Corinthians 15, written around 57 AD in Ephesus. According to Galatians 1:18, Paul was in Jerusalem three years after his conversion. Thus, he was there around 33-35 AD, if we put the death of Jesus in 30 AD. The witnesses of the appearances are quite close to the event of the resurrection. Paul appeals to an established tradition, rather than his own memory. The assumption that several members of the primitive Christian community genuinely experienced appearances of the resurrected Lord, and therefore not invented during later legendary development, has good historical foundation.[123]
First, Paul received the message that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures. Christ made expiation for our sins. Human beings could not compensate God for the wrong they had done. One puzzlement the theory of expiation presents is that it suggests that God is hard to please. If human beings could do nothing to make amends does that say “something” about God? Without pursuing this thought too far, the doctrine of the atonement says that God is the one making the sacrifice that human beings did not have the capacity to make. The endless round of sacrifices, both animal and grain, did not place human beings in right relationship with God. Paul is clearly presenting the death of Jesus in this way, freeing us from the responsibility of making something right that we could never make right. In this case, one goes back to Isaiah 53:3ff. Jesus died as one rejected by his people. This passage is the only part of the Jewish tradition to which the early Christians could go to interpret his death in an expiatory way. The circumstances of the death of Jesus provided a reason to go back to this prophetic passage because his people in fact despised and rejected Jesus, but the one whom God also in his resurrection.[124]4 As if to emphasize the point, he stresses that he received the teaching that his friends buried him. Eventually, this fact will become an important part of the “proof” that God raised Jesus from the dead. The disciples discovered the emptiness of the tomb. Yet should we consider it significant that Paul does not write directly about the emptiness of the tomb? Paul may have had no interest in such a legend. The Gospel story itself reminds us that historically, the emptiness of the tomb is an ambiguous fact.[125] Yet, the sequence of dead, buried, and raised hints at the emptiness of the tomb. The emphasis upon burial seems to stress that Jesus truly died. Thus, it was not just a literary device.[126] He may have considered the emptiness as self-evident. The “proof” Paul needed was in the appearance of the risen Lord to him, and thus, the emptiness of the tomb was ambiguous. Further, if the tomb is empty, it makes the idea that the appearances are hallucinations less likely. The empty tomb resists any superficial spiritualizing of the Easter message. We can admit that Jesus rose into the kerygma of the church. We can admit that the risen Lord identifies himself with the church so much that it has become the body of Christ. Such notions will push into the background the uniqueness of the event of Christ, transforming it into a generalized spiritual and ethical principle. It connects the earthly corporeality of Jesus with the eschatological reality of a new life. The empty tomb tradition is a separate, independent witness to what happened to Jesus after his death. It becomes an anticipation of the transformation of all creation that Christians anticipate will be the end of creation and thus humanity.
Christianity is the only religion in the world that places at the very heart of its message the death of its founder. Every other religion has a teacher who lived a human life and died, but followers did not consider that death as something to celebrate. Quite the contrary, followers remember the deaths of the Buddha or Muhammad or Confucius or Zoroaster with solemnity. Followers may consider manner of their deaths as noble. Yet, in the last analysis, they do not view the death of the teacher as especially helpful. Their death is a tragic and irrevocable loss. Not so for the death of Jesus. Paul proclaims that Jesus died for our sins. His words become harsher when he emphasizes the burial of Jesus. Because of his death, we are free. The passion narrative taken seriously is a massive cold spot, emptiness, and silence, from God. The silence of God makes what happens next in the proclamation of Paul a surprise.
Second, Paul received the message that God raised him on the third day in accordance with the scripture. Easter was, and is, a gracious surprise. The scientific details — the biology — of resurrection are a mystery. Christians need to admit the difficulty of continuing to believe the surprise of Easter is a promise for humanity and for creation. God has generated this event, so Jesus under his own strength and power did not rise from the dead. Resurrection depended upon the action of God on his behalf. The same is true for all human beings. Note that as Paul continues, the focus of the rest of the chapter will shift to the resurrection. Given the similarity of this statement with the “passion predictions” in Mark, and given the fact that Paul says received this tradition, Paul is relating an early statement of beliefs the church had concerning Jesus. This reference to scripture proved the veracity of the message of the resurrection of Jesus. This passage expresses why Paul is so astounded that the issue of resurrection should have even come up. His message of crucifixion and resurrection was of a single piece and primary elements of his preaching. Crucifixion and resurrection form the heart of the message, so much so that one without the other would not have brought the salvation Paul is proclaiming. Their preaching would be in vain (verse 12) were it not for the resurrection. Many scholars will agree with Bultmann, who thinks that “resurrection” here simultaneously means “exaltation.” The proper background for the language of resurrection is Jewish apocalyptic. The language is metaphor, in the sense of someone rising from sleep. It hints at new life. It will always be debatable since it points to an event beyond our everyday experience. The resurrection affirms the divine Yes over the life of Jesus, and therefore, re-focuses us upon the event nature of the relationship between God and humanity.
Third, Paul received the message that the risen Lord appeared to certain ones who would become witnesses. I will summarize the work of Reginald H. Fuller.[127] The fact that Paul relates about the event of Christ rests upon witness or testimony is significant. It does not rest upon the type of certainty one can have in math and science. In your life, you have relied upon witnesses. Someone testifies to a wonderful experience (movie, play, restaurant, and so on) and you take his or her word for it. You may be happy you did. They increase their credibility for you. You may be sorry you did, decreasing their credibility. When someone testifies to something unbelievable, such as seeing someone alive after he had surely died, it stretches our ability to believe the witness. Suppose today, someone testified to you she had seen a vision. It does not matter what it was a vision of, but you hear them say it. Testimony, in other words, is notoriously subjective to the offering the testimony and to the one hearing it. A follower of Jesus is willing to believe God acted in an incredible way in Jesus and will therefore act in an incredible way for us as well.
This passage has the effect of offering historical veracity to the resurrection of Jesus. Yet, we need to exercise some caution. To call it proof is to go a bit far. We often think of proof as having the certainty of math and science. If we could do that through the resurrection of Jesus, we would have a historical proof for the existence of God. I am not willing to go to that place. However, we need to have the courage to look at what Paul offers here as providing a basis for legitimately looking upon the event of Christ as a genuine event in the relationship between God and humanity. It heightens the event nature of that relationship. It emphasizes the revelatory character of that relationship. God discloses something to us that we could not figure out on our own. In his event, God is the one who promises that death and darkness is not the end. Rather, life and light are our end. As we explore Paul’s list of witnesses to the appearances of Jesus, we need to remember that his account here predates the written gospel accounts of the 80s and 90s by 30 years. Thus, just as the Corinthians could not fill in the details of what Paul says here by recalling the gospel narratives, we should not harmonize his list to their stories. Paul may well have provided more details in his teaching and preaching while in Corinth, but to assume his stories would have matched the evangelists’ (which do not even match one another) is an extreme argument from silence. The early church had independent traditions concerning both the appearances and the empty tomb. Yet, the empty tomb receives its significance from the appearances. The experiences of the risen Lord these persons received became an important part of the veracity of the message of the resurrection of Jesus.[128] When gnostic elements in Corinth push him, Paul is willing to enumerate witnesses as a verify the integrity of the message.[129] The significance of the list of witnesses is that Paul is going to make vast affirmations in verses 12ff for individuals and for the universe based upon the veracity of what he says here. One needs to have the theological courage to determine precisely as possible what the event of resurrection was for Jesus. Apart from that courage, the theologian runs the risk of becoming little more than offering Gnostic speculation and opinion. [130] The appearances might suggest a distribution between Galilee and Jerusalem, but it would be difficult to know how. Even from the standpoint of modern historical study, the fact that Paul knew the witnesses involved, or most of them, himself being the last in the series, lends credibility to this list. Paul brought this list together to give proof for the fact of the resurrection. Thus, 5 he appeared (ὤφθη) to Cephas, then to the twelve. This appearance is the establishment of the church. It confirms the founding significance of the disciples. Luke 24:34 refers to an appearance to Peter and both Matthew and Luke narrate an appearance to the Eleven. It is interesting that there is no narration of this appearance, even though Paul indicates its significance. However, there are some interesting stories in the gospels that, while most of them occur within the life of Jesus, we could read as anticipations of an appearance of the risen Lord to Peter. Peter bows before Jesus and acknowledges his sinfulness in a way that sounds like what we might imagine Peter would do when he saw the risen Lord (Luke 5:1-11). Peter has a key role in the incident of Jesus walking on the water in that he asks to join Jesus in that walk, notices the waves and starts to sink, but asks the Lord to save him, and the risen Lord reaches out to save him and bring him into the boat, but also questioning him as to his doubt (Matthew 14:22-33). Peter is unique among the disciples to affirm that Jesus is the promised Jewish Messiah (Mark 8:27-30), and based upon that confession Matthew expands upon it as Peter proclaims Jesus to be the Son of the living God and has the risen Lord (?) say to him that his confession is derives from a revelation of the Father and will be the foundation upon which the risen Lord will build the church and offer the message of forgiveness (Matthew 16:16-19). Peter is also a significant part of the story of the Transfiguration (Mark 9:2-8), in which three disciples receive clarity as to who Jesus is in relation to the Law and the Prophets, with the Father declaring Jesus to be the Son. In a story like that of Luke 5, John 21 has a story of the risen Lord appearing to the Eleven on the lake in Galilee, but Peter recognizing and affirming that it is the Lord and later the risen Lord offers Peter a three-fold mission to feed others, thereby forgiving him of his three-fold denial. Thus, Peter receives much attention as the one whose affirmation of faith in the risen Lord becomes central to the early church. