Status Updates From The First Epistle to the Co...

"'If anyone does not love the Lord.' That...covers the whole letter. To insist on human wisdom over against the gospel of the Crucified One is to 'not love the Lord'; so with living in incest, attendance at idol feasts, & so forth. The ultimate issue for Paul...is not their obedience to his word, but their love...for the Lord himself. Failure to obey Christ is lack of love for him" (926).

"...for Paul the key to such respect or 'submission' is not sex or socioeconomic status but ministry, as becomes clear in the addition 'and to everyone who joins in the work, and labors at it.' The collocation of these two words almost certainly refers to the ministry of the gospel" (918).

"The gospel is God's thing, and God's alone, and so too, therefore, is the church. The church, Paul argues strenuously, belongs neither to himself, nor to Apollos, nor to them. The church belongs to God through Christ, and all of its ministers, including the founders (!), are merely servants. This final word about Apollos is living evidence that Paul is as good as his word" (911).

"What is significant here is the very matter-of-fact way the issue is taken up. On a weekly basis they should set money aside, as the Lord has prospered them. No pressure, no gimmicks, no emotion. A need had to be met, and the Corinthians were capable of playing a role in it" (903).

"Because 'death could not hold its prey, Jesus our Savior,' neither will it be able to hold its further prey when the final eschatological trumpet is blown that summons the Christian dead unto the resurrection and immortality. What a hope is this" (894).

"Believers are said to share both kinds of existence, that of Adam through their humanity, that of Christ through their resurrection. They do not share Christ's heavenly existence because, as he, they are from heaven, but because at the resurrection they will receive a heavenly body that is just like his" (877).

"The transformed body, therefore, is not composed of 'spirit'; it is a body adapted to the eschatological existence that is under the ultimate domination of, and animated by, the Spirit. Thus for Paul, to be truly pneumatikos is to bear the likeness of Christ (v. 49) in a transformed body, fitted for the new age" (869-70).

"Here he means that if there is no hope in the resurrection, then his life-or-death struggle against the opponents of his gospel is carried on at the merely human level - he is nothing more than a 'mere man' among other 'mere humans,' with nothing better than merely 'human hopes'" (854).

"Death is the final enemy. At its destruction true meaningfulness is given to life itself. As long as people die, God's own sovereign purposes are not yet fully realized. hence the necessity of the resurrection - so as to destroy death by 'robbing' it of its store of those who do not belong to it because they belong to Christ!" (838).

"It was the resurrection after all that made it possible for them to say, 'Christ died for our sins.' And it was the resurrection, as he will go on to argue (vv. 20-28), that guarantees our own future as the people of God. To deny the objective reality of Christ's resurrection is to have a faith considerably different from Paul's. One wonders whether such faith is still the Christian faith" (817).

"Paul's point seems emphatic The resurrection of Jesus from the dead was not a form of 'spiritual' existence. Just as he was truly dead and buried, so he was truly raised from the dead bodily and seen by a large number of witnesses on a variety of occasions" (808).

"If for Paul, and therefore for us, there is an element of mystery to the concept of a 'spiritual body', there can be little question that for him Christ's resurrection is central to everything. It is the ultimate eschatological event. By raising Christ from the dead God set in motion the final overthrow of death itself. Hence the inevitable fact and nature of our own resurrection" (796).

"The problems with seeing this as authentic are obvious. If Paul himself is responsible for such a 'corrective,' it is surprising that he should add it here, yet earlier...affirm that women should both pray and prophesy...in the gathered assembly. What is also surprising is the sudden shift from the problem of disorder in the congregation in Corinth to a rule that is to be understood as universal..." (790).

"Paul's response to all this has been twofold. First, they are to broaden their perspective to recognize that being Spirit people by its very nature means a great variety of gifts and ministries in the church (chap. 12). Second, the whole point of the gathered people of God is edification, the true expression of love for the saints" (775).

