No interpreter doubts that this Epistle is primarily about the Unity of the Church, and that its questions all bear on that subject. The effort has been to see how Corinth’s particular circumstances connect to the general argument, and what that argument has to do with the frequent talk of Wisdom, and the wisdom of the world, in the earlier chapters.
These allusions lead to Paul’s declaration that he determined to know nothing among the Corinthians but Jesus Christ crucified. From this the natural inference is that their passion for wisdom was a chief cause of their disunion; that to unite them was to humble them; that to humble them was to hold up Christ dying on the cross. How this works is disputed. The pious Romanist says that contemplating the act of crucifixion, aided by a sensible image, has special power to lower intellectual pride. The pious Protestant says rather that belief in Christ as a perfect Saviour from wrath and sin, which a man could not achieve by his own efforts, is what empties him of self-sufficiency. Each suspects the other — the Protestant of regarding Christ merely as carnal image, the Romanist of reducing him to a doctrine stated as a proposition. The Protestant complains that Christ’s work should raise us above visible idolatries; the Romanist replies that there can be no fellowship with the poor without presenting the Crucifixion more objectively. History seems to sustain both objections, while refuting the uncharitable assumption that either the one who bows before a crucifix, or the one who dwells on the cross as peace for a crushed conscience, cannot be a spiritual worshipper. So one of the great causes of the Church’s division meets us at the very threshold of the classical book on its unity — seemingly suggested by the book itself.
If I tried to resolve this perplexity by Paul’s own account of his conversion and his preaching to the Gentiles, both Romanists and Protestants would likely object equally. They would say: whatever occasions justify speaking of Christ as revealed in him, this is not one. The wisdom-teachers drawing the Corinthians from gospel simplicity were mystics, substituting inward apprehensions for outward facts. The preacher of Christ crucified was directly opposing them by affirming a fact — calling the Corinthians to acknowledge that first, whatever interior illumination might come after.
This has plausibility. Apollos, we know, was an Alexandrian teacher. We need not suppose he consciously rivaled Paul or openly claimed deeper lore, but the language of the Epistle shows this was the effect on men already eager to rally round a new leader for self-glorification. Given this, the view of sound critics that Apollos had studied under Philo, and so imparted lore especially concerned with the Divine Word speaking inwardly, may be accepted. This hypothesis explains one party the Apostle alludes to, fits Corinth’s circumstances, and illuminates otherwise obscure passages.
An Alexandrian Jew as learned as Apollos would constantly use “Wisdom” or “Word,” tracing them through Proverbs, the Prophets, even the Law’s forms and the Patriarchs’ history. Whatever impression this made on synagogue-goers, it would strike with startling force those few cultivated Greeks who had heard the Porch or Academy debated — for here was the very thing Greek inquiry sought, reconciled with the sacred book, linked to the innermost New Testament revelation. Even ordinary Greeks in the crowd — used to judging plays, having picked up scattered ideas from travel, their reflective powers now awakened by the Gospel — would claim their own privilege to follow a teacher who spoke of mysteries they longed, as Corinthians, to know, and claimed, as Christians, to be initiated into.
It seems beyond question that the Apollos party formed this way, and that the language of the first chapters justifies us in thinking this was the party the others protested against. A school exalting spiritual intuition and inner guidance, appealing as the Alexandrians did to the Old Testament, would provoke Jewish Christians raised under the Pharisees, who took Jesus as fulfilling Law and Prophets in their plain historical sense — these would call themselves Cephas’s party, especially once a third party arose proclaiming the New Testament as God’s message to the Gentiles, against both literal and spiritual Judaism. Paul’s name would equally serve those saying: the Old Covenant is abrogated, we are not under Law, Christ came for the Gentiles and to give the Spirit — why do you Apollos-followers drag us back to old allegories? We might easily conclude, even without the Epistle’s clear hint, that a fourth class existed, despising all human teaching — Apollos’s wisdom, Cephas’s dogmatism, even Paul’s liberty — and clinging only to Christ’s own words.
Granted that the Apollos school posed the primary danger, and the other parties formed in reaction to it, the question is how Paul met that danger, and how far his approach healed the Church’s schisms generally.