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. This appearance would appear to be the first fruits of the founding of the church, quite likely the result of the labors of the disciples in Jerusalem. If so, even if it can be nothing more than a supposition, it may have a connection with the event Luke describes on Pentecost in Acts 2.[131] The intent of the enumeration is to show the integrity of the tradition regarding the resurrection by means of witnesses for the reality of the resurrection of Jesus is particularly strong here. Given the standards of the time, one can hardly call into question the intention Paul has of giving a convincing historical proof,[132] even if we must stop short of viewing them as such. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Although James himself stayed in Jerusalem, he assisted the church in its early missionary outreach into Judea and Samaria. Thus, this appearance would have a connection with that calling and mission. The appearance narrated in Luke of the two on the way to Emmaus might be an example of an appearance to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born (miscarried, aborted), he appeared also to me. The idea is that from the spiritual point of view he was not born at the right time, because he had not been a disciple during the lifetime of the disciples. It could also refer to the idea of unfitness for life, a charge against Paul by his opponents.[133] He would be an unlikely person to choose as an apostle, being an active opponent and persecutor of the church. However, the disciples whom Jesus formed during his life were also unlikely choices. Recognizing this, it would be an interesting study of the unlikely persons and groups of persons with whom God works to be witnesses to the saving works of God. The only criteria is an willingness to listen and respond to the call. One can have little doubt that the appearance to him has a close connection, not only to his personal conversion, but also to his missionary outreach to the gentile world. It suggests that the appearance to Paul is on a par with or like the appearance to that of the disciples. It suggests the disciples accepted the appearance of the risen Lord to Paul as credible and bound them together in a common mission. All of this gives some credibility to the notion that the appearances were more like the prophetic visions we have in the Old Testament. Isaiah had a vision of the Lord in the Temple. We could compare the visionary experiences of Ezekiel and Zechariah as well. If so, the New Testament is making a bold claim that the apostles and their kerygmatic witness represented by the New Testament writings are on a par with the prophetic witness to Israel. They were disclosures or revelations to these individuals and groups of the risen Lord. We do not have to view such a vision as subjective psychological projection. In this case, the sheer number of the visions occurring over several years suggests something more than simple projection.[134] The witnesses to the appearances “saw” an end-time reality. If our time and place is the present time, the old age that is passing away, then the appearances are the new age. How can we expect that we can clearly define it in our terms? The appearances occur over a period of three years, which should lend some validity to their historicity.[135] Paul is insisting that the Jewish apocalyptic hope remains valid for these Gentiles, regardless of heavily influenced they might be by their Greek philosophical tradition. Thus, one might be able to designate the resurrection of Jesus as an historical event. If one can understand the emergence of primitive Christianity only considering the eschatological hope for a resurrection from the dead that occurs in Jesus of Nazareth, then it would be designated a historical event, even if we do not know anything more about it. For some people, violating the laws of nature will be too much to take.[136] Understanding the resurrection of Jesus and the hope contained in it in a way that does not violate the laws of nature is a challenge I want to undertake.
Scholars who want to explore the historical basis for Christian claims will focus on what Paul says here, and rightly so. The appearance stories in Matthew, Luke, and John come 30-40 years later. The narrations of the appearances of Jesus in the gospel story are vehicles for the theological perspective of each writer.[137]
The theological significance of this passage is immense. The letters of Paul formulate basic Christian beliefs along the line of Jewish apocalyptic. An important reason for this is his belief that God raised Jesus from the dead. I do not think most scholars would disagree with this. However, one area that will need some exploration is whether Paul carried out this formulation like his rabbinic heritage, or whether he abandoned it in favor of Hellenism.
What Paul presents in his letters occurs in the context within Judaism.[138] For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus is the first fruits of the general resurrection. This image implies that the full harvest will follow. In the resurrection of Jesus, Paul saw the beginning of the end. The powers of the age to come were already at work in his time and place. It was along these lines that Paul participated in the reconstruction of the eschatology of the early church. Now, the background for this reconstruction was Judaism, in that it had already expended much thought upon the problems involved in the notion of resurrection. Such Jewish speculation influenced early church thinking in this regard. The most important aspect of this speculation was in Hebrew anthropology and psychology. Judaism conceived of the human being as a totality, a union of flesh and soul. A truly living being was always an embodied spirit, God having created both soul and body. They have a mutual interdependence, incapable of genuine life apart from each other. Death was not natural. It was the consequence of sin. The reunion of soul and body in resurrection was involved in any teaching concerning eternity with God. Life in the age to come must be embodied life.
The testimonies concerning the appearances and the empty tomb provide reasonable grounds for Christian confidence that God raised Jesus from the dead.[139] This means the appearances did not develop as a legend over the years. This fact separates it from his approach to the legendary stories related to the birth of Jesus.[140] Bultmann is a somewhat surprising in admitting that the cross and resurrection as salvation occurrences is different from the myth of the mystery religions and from Gnostic thought.[141] The differences consist in the fact that the subject is a historical person, Jesus, and his death on the cross only a few years earlier is at the center of the salvation occurrence. One does not accept the witness based on authority, of course. The nature of the witness will have to hold up to the testing to which we as modern persons put them.
This passage concludes with the personal testimony of Paul to the work of grace in his life. The recipient of grace presupposes that individuals are nothing. This passage brings out the meaning of grace.[142] Paul sees himself as unfit and undeserving. The loving grace of God saved him, lifted him up and set him on a new course, giving a new and quite different meaning to his life. We are where we are and who we are by the grace of God.
Paul is emphasizing that the preaching of the disciples and the early church in Jerusalem are consistent with his preaching. Paul wants to emphasize both the historicity of the resurrection and its centrality in the proclamation of the community. We can say historically that witnesses claim, after the death of Jesus, to have seen him. Based on such visions, they arrived at the theological conclusion that God raised Jesus from the dead. They knew they spoke of an event that happened. They became convinced that the resurrection of Jesus had taken place. Historically, we cannot establish this fact. If the appearances were the sole means by which the certainty that God raised Jesus from the dead came to the disciples, and on which the church came into being, how was it possible for these experiences to have had such an effect? We simply cannot reserve this question for faith and deny the question to the historian.
Yet, I would make the point that Peter, the twelve, the 500, James, and all the apostles, had a decision to make. The narratives in Matthew, Luke, and John contain evidence of this in that on several occasions a disciple or the Eleven could have believed because of a testimony and they did not do so. It verifies the gospel narrative of their little faith. They had come to a point in their lives when they could respond with faith in what they had seen or turn away from what they had seen. Thus, we are at one with the first believers and with Paul himself in our common faith. Granted, our decision relies upon their testimony, but even then, the object of faith remains the risen Lord. When we look upon texts honestly, we can only say that the decision is in part weighing of evidence but has also become for us the risk of laying our lives alongside that of the crucified and risen Lord. The veracity of the witness concerning the resurrection can only be fragmentary and contradictory. The chronology and topography are vague. We do not have independent sources from which to check the evidence. One should not take narratives of the appearances as history in the purest form. In fact, we treat verses 3-8 in a “strangely abstract way” if we regard it as a citation of witnesses for the purpose of historical proof. They describe something beyond the reach of typical historical study in that the event comes from the activity of God.[143] These verses are not an attempt at an historical proof, for the history of the appearances cannot take place within the confines of modern historical study. This passage is not an attempt at an external objective assurance that the history did take place. The reason is that the witnesses are the tradition that underlies the community, which calls for a decision of faith, not for the acceptance of a well-attested historical report. They are those who have made this decision of faith. The appeal is to faith based in the recollection of the faith that constitutes the community.[144]
An attractive apologetic response is to think of the resurrection of Jesus as figurative, metaphorical, and spiritual, (Bultmann, Marcus Bord, etc), given that Paul also says “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable” [15:50; cf. vv. 51-57]). Such a one-sided conclusion is problematic. For instance, it seems inconsistent to regard the death and burial of Jesus as bodily events, and then suddenly shift and speak of Christ’s resurrection exclusively in spiritual terms. Is such an abrupt change logical in this passage? In addition, although we might struggle to accept a literal, physical resurrection, would Paul have found it any less dubious given what Luke reports as his willingness to persecute them and condemn them to death (Acts 26:9-11)?
Paul’s understanding of the gospel integrates not only Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, but also Christ’s appearances, especially to him. Consequently, Paul’s profound experience when he received the gospel is not incidental, but critical for the Corinthians. They must remember both the fundamental aspects of the cross — i.e., Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection — and the effects of the gospel.