"Now Paul is arguing that the basis of all these instructions is ultimately theological. It has to do with the character of God...vis-a-vis the deities of the cults, whose worship was characterized by frenzy & disorder. The theological point is crucial: the character of one's deity is reflected in the character of own's worship. The Corinthians must therefore cease worship that reflects the pagan deities..." (771-2).

"The...account of the fall suggests that one of its first effects on humanity is their great...need to hide from the living God...one of the sure signs of the presence of God...is this deep plowing work of the Spirit, whereby through prophe[cy] the secrets of the heart are laid bare. No wonder the Corinthians preferred tongues; it not only gave them a sense of being...people of the Spirit but it was safer!" (761).

"His concern throughout has been with uninterpreted tongues in the assembly, because what is said cannot edify the church. With this sentence he outmaneuvers the Corinthians altogether. He herewith affirms their gift in the strongest of terms; but he does so in order to reorder their own thinking about what should be happening in the gathering for worship" (748).

"The analogy is clear. Speaking in tongues in the community at worship...is like the harpist running fingers over all the strings, making musical sounds but not playing a pleasing melody, or like a bugler who blows the bugle without sounding the battle cry. In both cases sounds come from the instrument, but there is no tune or melody; thus...they do not benefit the listener. So it is with tongues" (736).

"Contrary to the opinion of many, spiritual edification can take place in ways other than through the cortex of the brain. Paul believed in an immediate communing with God by means of the S/spirit that sometimes bypassed the mind; it is only at a later period in history, conditioned by the so-called Enlightenment, that people in the Western world would think otherwise" (728).

"Love does not eliminate the gifts in the present; rather, it is absolutely essential to Christian life both now and forever. The gifts/manifestations, on the other hand, are not forever; they are to help build up the body in the gathered assembly of God's people - but only in the present, when such edification is needed" (717).

"...Paul's description of love begins with this twofold description of God, who through Christ has been shown to be forbearing and kind toward those who deserve divine judgment. The obvious implication, of course, is that this is how God's people (i.e., the Corinthians themselves, not to mention all others who would claim to belong to Christ) through Christ and the Spirit are to be toward others" (705-6)

"...what is involved here are two opposing views as to what it means to be people of the Spirit. For the Corinthians it meant 'speaking in tongues' & having wisdom & knowledge...without a commensurate concern for truly Christian behavior. For Paul it meant...to be full of the ...Holy Spirit...to behave as those 'sanctified in Christ Jesus & called to be his holy people' (1:2)...to 'walk in love'" (698).

"Tongues are fine, he will go on to affirm, provided they are interpreted. But not everyone should speak in tongues when the church assembles for worship. That makes everyone the same, which is like a body with only one part" (689).

"'If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?' This interchange of the sense organs makes it clear that Paul's point is not the 'inferiority' of one to the other. The point is the need for all members; otherwise some function of the body would be missing" (676).

"Paul saw the Spirit as the key to everything in the Christian life. It seems mandatory that such prevail again if there is to be effective Christianity in our day. But let the one who says that not force their own brand of 'spiritual unity' on the church as simply another human machination. Our desperate need is surely for a sovereign work of the Spirit to do among us what all our "programmed unity cannot" (673).

"Indeed, the truly remarkable feature of this catalogue is the attribution to 'each one' of a whole gamut of supernatural activities in the same matter-of-fact way that contemporary church leaders would list positions on an organizational chart!" (655-6).

"All of this suggests not only that we do not have here a systematic presentation of 'Spirit gifting,' but also that there is some doubt as to whether the apostle himself had precise and identifiably different manifestations ('gifts') in mind when he wrote these words" (650).

"The presence of the Spirit in power and gifts makes it easy for God's people to think of the power and gifts as the real evidence of the Spirit's presence. Not so for Paul. The ultimate criterion of the Spirit's activity is the exaltation of Jesus as Lord, which in turn expresses itself in loving concern for others. Whatever takes away from that...begins to move away from Christ..." (645).