Jeff Ragan’s Reviews > The First Epistle to the Corinthians > Status Update
Jeff Ragan
is on page 673 of 1044
"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).
— Apr 08, 2026 08:12AM
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Jeff’s Previous Updates
Jeff Ragan
is on page 921 of 1044
"...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).
— Jul 13, 2026 10:47AM
Jeff Ragan
is on page 913 of 1044
"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).
— Jul 09, 2026 09:18AM
Jeff Ragan
is on page 903 of 1044
"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).
— Jul 06, 2026 09:24AM
Jeff Ragan
is on page 895 of 1044
"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).
— Jul 02, 2026 11:41AM
Jeff Ragan
is on page 880 of 1044
"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).
— Jun 28, 2026 10:46AM
Jeff Ragan
is on page 870 of 1044
"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).
— Jun 25, 2026 10:45AM
Jeff Ragan
is on page 858 of 1044
"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).
— Jun 22, 2026 10:08AM
Jeff Ragan
is on page 842 of 1044
"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).
— Jun 17, 2026 07:32AM
Jeff Ragan
is on page 826 of 1044
"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).
— Jun 10, 2026 12:18PM
Jeff Ragan
is on page 812 of 1044
"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).
— Jun 05, 2026 08:02AM