One approach to the issues raised here is that of keeping the event nature of Christianity before us. The event of Jesus of Nazareth, especially the cross and resurrection, are momentous events in the life of God and in the salvation history of humanity. Christianity will lose what is central to it if that event is forgotten. However, it must not become a strangely abstract event of the past. This event of the past needs to have a corresponding event within us, in which, as Paul will say elsewhere, we die with Christ and rise with him. As the life-giving Spirit of God raised Jesus from the dead, the same life-giving Spirit can empower us as well.
Paul explains the consequences of denying the resurrection and begins to draw out the implication of the resurrection of Jesus (I Corinthians 15:12-20, Year C Epiphany 6). Paul turns from witness to Christ's resurrection to its implication for faith. The text represents a portion of Paul's major disposition on the relationship of the resurrection of Jesus Christ proclaimed in the early Christian kerygma, and the general resurrection of the dead at the second coming of Christ. Is it possible for someone to affirm his or faith, using the Apostle’s Creed, convinced that “on the third day he rose again from the dead,” but doubting “the resurrection of the body”? What is the connection between Christ’s resurrection and our own? Why is Paul so insistent that Christians then and now make this connection?
As with all of Paul's discussion of such doctrinal notions, his treatment of the resurrection in I Corinthians 15 has its basis in practical matters within the church. Paul was dealing at Corinth with some serious skepticism on the issue of resurrection. While some in Corinth say there is no resurrection from the dead, scholars debate what this denial means. Paul will offer an opportunity to reflect upon our theology of death. The hope of which Christians speak rests on the witness concerning the resurrection of Jesus.
Paul is reminding his readers of the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead to the apostolic message. It has come to Paul’s attention that some of the members of the church in Corinth do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. Nowhere do Paul’s doubts about the theological maturity of the Corinthians emerge more clearly than in his impassioned discussion of the resurrection of the dead in this passage. What were the opponents of Paul proposing? Did they doubt that God would raise anyone from the dead, Jesus included? Alternatively, did they doubt that anyone besides Jesus could escape the grave? Either way this raises some serious theological difficulties for Paul. The Gentile community might have accepted the uniqueness of the resurrection for Jesus but affirmed the general Greek philosophical notion of the immortality of the soul to deny that the resurrection of Jesus is an anticipation of a future that awaits humanity. While many Jews in the first century would have affirmed the hope for a resurrection of the dead at the close of history, most Gentiles would have thought such a notion absurd. However, even in Jewish circles there was some dispute. The Sadducees question Jesus, “who say there is no resurrection” (Mark 12:18; Matthew 22:23; Luke 20:27). The Stoic and Epicurean philosophers who listened to Paul’s famous speech on the Areopagus are unimpressed with Paul’s claims about the “resurrection of the dead” (Acts 17:32). To Paul, only the resurrection of Jesus gives any belief in a general resurrection of the dead any significant meaning. The resurrection of Jesus defeats the power of sin and death and is a sign of inclusion of the Gentiles into the promises given to the Jews.[145]
Thus, matters regarding the resurrection in the Christian faith are for Paul both elementary and ultimate. He was not willing to surrender the Jewish apocalyptic hope to become more appealing to the Greek intellectual world. The character and content of the body of Christ has its foundation upon the hope and faith that the God of Israel has raised Jesus from the dead and through Christ will defeat death and raise those who are in Christ from the dead. What Paul does here and in other places (I Thessalonians 4:13-18) is to work with established apocalyptic expectations and connect the Christian kerygma with them. In this sense, Jesus' resurrection becomes an inaugural moment in a new phase of salvation history. The description of the scope of this moment, and its unfolding implications, is what concerns Paul in these verses. The preaching of resurrection from the dead is inseparable from that of the judgment of God, for God brings the dead to account for their former deeds.[146]
Paul’s goal, of course, is to persuade those who disavow the resurrection of the dead to change their view to achieve consistency with their belief in Christ’s resurrection. To fail to do so would be in Paul’s eyes a great tragedy. Paul uses the logic of syllogism in the following passage. In philosophy, the logic goes like this. Human beings are mortal. Socrates is a human being. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. In this case, the syllogism goes like this. The dead do not rise. Jesus died. Jesus did not rise from the dead. Of course, Paul will reverse this logic of his opponents. God raised Christ from the dead. Christ was a human being. Therefore, God will raise the dead. Paul employs two simple logical conditions to construct his case. He states his first logical condition, that if there is no general resurrection of the dead that God did not raise Jesus from the dead. Paul then offers the second conditional statement that follows from the first, that if God has not raised Jesus from the dead then the apostolic proclamation (κήρυγμα) has been in vain, and their faith has been in vain. He will repeat and expand the point in verses 17-18. Paul is going to stress that the denial of Christ's resurrection means the denial of apostolic teaching. Christ appeared to them is the content of the apostolic preaching and the theme of the faith of the community that it awakened. This preaching tells us that God has ratified that which took place for us, for our redemption, and for our salvation. It alters the human situation. It reveals the obedience rendered by the Son. It reveals the grace shown by the Father to the Son and to humanity. Because it has happened, our justification follows. The resurrection is the verdict of the Father that radically alters the human situation. The community understands itself and its time in the world in the light of the resurrection. It looks forward to its fullness in the second coming of Jesus Christ. In fact, the cross is light for Christians because of the resurrection.[147] Not considering the possibility of a pious illusion as its source, Christians would be providing false and misleading information about God if God has not raised Jesus from the dead. If God has not raised Jesus for our justification, his death becomes null, for there is no redemptive power. If they want to maintain that there is no resurrection from the dead, then they cannot continue to claim that God raised Jesus from the dead. Paul does not consider the possibility that what happened to Jesus was unique to him. Rather, he assumes it has implications for humanity. Paul intends to show the logical necessity of the resurrection given the Corinthians’ own proclamation about Christ. To Paul this is more than interesting theological chatter or ethical exhortation. He is clear that if there is no resurrection of Jesus, not only is there no resurrection for the believer but one would legitimately find the entire proclamation of Christianity to be invalid. For Paul, the essence of Christianity is not a morality or an ethic but a statement about the nature and purpose of God and the power of Jesus Christ over sin and death. If there is no resurrection, then the old connection between sin, judgment and death remains. His point is that if death has swallowed up Jesus, if Jesus is truly extinct, if the curse of sin overwhelmed him, one has subverted then the entire Christian notion that God has revealed the saving intent of God through Jesus as the promised Jewish Messiah. Salvation will not come through Christ if death and sin have their victory over Christ. Paul is suggesting that the entire gospel consists in the cross and resurrection. The church must stand here if the gospel is to make progress in the world.[148] If there is no resurrection, then Gentiles are not included in the promise. If there is no resurrection, for all their sophistication the Corinthians are in no better position than they were before Christ. If there is no resurrection, then Paul's proclamation is not only a chimera but in fact those who hold to the belief anyway are embracing an historical event of a grisly death - not celebrating a life - and there is no hope. The foolishness and pitifulness of such a proposition is self-evident to Paul. Paul takes it for granted in this whole passage that the resurrection of the dead belongs to the core of Christian faith. If there is no such thing, the preaching and faith of the early church are invalid. Denial of resurrection means the destruction of Christian hope. Christians would lead a pathetic life if this hope were not true. The Christian hope overcomes the misery and evils of this life. The scope of God's saving work in Christ goes way beyond what we can see now. Hope that only encompasses what Christ means for the present life is pitiable hope. It is small hope. Paul calls the church to greater hope. Yet, what he finds interesting is that this message is so incredible to his Corinthians audience that he must prove its right to receive a hearing. Paul is arguing that what God has done in Christ in rising him from the dead is not an exceptional case. Paul has argued that his death was “for us,” and now he argues that his resurrection has implications “for us” as well. Granting the significance of the event of present fellowship with God in the life of an individual and in the life of the congregation, for without it, the influence of Christ upon human lives would not be present. Yet, the basis of such hope relies upon the prior demonstrated power of God to overcome death.[149] Truth is event rather than a pious longing or illusion. Without the resurrection of Jesus all who thought themselves part of the new dispensation of grace, freed from sin and death, remain locked in the prison of the old dispensation: Gentiles are not part of the kingdom promise. It is the fact of the resurrection that gives meaning and weight to every other issue according to Paul. Hence, even more important than proper practice is proper proclamation.
Paul will apply the significance of the resurrection of Jesus to humanity. The idea of rising from the dead to a new and eternal life has its roots in Jewish apocalyptic hope. Note the shift to a joyful and triumphant note. Christ is the first fruit of human resurrection. He asserts without hesitation the resurrection of the just as a transition to eternal life. Thus, resurrection is not a return to bodily life as we experience it. Christ’s resurrection marks the beginning of a great harvest season during which those who have died God will also eventually raise. Christ is the first fruits of a new act of redemption. Since the harvest is a process, God will reveal more, but has shown us what that future will be like in the resurrection of Jesus as its first fruit. This is good news indeed for any age and offers a power of living that lifts the believer beyond and above any pressure of life.[150] Such a faith will have to move against respected alternatives in our time. It could well be the offer of a future illusion of happiness that invites people to ignore their present suffering and impede their willingness to bring change in political structures (Karl Marx). This proclamation may will be nothing more than a wish-fulfillment that invites people to ignore the harsh reality of human life (Sigmund Freud). Christianity may be only for the weak (Nietzsche).[151] Belief in the resurrection of Jesus and the hope it contains for humanity is not a matter of indifference for the Christian or for the Christian community. If one removes the integrity of the apostolic witness and its hope for humanity, one removes the entire picture of the world advanced in Christianity.
Belief in the resurrection of the body is a leap of faith, to be sure. Yet, I would like to invite you to a brief bit of speculation. If we are ensouled bodies, as Karl Barth and many other theologians have come to believe, then the resurrection of the body involves admirable consistency within the biblical witness. Today, we think of the soul as “within” the body. The resurrection of the body may well envision a time when the body will be within the soul. The means by which we know bodies and the world will change. We have an analogy of this in our experience of memory. Our memory of past events keeps alive the painful and joyful events of our past. Memory may well be a feeble anticipation of the future resurrection of the body, in which soul (memory) will now embrace body. In philosophy, one can affirm that the Infinite and Eternal embrace the finite and the temporal. As space-time is “in” God, so our little, insignificant, and individual space-time will be “in” soul. The new heaven and new earth will be the same, yet, not the same. Such speculations can only be that. The Bible itself is poetic about eternal life with God will be like. However, the resurrection of Jesus and the creedal affirmation of the resurrection of the body understandably invite us to such speculation. We are wondering, questioning beings. What happen if the sensuous life rose from its death to new life in the soul? We would then have a powerful image of Christian hope for the redemption of all that God has made.[152]
I do understand the difficulty in believing the apostolic witness concerning the resurrection of Jesus and its implication for us. Death is final. We can go to any cemetery and see how final death is. The finality of death confronts each of us. When death comes, that is it. You log off. Screen fades to black. Game over. Beyond that, our science confronts us with the cold, death-like existence of the universe. It no longer thinks life is everywhere in the universe. Life, if we do find it somewhere, is not in the Milky Way galaxy. So far, the galaxies in our neighborhood of the universe do not appear to have life. While such reflections can be depressing, they also provide a context for the nature of the hope contained in the witness to the resurrection of Jesus and its implication for our lives. Such a discussion can divert attention away from life here and now. Yet, it can also deal with the practical question of whether death has the final word. If death is that final word, do our lives have an ultimate meaning or purpose?
Frankly, if we view ourselves as isolated individuals, meaning and purpose will be impossible to find. Connecting our lives with eternity assures us that we are accountable for the way we live our lives. Our lives are not simply about temporality. Our individual lives have meaning only in the context of the story of our lives, and the influence that story has on the lives we touch. The story that other people tell intersects with our story and influences us. Our individual lives have meaning in such webs of relationships, where we influence each other far more profoundly than we imagine. Even then, our lives will have little meaning, for most of us influence the lives of a small number of persons. Within our immediate families, after a few generations most will not know our names. They will not know what we did with our lives. Our ancestors lived and died, having influences upon our lives in ways most of us will never explicitly know. For me, belief in the resurrection is as simple as this: God loves each of us individually to such extent that God will not allow eternity to forget any of us. God is the one who connects our finite, time-bound lives with eternity. Therefore, we are accountable for how we live our lives. Accountability to the ultimate means the vices and virtues that are part of our lives matter to God. I do not pretend to know all the details of the nature of that life. My only confidence of that kind of love is the life-giving power of the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead. As hard as it may be at times for me, here is the truth to which I cling. I do not pretend to understand the nature of the resurrection of Jesus. I do have the confidence that this connection between Father and Son is a connection Jesus established with humanity. In Jesus Christ, we learn that death will not have the final word. The final word belongs to God, and that word is life.
Paul will discuss the nature of the resurrection body (I Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50, Year B Epiphany 7). The ancient creeds of the church affirm that we believe in the resurrection of the body. Few things could depart from human experience and reason than this affirmation. Bodies decay, die, and rot away. Bodies may die by disease, at human hand, or by nature. Thus, this affirmation of faith is ridiculous to the point of absurdity if we follow human experience and reason. Only an act of God could persuade us in another direction.[153] Paul can only write in analogy when describing the nature of the resurrection body. He points to their experience of seeing that the dissolution seen in death and continuity of life are compatible, given the seasonal cycle of death (winter) and life (spring). Death is a natural and necessary step on the path toward eternal life with God. God will provide the proper body. When God establishes the new creation, those who dwell in it will have dissimilar bodies from those suitable for this time and place. Bodies suitable for this world are perishable, while the body God gives for the eschatological reality will be suitable for the glories of eternity with God. our physical bodies die, and then God raises us with spiritual bodies. After the very real deaths of our physical bodies, we receive the very real life of our spiritual bodies. The focus upon the pneumatic quality of resurrection life reminds us that the Spirit is the creator of all life. The point is that a new body replaces the old one. There is a continuous succession of resurrection. “Sowing in dishonor,” suggests death is not honorable but an enemy. The corpse is subject to nature while the raised body is subject to the spirit. Behind this discussion is the awareness that among some Greeks and Romans there was a notion of immortal spirit life and contempt for things physical. A bodily resurrection to these "believers" would be unseemly and even beneath God's power, for God was supremely spiritual. Paul does not deny a spiritual incorruptibility that replaces a bodily mortality. Yet again, to Paul this immortality of the soul is an insufficient explanation of the mystery and power of the Gospel. The triumph of the resurrection is a transformation of the body, not an escape from it. There is no spirit/body dualism in Paul's thinking about the resurrection.
Paul makes a clear contrast between the first Adam and the second Adam. 45 Thus it is written, "The first man, Adam, became a living being"; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Paul alludes to Genesis 2: 7. One of the issues in this passage is whether the contrast between soul/spirit is entirely negative. I think most scholars would agree that the “psychical” is not sinful, but it is open to corruption. What separates Paul from his opponents at Corinth at this point is that he looks at the heavenly and spiritual as still coming, while his opponents think they are in possession.[154] What Paul has done is merge the life-giving Spirit and exalted Christ in his thinking. As Paul does in other of his writings, where he can write of either the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of Christ, he has done so here. This life-giving Spirit is the power of God recognized by the consciousness of oneness with Christ and in Christ by the impress of the character of Christ that it begins to bring about in the life of the believer. In another sense, Spirit and Christ remain distinct. If the exalted Christ is to the believer as life-giving Spirit, he is to God as firstborn Son. This indeterminate intermediate role of the exalted Christ between humanity and God as Son and between God and humanity as Spirit was an important factor in pushing Christian thought in a Trinitarian direction.[155] Humanity lives under the shadow of death and must go through that process before experiencing the hope of eternity with God. 47 The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. Both Philo and the apocalyptic Book of Enoch used the term. [156] 48 As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. 49 Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven. All who remain in Adam return to dust. In Christ, however, God will glorify them. The point is the correspondence between two different Adam/Anthropoi, a spiritual and heavenly being from a soulish and earthly being. One is macrocosmic, upper and first in the heavenly hierarchy, while the other is microcosmic, lower and second. Paul establishes a new sequence, polemically affirming that nevertheless the psychic, not the pneumatic, is first, and only then does the pneumatic come. I say “polemically,” because he must maintain the early Church teaching of eschatology as centered in the renewal of creation in Christ that is yet to come. [157] 50 What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Here is the main proposition of this passage. Death is an essential part of eternal life with God. This knowledge helps us to accept death as a part of God’s care for us, in this life and the next. If we let go of fear, we can get more out of life. Considering Paul’s main proposition, what is his view of our physical life on Earth? He undoubtedly recognizes the futility of any attempt to cling to an earthly life, since death comes to all. Consequently, he calls on Corinthian believers to embrace an alternative vision that shapes their understanding of the present life in anticipation of their future life. Death is an unpleasant fact, of course. Yet, this fact may well be a vocation or calling each of us must fulfill. It may be a sacred or holy call. When the summons comes, we can be angry, bitter, or terrified. However, if we see it as a call from God, we can prepare ourselves for the difficulties it presents.[158]
Paul begins with the ideas of the Corinthians. However, he refutes them by understanding the spiritual body, not as something the believer already has that outlasts death, but as something that God will yet give in the general resurrection. He writes of the life-giving spirit as the creative act of the risen Lord. Life after death is for Paul dependent on the resurrection of the body since non-bodily life is quite inconceivable for him. This means the resurrection is entirely an act of God. [159] Behind this notion is Jewish rabbinic speculation regarding Adam. Given the glories of Adam before the Fall, it would have cosmological significance. The reason for this is that God created the world for humanity. When Adam sinned, the whole creation participated in the corruption. if the fall had cosmic implications, the age of the Messiah must undo the consequences of the fall. Clearly, once Paul was convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, his mind would assign to the risen and exalted Lord the cosmic functions Judaism had come to expect of the Messiah. The Christian dispensation, as a new creation, must redress the balance of the old. The Christian conception of redemption is the counterpart of the Jewish conception of creation. With this being the case, the transition to the thought of Christ as a second Adam was almost inevitable. In this passage, Paul explicitly calls Jesus the second Adam, the counterpart of the Adam that Genesis 1-2 describes. Paul has to fight a battle on two fronts. He fights against a Hellenistic denial of all resurrection of the dead in the interests of a mistaken spirituality. He must also argue against a crass materialism as to the method of the resurrection that one often finds in Rabbinic Judaism. He must assert the reality and centrality of the resurrection against those who claimed that the soul could exist without a body. He must also re-interpret the resurrection in such a way as to show that it was not the flesh and blood that was to be raised, but a body new in kind, a “spiritual body.” I must note that Paul has some acquaintance with the ideas of Philo. Paul could use the terminology of Philo if it served his missionary purpose. Yet, the danger is that such accommodation might go too far. In contrast to Philo, Paul teaches in this chapter that Jesus is indeed the man from heaven, but that he is not a mere idea and incorporeal, he appeared in history. Significantly, Paul identifies the heavenly man with Jesus, who came well after the first Adam. For Paul, the heavenly man has introduced the other realm into this time and space. For Paul, the particular is not a scandal. For Paul, the use of the second Adam image is polemical. As Paul continues to develop his thought, just as Adam symbolized the unity of humanity, so Christ as the second Adam symbolized the re-constitution and re-unification of humanity, which is not the intent and purpose of God in dealing with humanity. [160] The separation of the first and last Adam by so many years shows the separation of the natural and spiritual body. The image of Adam, the physical body, God will transform into the image of Christ, a spiritual body. As long as Christians are in their earthly bodies, they are like Adam. In their resurrected bodies, they will be like Christ. For Paul, Christ and Spirit are a unity, even as we see here, where Christ is a life-giving spirit. Christ is the first and true Adam, of which the first Adam is only a type. [161]
With Paul, the God of redemption revealed in Christ is the same as the creator of the world. The saving work of God is an expression of divine faithfulness to the creating work of God. Such a salvation history has the aim of human fulfillment in Christ. In that case, the sending of the “last Adam” has an intentional connection to the first Adam. We receive a hint of this emphasis in the letter of Ignatius of Antioch to the Ephesians (20). He told the Ephesians that he was declaring to them the divine plan of salvation, which aims at the new man, Jesus Christ, “which is the medicine of immortality, and the antidote to prevent us from dying, but [which causes] that we should live forever in Jesus Christ.” The one who primarily developed this thought in the early church was Irenaeus (Adv. Haer, especially 3-5). One passage in particular is interesting. In 3.23, Irenaeus points out that God created Adam to live. We participate in that divine intent. Therefore, if God left us alone, our disobedience would defeat the intent of God. The serpent in the Garden of Eden and human disobedience would have conquered God. The will of the serpent would prevail over the will of God. However, Christ as the new Adam came to fulfill the original intent of God in creating humanity in the first place. Irenaeus goes on to argue that Adam himself must be saved, as if to make sure that the intent of God toward Adam not be thwarted by an evil forces. The intent is to restore the image of God in humanity. He goes on to argue (5.16.2) of the significance of the coming of the Logos. The Logos becomes a human being in such a way that humanity becomes precious to the Father by making clear that God had created humanity in the image of God. Interestingly, Irenaeus refers to verses 48 and 49 to support the following argument in 5.9.3. Flesh without Spirit is dead. It does not have life and cannot possess the kingdom of God. However, where the Spirit is we find a living human being preserved by God. Spirit possesses flesh and it conforms to the Logos. The Lord fashioned the earthly, but the heavenly is the Spirit. Irenaeus then encourages turning away from our former time of living without the Spirit to walk now in newness of life in the Spirit. We participate in the Spirit through faith and in the way we live. What Irenaeus has done is integrate the covenant history of God with Israel into his picture of human history. Based upon the passage we are now considering, Irenaeus links the Old Testament statements about the creation of Adam to the statements by Paul about Jesus Christ as the last and definitive Adam. What we have here is more of a sequence, first the Adam who is a living soul of Genesis 2:7, and then the spiritual man of I Corinthians 15:46. For him, nature had to come first, then the mortal and corruptible had to be overcome. Humanity had to become according to the image and likeness of God, having first attained to the knowledge of good and evil. We are all to receive life in the spiritual Adam as we all died in the psychic Adam. For Irenaeus, the basis of the perfecting of humanity is already present in the Incarnation, a thought that takes us beyond what Paul says here but is consistent with bringing the Gospel of John into one's picture. In 5.15.5, he puts it in a graphic way. Adam hid himself from the Lord because of his disobedience. The Lord came in the evening and called for him. In the last time, the same Word of God came to call humanity, reminding humanity of its sin, living as if trying to hide from the Lord. In these last times, the Lord is searching out the posterity of Adam and has visited them.[162]
Reflections like these relate to the concept of humanity. In fact, Christian theology must make such connections, or else it will lose the interrelation of creation and redemption.[163] The divine will finds fulfillment as we allow the Spirit to draw us into the image of Christ.[164]
Is there continuing validity to the apocalyptic message of the gospel Paul reached? One might want to replace it with an interpretation of the resurrection as the rise of the self into the ethical community of humanity (Peter Hodgson[165] based upon Karl Rahner[166]) or the “spiritual body” of the Christian community, focused in love and forgiveness (Gordon Kaufman[167]). This suggests that the apocalyptic context of the preaching of Jesus and the apostolic witness contained in the New Testament is a weight the church of today needs to shed. What they want to do, I think, is to find the germ of a general idea that is humanitarian, thereby liberating Christianity from what they think of as the scandal of the focus upon the particularity of Christ.
We seem to live in a death-denying culture. Americans tend to emphasize youth and beauty and spend vast amounts of money in attempts to reverse or mask the aging process. People do not just buy moisturizer — they purchase “age-defying” moisturizer. When we take sick people to hospitals, we expect health care professionals to perform heroic measures, even when patients are incredibly old. Death typically occurs in hospitals or nursing homes these days, far from the center of family life. It was not always so. Death used to be more part of our lives, whether with numerous deaths in childbirth, infancy, or early childhood, or simply because we did not live as long as we do today. When death happened, an intimate affair occurred in the home surrounded by family and friends. I have been in hospital rooms where the family knew the end was near. It was also a very intimate affair for us all. Life is precious. We ought to use technology to ward off the end as much as we can. Such efforts are part of genuine respect for life. Yet, all we can do is delay an end that will come for us all. Yes, death is the enemy. This enemy has superior forces than we will ever have. When it does happen, we do not even like to say that a person died. We euphemistically say they “passed away” or have “gone to a better place.” Literary types quote Shakespeare and say that a person has “shuffled off this mortal coil.” We seem uncomfortable enough with death that in movies, people die, but the dead continue to hang around with living people as ghosts. They have difficulty communicating with their loved ones. Their loved ones have difficulty hearing what the dead are saying.
Paul will discuss the eschatological transformation that awaits the people of God (I Corinthians 15:51-58, Year C Epiphany 8). This passage presents several challenges, in translation, theology and hermeneutics. The central question is whether one needs to accept an apocalyptic mindset to understand fully this passage. Must one picture resurrected bodies leaping to life when a trumpet sounds on judgment day? The difficulties of apocalyptic images are that they need to be vivid enough to convey the reality of Christian hope - yet they are figurative and imprecise, leaving space for improvisations and situations that emerge over time. Paul seems compelled to reflect on these end-time issues because of the Corinthians' confusion of Jesus' resurrection and their own. In I Thessalonians 4:13-17, Paul has provided reassurance that those who "fall asleep" before the second coming would not be at a disadvantage: They would rise first. The Corinthian Christians have presented him with a separate set of problems.
Paul refers to a secret truth (μυστήριον) that God has revealed to and through Paul about what is to happen. We (Paul and his readers) will not all (believers or all humanity) die, but God will change us all, 52 in a moment (ἀτόμῳ), an indivisible fragment of time, in the twinkling of an eye, a split-second of transformation combined at the last trumpet.[168] Paul speaks of the "last trumpet," a familiar image from the Hebrew Scriptures. Isaiah 27:13 speaks of the trumpet blown for return of the exiles; Leviticus 23:24 describes a blowing of a trumpet to usher in the civil New Year as a penitential season that will conclude in the Day of Atonement. The last trumpet does not equal the last in a series of trumpets. It is simply the trumpet call that accompanies the End. The question that Paul is not attempting to address, but one that has attracted the attention of modern readers further complicates this. Paul is talking about believers: Living and dead that God will change to conform to conditions of the resurrection age. Modern readers have focused on "all." All believers? All humanity? Does this say anything about the fate of the wicked? Again, we see the challenge of the difficulty that these apocalyptic images have presented across the ages. Paul does not give us the details of how all this will happen, just that it will happen quickly. This provides Paul's audience with a standard feature of the Day of the Lord in Jewish literature. Thus, as the momentous day of the Lord draws near, it will be a day of trumpet blast and battle cry, bringing to completion the victory of the Lord against evil (Zephaniah 1:14-16). Since the day of the Lord, a day of judgment upon evil, is near, blow the trumpet in Zion (Joel 2:1). Paul also indicates that he expects that he will not be among those who are dead, for he speaks of them in the third person. He believes he will be among the living, whom he speaks of in the first person. This was a challenge in early Christian eschatology. John deals with this issue differently than does Paul by holding the present and the future in tension with each other, with more attention given to the present. For Paul, the focus is on the future, the Parousia. Whether Paul changes his belief remains disputed by scholars, however; it seems that if Paul's perspective changes, it is because Paul found his death nearer, rather than that he saw the second coming further off. Another significance of this passage is that it clearly envisions a finite life without death. This life in fellowship with God does not involve total absorption of our creaturely existence in God. Rather, it expects its renewal and definitive establishment. Participation in divine life will not set aside the finite quality of creaturely life. The significance of this point is that death and finite life do not have a necessary connection.[169] For the trumpet will sound, and God will raise the dead as imperishable, and God will change us. What is important in this passage is not the last trumpet or the rising of the sleeping dead, but the confidence of Christians in the power of God who raised Jesus. It is crucial that readers neither severely isolate these images in an unyielding timetable, nor simply dismiss them as primitive fantasy. The work of the Spirit is fundamental for the eschatological salvation event of the resurrection of the dead. Resurrection means change into a new life resulting in a relation between the work of the Spirit and theme of judgment. This mortal cannot acquire immortality without a change. The whole notion of this “change” has a link to judgment as well.[170] 53For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. Now, in contrast to his emphasis in dealing with the problem presented to him by the congregation in Thessalonica, Paul is saying that the dead in Christ will rise with spiritual bodies and those who are still alive will have their mortal bodies changed. The finite quality of the perfected life toward which God is bringing us, when this corruptible will have put on incorruption, will no longer have the form of a sequence of separated moments of time. Rather, it will represent the totality of our earthly existence. The totality toward which we now move will become reality, in a moment, in a change. [171] Nothing will be put in place of this present life. No matter how pitiable, this finite existence will share in eternal salvation. Rebirth to a vastly different existence can accomplish this. Such a rebirth into this finite life would not redeem this earthly existence. It would have been left behind.[172] 54 When this perishable body puts on imperishability and this mortal body puts on immortality. Contrary to the notion that the soul is immortal and never experienced death (Plato), such is not the case in this passage. Mortal must “put on” immortality. The mortal must pass through genuine death before “immortality” becomes a gift of grace. Then the saying that we find written in Isaiah 25:7 finds its fulfillment, "Death has been swallowed up in victory." In Paul's emphasis on God changing mortal bodies, Paul concludes that if flesh and blood were appropriate for this world, they would be inappropriate for the world to come. Once God clothes the believers in immortality, death can no longer touch them. Further, in Hosea 13:14 we read, 55"Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" The point of these passages from the Hebrew Scriptures is that they invite Death and Sheol to bring forth their terrors and apply them. Here we have Paul mocking these powers as already defeated. God has swallowed up death. He states this in the past aorist tense, which translates into the present perfect in English. Paul's emphasis is on what happened rather than the time of it happening. Paul uses these words as a taunt. He is putting himself at the end of time and he mocks a powerless death, as one might a fallen dictator. 56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. Death remains an enemy for Paul, as it does for us. The fact is that death is not "natural"; it is not a process eased by therapy. As humans, we live for life and the sting of having to die is sin. Death is our enemy. 57 Nevertheless, thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. In Paul, gratitude for the saving action of God in Jesus Christ forms the starting point and context of all Christian prayer.[173]Death is now a disabled enemy. When Christians die, they are no longer prisoners of death, but sleeping in the certainness of waking in the resurrection. The reign of death rests on the power of sin, but since sin has been overcome in Jesus' death and resurrection, it loses its power to terrorize. Paul can also say that as death has spread to all through the power of sin, but grace exercises its power through justification that brings eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 5:12, 21). Paul does not allow his eschatology to carry him away into unreality. He recognizes that Death is the last enemy God will overthrow. Death still prevails between us and still has a sting. Paul does not come to the end of a chapter-long discussion of resurrection with the type of optimism that some personalities simply possess. His optimism arises from an event that has given him knowledge of a victory already won. The victory of Jesus the Christ was a victory over sin because he died to sin in that singular moment on the cross for all human beings, but the new life he received through the Spirit he lives to God, which summons the response in us to consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus as the Christ. a death to which this life summons all human beings to share (Romans 6:10-11). The sting of death is now, but in Christ, it will become a victory. Christian faith does not deny death, but celebrates a Living God, a God that is greater than death. Since all this remains in the future and remains hope, today we are to joyfully engage in serving the Lord by spreading the good news of Christ's resurrection and ours and a reminder that such labor will never be in vain.
Part of what Paul may be saying here is that the crucifixion of Jesus is the end of our time, while the resurrection of Jesus ushers in the last day. The believer in Jesus lives a life hidden with Christ in God. Beyond this end, Paul can see only one other prospect. God will be all in all (verse 28). The end is a historical and temporal event. Yet, it is not a present without a future. We have no more information or promise, other than the sounding of the last trumpet in verse 52. This moment is when corruption becomes incorruption, dishonor becomes honor, and weakness becomes power. Time will be no more, as Revelation 10:6 put it. There is no question of the continuation into the indefinite future of an altered life. The New Testament hope for the other side of death looks forward to the Eternal. God will divest this corruptible and mortal life of its character as “flesh and blood.” It will then be eternal life in God and in fellowship with Christ. Our time will undergo a transition and transformation by participating in the eternal life of God. This transition and transformation are the unveiling and glorifying of the life that in its time humanity has already in Christ. Whatever happens in a twinkling of an eye is an unveiling of the eschatological life already present throughout our lives. It is the resurrection of the dead, which according to the indication given after the resurrection of Jesus is our participation in His future revelation. This is our hope in the time that we still have.[174]
An indication of the validity of this approach is the struggle we find in the New Testament regarding these matters. In the first-century church, Christians believed that Jesus was coming back in their lifetime. Paul certainly believed it. The Church described in the book of Acts believed it to the point that they sold their houses and everything in their houses without regret because they fully believed that Jesus was coming back almost immediately to retrieve them. Who needed jewelry, silverware, and real estate if they were leaving to join Jesus in heaven in a matter of days or months or even years? This was Paul's message to the first Christians in Corinth, Greece, in the first century. "We will not all die," he wrote, "But we will all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet." Eventually, of course, all those who first received Paul's letter did die. Jesus did not return in their lifetime.
No one knows exactly when Jesus will return - not even the Son of Man himself (Mark 13:32). In the meantime, God left us behind 2000 years ago to serve in the likeness of Christ. Jesus left us with several warnings about watchfulness, about readiness during human life. He left us with many instructions that guide us being his followers today. Most of us are not assuming that Jesus will return today or tomorrow. Given our experience, we rightly assume this world will continue indefinitely. However, with the interpretation offered here, the hope of a new finite and temporal reality which the Infinite and Eternal God embraces and incorporates in life with God can energize us to anticipate that future in our personal and corporate life.
If the interpretation offered is correct, then such a transformation of our finitude and temporality is not the hell of a continuation of our present reality. [175] The hope consists of a genuine transformation of finitude and temporality into life with God. Thus, the resurrection of Jesus and the hope for a future transformation of our present reality is not a symbol of optimism in our creativity and freedom. Human beings being who they are, some will have such optimism, and they do not need the risen Lord to give it to them. They simply have confidence that human beings will eventually arrive at such humanitarian ends. Such theologians want to replace the specificity of grounding this hope in Jesus Christ and replace it with belief in human progress in which anyone can share. Christian truth becomes a possibility for humanity by using their creativity and reasoning. Getting rid of the old myths, which such persons would consider Paul as expounding in this chapter, would be the goal.[176]
The interpretation I have offered here is an attempt to give priority to the apostolic witness concerning the resurrection of Jesus and the hope for a transformation of this reality into the new eschatological reality of the promised victory of God over the forces of sin and death. I have mentioned that some theologians will move in a different direction, making such language symbolic of human efforts of humanitarian goodness and creativity. I grant that a Christian could come to such notions. I understand why a Christian might want to do so. For apologetic reasons, it might create common ground with the culture in which any human being might share. Since such a view defines a progressive approach to Christian theology, it opens the way for such thinkers to bring the church into a progressive political agenda. Shedding the orthodox/evangelical position on Christ allows one to make a political and economic agenda primary, since dissolving eschatological hope frees one invest oneself into transforming the present through political and economic action. Such a view reduces the need to ground such a hope in the particularity of Jesus Christ. Although such thinkers find generalizing Christian truth attractive, such generalizing is the problem. It removes the scandal of that particularity even as it removes the paradox with which humanity faces when confronted with the apostolic proclamation. The particularity of the what God has done in bringing reconciliation and promised redemption through cross and resurrection of Jesus are what brings offense. The historical reality of the church suggests that it will find common ground with various schools of philosophy and cultural norms. What I have sought to do here is offer an interpretation that adheres to the priority of the word of God and the orthodox/Evangelical position. The person who opts for removing what they perceive to be an unnecessary intellectual obstacle needs to be clear that while they may have Christian faith, they have placed themselves outside the apostolic witness, the early creeds of the church, the confessions of faith in the Protestant traditions, and the evangelical proclamation of the good news. The interpretation I have offered maintains that which is distinctive and unique about Christian faith.
In a theological excursus that has a Trinitarian formulation, Paul will discuss the faithfulness of God, affirming that Jesus is the proof that God will always do as promised (II Corinthians 1:18-22, Year B Epiphany 7). He affirms that while a human word may be unreliable, the word of God is reliable. Although the accusation against Paul is that his word is both Yes and No, he asserts that the Son whom Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy preached to them is always Yes. The center of their preaching is Jesus Christ. This passage assigns a type of simplicity to the Word of God or the kerygma of the early church.[177] Christ is the basis for the affirmation of the reliability of the word of God, for in Christ, we see the simplicity of the word in the divine Yes to humanity.[178] Some of those among his readers did not trust the word of Paul. Paul focuses on the simplicity of the word from God that Jesus presents. The simplicity of God reveals itself in in this self-confession and self-attestation of the identity of the Father in the Son. God has given them eschatological blessings in Christ. The simplicity of God also reveals itself in the repetition and fulfillment of the promise of God in Christ. However, this fulfillment of the promise occurs in such a way that it remains promise. We have the opportunity of seeing in Christ the promise of God.[179] The human response to this faithfulness of God in Christ is “Amen,” to the glory of God. God establishes them in Christ and anointed them in baptism by putting the divine seal upon us in our baptism, giving us the Holy Spirit in our hearts as an advance installment on the life of the resurrection from the dead[180] and a pledge of future glory and honor.[181] We have here an indication of the grounding of Christian eschatology, especially in the framework of the Already and the Not Yet. This passage, with its affirmation that in Christ all the promises of God are Yes and Amen, affirms the Already aspect.[182] The Spirit imparted to believers guarantees them a share in the future consummation.[183] Another way of saying this is that by the Spirit, the future of Jesus Christ is already present to believers as their personal and common future of salvation.[184] If we think of this passage in the context of baptism as the constitution of Christian identity, baptism is an act of transfer. The baptized no longer belong to themselves. They belong to Christ. The notion of baptism as a seal meant a distinguishing mark assures the baptized of eschatological deliverance at the coming world judgment, a sign of their election and hope.[185] It might also refer to the gift of the Spirit to all believers. If we think of the relationship between baptism and faith, in anointing and the sign of the cross as sealing for the participation of the baptized in the anointing of Christ. All of this is constitutive for the title “Christ” or “Messiah,” in which the early church also saw a sign of the imparting of the Holy Spirit conferred by the laying on of hands.[186]
Paul transforms a dispute regarding his authority into a moment to proclaim the confidence God has placed in ordinary people (II Corinthians 3:1-6, Year B Epiphany 8). The people to whom he is writing are the letter through which the living Christ is making an appeal to the world. Paul is saying something like that here. He uses the example of letters of recommendation to say that they as a people are their letter, written upon their hearts, which everyone can know and read. Emerson once wrote that what you are speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say you are. Paul is saying something like that here. They are such a “letter” of Christ, identifying their true foundation. They wrote this “letter” with the Spirit of the living God on tablets of human hearts. He then works with the dialectic of inadequacy and adequacy, unworthiness and worthiness. Any competence they have is from God, who has made the missionary team of Paul competent to be ministers of a new covenant (καινῆς διαθήκης), suggesting that this concept of the newness of the covenant was part of the tradition Paul had received from the community of faith that instructed him. He then distinguishes between the physical letter which kills from the Spirit that gives life. Paul is not disqualifying the Old Testament, but the books are simply writings, holy and necessary, recognizing that the law increased sin and gave effect to its link to death as its consequence.[187] The contrast of letter and spirit is part of the Pauline contrast between what enslaves and what frees, what is visible and what is invisible. Paul is distinguishing the gospel from the Old Testament ministry of the law.[188] Paul is offering his way for Christians to read the Old Testament. It witnesses to the revelation of Jesus Christ.[189] We need to understand the law from the perspective of Paul and his view of salvation history. The only master concept under which Paul could contrast and relate the law and the new reality of faith, grace, and Spirit that abrogates it is the covenant, his antithesis being that of the old covenant and the new. As Paul sees it, the law is not the timelessly valid form of the divine will or of the demand of God on us. Rather, the law is a positive historical entity, namely, Old Testament law, or in general, the whole Old Testament viewed as law.[190] If only the letter of the Jewish Law has the function of condemning, does such condemnation have a broader sphere of validity in accord with the inner link between sin and death?[191] If we think in terms of the notion of the people of God and the official church, the fellowship of the new covenant is spiritual, as indicated here, because membership in the church rests on baptism as a sign of fellowship with Christ and of membership in the body of Christ.[192] If we think of the new person from above, Irenaeus, who followed the lead of Paul here, integrated the covenant history of God with Israel into his picture of human history as a whole.[193]
[1] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 492.
[2] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 208-10.
[3] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [56.1] 581.
[4] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 447.
[5] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 440.
[6] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 240.
[7] -Frederick Buechner, "Denominations," Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1988), 33, 35.
[8] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 325.
[9] (John Wesley, "Catholic Spirit," Sermon XXXIX, p. 381).
[10] -Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968), 122.
[11] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 455.
[12] Barth Church Dogmatics IV.3 [70.1] 390-1.
[13]
[14] -Mary C. Boys, "The cross: Should a symbol betrayed be reclaimed?" Cross Currents, Spring 1994.
[15] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, 441.
[16] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [56.2] 603.
[17] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 113.
[18] Schrenk, TDNT Volume II, 204.
[19] Procksch, TDNT, Volume I, 112-3.
[20] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2 [64.4] 273-4.
[21] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1 [58.2] 101.
[22] Buchsel, TDNT, IV, 351-356.
[23] Barth, Church Dogmatics I.2 [13.1] 10.
[24] Walter Earl Fluker("Valley Calls," Pulpit 1.3 [Summer 1998], 36-37).
[25] Orr & Walther.
[26] George Whitfield
[27] Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 247.
[28] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 211.
[29] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 40.
[30] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 441.
[31] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 185. On the rarity of the phrase in Paul, see tDNT, I, 51, 53.
[32] Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1 [6.4] 241.
[33] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 303.
[34] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 395.
[35] See Robertson & Plummer, Orr & Walther, Homiletics for January and February 1999.
[36] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 298.
[37] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 128.
[38] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 623.
[39] Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1 [6.2] 196-8. I differ from Barth here. - The word of God does not receive its dignity and validity from a presupposition that we bring to it. Its truth for us has its ground in itself. We have self-certainty based upon the certainty of God. In a sense, we begin with the certainty of God without waiting for validation. Theology must adopt this procedure. People can know the Word of God because God wills it so. If one wants to call the problem of the knowability of the Word of God an anthropological problem, the reference must be to a theological anthropology. The question is not how humanity in general can know the Word of God. Rather, the Word of God speaks to a specific person. The question is how such people to whom God addresses this Word can know it. The answer must be that they can do so only by the Word. Therefore, one can attach a definite affirmative to the knowability of the Word of God, but only in reference to the event of the Word. Knowability does not rest in our hands, but in God.
[40] --Frederick Buechner, Now and Then (HarperCollins, 2010), 73.
[41] Our Mother Saint Paul (41-50), Beverly Roberts Gaventa
[42] Our Mother Saint Paul (41-50), Beverly Roberts Gaventa.
[43] --Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith. Entry for March 7 (HarperCollins, 1985).
[44] —Fred Rogers, The World According to Mr. Rogers: Important Things to Remember (New York: Hyperion, 2003), 82.
[45] --Frances Childress, "6 signs to be aware of before committing to an immature relationship," The San Francisco Examiner Website, examiner.com. July 28, 2010. Retrieved September 12, 2013.
[46] Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass: 2011), vii, ix-x, xi.
[47] Pope Gregory, letter sent to the Abbot Mellitus, then going into Britain. Cited by Bede (673735): Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, Book I, Chapter XXX, fordham.edu. Retrieved July 12, 2019.
[48] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1 [62.2] 673.
[49] Evelyn Underhill, “The Spiritual Life,” Part III.
[50] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Vol I, 61)
[51] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology (Vol III, 108, 391)
[52] (Systematic Theology, I, 303)
[53] (Vol. III, 2)
[54] (Vol. III, 12)
[55] (Church Dogmatics IV.3 [71.3] 537)
[56] Church Dogmatics III.4 [56.3] 667.
[57] (Fitzmyer, First Corinthians: A New Translation, vol. 32 [2008], 212.
[58] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 3, 346)
[59] Barth (Church Dogmatics III.4 [56.3] 679)
[60] Barth Church Dogmatics, (IV.3, 920).
[61] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 3, 568, 613)
[62] — Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
[63] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 68.
[64] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [54.1] 135.
[65] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [54.1] 145.
[66] --Sam Keen, To Love and Be Loved (Bantam, 1999).
[67] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [54.1] 135.
[68] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, 269.
[69] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 451.
[70] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 303.
[71] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2 [45.3] 305-8.
[72] Barth, Church Dogmatics, III.4 [54.1] 139-148.
[73] Sampley, J. Paul. "First Letter to the Corinthians." The New Interpreter's Bible. Nashville: Abingdon, 2002, 893-902.
[74] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 185, 189.
[75] --William Sloane Coffin, Letters to a Young Doubter (Westminster John Knox, 2005), 22-24.
[76] C. S. Lewis
[77] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 267, 302.
[78] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 369-70.
[79] (William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Spoken by Isabella in Act 2 Scene 2)
[80] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2 [47.5] 607.
[81] Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 [53.2] 76.
[82] (Paul W. Marsh, New International Bible Commentary, ed. F.F. Bruce [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979], 1356)
[83] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 380-1.
[84] (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, "First Corinthians," The Anchor Yale Bible [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008], 369-70).
[85] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 62.
[86] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 61.
[87] Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, St. Paul’s Corinth [3rd edition; Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2002], 12-15
[88] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2 [64.4] 376.
[89] Barth, CD, III.4 [53.3] 114-5.
[90] “Their idols are silver and gold, / the work of human hands. / They have mouths, but do not speak; / eyes, but do not see. / They have ears, but do not hear; / noses, but do not smell. / They have hands, but do not feel; / feet, but do not walk; / they make no sound in their throats” (cf. Psalm 135:15-18).
[91] Gordon D. Fee, First Corinthians, 578-82.
[92] Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., but I have never seen the source.
[93] Barth, CD, IV.2 [64.4] 321.
[94] Barth, CD, I.1 [9] 348-9.
[95] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 372.
[96] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 18.
[97] Barth, CD IV.3 [72.4] 856-9.
[98] Barth, CD, III.4 [56.2] 603.
[99] Barth, CD I.2 [16.1] 215.
[100] Barth, CD IV.1 [ 62.2] 662-8.
[101] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 419.
[102] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 15.
[103] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 16.
[104] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 134.
[105] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume 3, 459.
[106] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 478.
[107] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 552.
[108] Klink, William H. “Ecology and eschatology: Science and theological modeling.” The Otherness of God. Orrin F. Summerell, ed. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1998.
[109] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 419.
[110] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 292-3, 325, 372, 628.
[111] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 378.
[112] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 387-8.
[113] Eric Fromm, The Art of Loving, 4-5.
[114] Church Dogmatics IV.2 [68.1], 727-51.
[115] M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled,
[116] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2 [68.4] 828-31.
[117] John Wesley, Sermon 91, “On Charity.”
[118] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2 [68.4] 831-35.
[119] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 55, 118, 138, and 554.
[120] – Glenn Tinder, The Fabric of Hope: An Essay, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, pp. 44–45
[121] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.2 [68.4] 835-40.
[122] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 184.
[123] Pannenberg (Jesus: God and Man, p. 91)
[124] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 2, p. 425)
[125] Gordon D. Kaufmann (Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective, p. 418)
[126] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 2, p. 359)
[127] Reginald Fuller (The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives, 1971, pp. 34-48)
[128] Bultmann, (Theology of the New Testament, Volume 1, p. 82)
[129] Bultmann (Theology of the New Testament, Volume 1, p. 295)
[130] Gordon D. Kaufmann (Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective, p. 416-417)
[131] Bultmann (Theology of the New Testament, Volume 1, p. 45)
[132] Pannenberg (Jesus: God and Man, 1964, 89)
[133] (Schneider, TDNT, Volume 2, p. 466-467)
[134] Pannenberg (Jesus: God and Man, p. 92-23)
[135] Reginald H Fuller (The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives, 1971, p. 48-49)
[136] Pannenberg (Jesus: God and Man, p. 98)
[137] In Mark, though there are not appearances in the strict sense of the term, the nature miracles of Jesus seem nothing less than the heavenly Jesus appearing. The baptism (1:10-11) and the transfiguration (9:2-11) declare Jesus to be the Son. The feeding of the 5OOO (6:35-43) and the 4OOO (8:1-10) show Jesus in his Eucharistic presence feeding the faithful with bread from heaven. The calming of the storm (6:47-52) shows Jesus in command of the storms of life that Mark's community was facing. The exorcisms proclaim Jesus the Son of God through the voice of the demons (1:23-28; 5:1-20). In Matthew, the risen Lord gives the commission to make disciples of all peoples, thereby making it clear that the mission to Israel is over and that the rest of the world awaits the good news. The risen Lord will be with them. In Luke, the interest is verifying the physical nature of the resurrection, a process begun by Mark’s emphasis on the empty tomb. This is likely the result of the early debate with Gnosticism. None of these stories has any claim to historical accuracy, though they have been great opportunities for meditation in the theology and mission of the church. The defense of the resurrection appears to be their motivation. They also become ways in which the gospel writers convey their theology. That is why we find so much diversity in the accounts of the appearance, while we have so much similarity in the in the narrative of the last week of his life. The theological richness of these texts makes them wonderful for preaching. However, the historian can give little credibility to them.
[138] W. D. Davies (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, p. 285-320)
[139] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 2, p. 352-353)
[140] Pannenberg (ibid., p. 318).
[141] Bultmann (Theology of the New Testament, Volume 1, p. 295)
[142] Bultmann (Theology of the New Testament, Volume 1, p. 284)
[143] Barth (Church Dogmatics, III.2, p. 452 [47.1])
[144] Barth (ibid., IV.1, p. 335 [59.3]),
[145] Albert Schweitzer (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, 93)
[146] Bultmann (Theology of the New Testament, Volume 1, p. 77)
[147] Barth (Church Dogmatics, IV.1, p. 334 [59.3])
[148] John Calvin, in his commentary on this passage, makes all of this quite clear.
For what remains if Christ has been swallowed up by death — if he has become extinct — if he has been overwhelmed by the curse of sin — if, in fine, he has been overcome by Satan? In short, if that fundamental article is subverted, all that remains will be of no moment. … in the death of Christ, considered in itself, — “That is to say, apart from his resurrection.” there is seen nothing but ground of despair, for he cannot be the author of salvation to others, who has been altogether vanquished by death. Let us therefore bear in mind, that the entire gospel consists mainly in the death and resurrection of Christ, so that we must direct our chief attention to this, if we would desire, in a right and orderly manner, to make progress in the gospel ...
[149] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 3, p. 534)
[150] W. D. Davies (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, p. 106)
[151] -N. T. Wright, "Grave matters," Christianity Today, April 6, 1998.
[152] Lewis, C.S., Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. G. Bles: 1964, 121-22, 158.
[153] John Calvin
[154] Eduard Schweizer (TDNT, Volume 9, p. 662-663)
[155] Dunn (Christology in the Making, p. 148-149)
[156] Traub (TDNT, Volume 5, p. 528-529)
[157] Colpe (TDNT, Volume 8, p. 471-472)
[158] —R.C. Sproul, Surprised by Suffering (Tyndale, 1994).
[159] Eduard Schweizer (TDNT, Volume 6, p. 420-421, Volume 7, 1060, 1062, 1072-1073)
[160] Davies (Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 36-57)
[161] Barth (Church Dogmatics, IV.1, 513 [60.3])
[162] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 2, p.297-301)
[163] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 2, p. 208)
[164] Pannenberg (ibid., Volume 3, p.. 522)
[165] Hodgson (Winds of the Spirit, p. 273-274)
[166] Rahner, Theology of Death (p. 22) As Rahner puts it,
By surrendering its limited bodily structure in death, becomes open towards the universe and, in some way, a co-determining factor of the universe precisely in the latter’s character as the ground of the personal life of other spiritual corporal beings.
[167] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective, 417 420)
[168] There are several textual problems and variants in verse 51. This is largely due to the number and position of the negatives in the sentence.
[169] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 2, p. 271)
[170] (ibid., Volume 3, p. 623)
[171] (ibid., Volume 3, p. 561)
[172] (ibid., Volume 3, p. 574)
[173] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume 3, p. 207)
[174] Barth (Church Dogmatics, III.2, p. 624 [47.5])
[175] Paul Tillich (“Frontiers,” Journal of Bile and Religion, 1965, 33:22)
[176] Gordon Kaufman (Systematic Theology: A Historicist Perspective, p. 465-474)
[177] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 240.
[178] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1, 61.2, 532.
[179] Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.1, 31.1, 460.
[180] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 241.
[181] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 552.
[182] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, 545.
[183] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 98.
[184] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 134.
[185] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 239.
[186] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 266.
[187] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 67.
[188] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 459.
[189] Barth, Church Dogmatics I.2, 19.2, 514.
[190] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 61, where he commends an essay by Gerhard Ebeling.
[191] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 69-70.
[192] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 478.
[193] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 298.
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