All agree his method was preaching Christ crucified — his words are too plain to dispute. But since what this means is disputed, we should seek his own fuller statement. I find it in chapter one: Jews require a sign, Greeks seek wisdom; we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews, foolishness to Greeks, but to the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the Wisdom and Power of God. This is a cardinal passage introducing the whole doctrine of the Cross. Here are the Apollos school’s favorite words, Wisdom and Power. Paul purposes to declare God’s Wisdom (Σοφία) and Power (Δύναμις) — but says God has declared them better than his own discourses could. The Cross manifests both. God’s foolishness is wiser than man, God’s weakness stronger than man. You speak of a living Word, the expression of God — I confess it, and say that Word has spoken by acting, suffering, and — greatest wonder — dying; and in that death has come forth God’s innermost character, his essential love and his essential power.
This was Paul’s Gospel, mighty and startling. God had revealed his Son in him, that he might preach him to the Gentiles who had struggled against him — his spirit had bowed to this Lord and asked what to do; the answer was to proclaim this Lord to all as claiming their submission. But was he testifying to an unknown teacher speaking only in secret hearts? Then his message would be for a few elect spirits, as Philo’s initiates — not for the Gentile, for men, for the world. Only if this Word revealed himself through human, bodily, mortal acts — acts the delicate Alexandrian mystic disliked dwelling on — could Paul fulfill his commission, and show the true dominion of spiritual power over fleshly, divine over human. The two could not stand aloof; they had to meet in conflict for each to prove its strength.
This preaching of the Cross as God’s manifestation of Wisdom and Righteousness is neither Romanist nor Protestant as they oppose each other. It does not appeal primarily to sense or intellect, but goes deeper than both — yet does justice to each method, explaining why each alone is unsatisfying. The sensible image corresponds to spiritual reality; Christ must be as truly an object to the spiritual organ as the crucifix to the eye. Forms of sense, following Scripture, are the best — the only — way to express spiritual truth; translating them into intellectual propositions weakens them. Yet the longing to escape mere sensible, material idols is genuine, and the true preacher awakens it — connected with, though not identical to, the longing to escape moral evil, which arises when a man knows himself his own tormentor, having bowed to outward things by wandering from a higher centre. Announcing that spiritual centre — Christ as the power drawing all creatures to itself, withdrawing them from dividing material idols, raising them above themselves — fulfills both purposes. It is not a charm on the outward man, nor a proposition for the understanding, but a message to what is most human and universal in each person, concerning the one in whom alone the universal overcomes the partial and warring.
We can now follow the Apostle’s thought. He finds the Corinthians rich in gifts, yet divided into parties under leaders. Paulites! Were they baptized into Paul’s name? He thanks God he baptized few of them, lest they think so. He was sent to preach the Gospel — Christ as Wisdom and Power of God — to the despised and foolish as much as the wise: you are called of God, Christ is made your wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption. He proclaimed one common human-and-divine foundation for all — and instead of resting on it, they set up separate teachers, making Christ a minister of division rather than Lord of Man.
Chapter II
Paul resolved to preach this Gospel as broadly and simply as possible, so their faith would rest not in his wisdom but God’s power. But was he not then preaching a mystery, God’s wisdom? Certainly a profound one — one the learned rabbis and Roman rulers could not penetrate, or they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. It required divine light to reveal: eye had not seen, ear not heard what God prepared for those who love him. But God revealed it by his Spirit — none can know God but God’s Spirit, as none knows a man but that man’s spirit. The merely natural (psychical) man does not receive this; a spiritual organ is needed for spiritual communication.
Here Paul touches the heart of Alexandrian teaching. Does he refute it? No — he adopts its very principle and terms. A mystery known by the initiated, by a spiritual organ rather than mere ψυχή, the spiritual man above others — all granted. Where they differ is only when the mystery becomes not an eternal, universal reality but the possession of particular men; when the initiated become a peculiar set glorying in a peculiar organ rather than an open eye receiving light meant for all. Then the “spiritual” man becomes exactly the carnal, natural man — for that is what happens when he glorifies his individual soul and separate wisdom above the Wisdom that is for all mankind.
Paul applies “Who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he might instruct him?” — what contradiction, for the partial, individual mind to comprehend the Universal! Is knowledge of God then impossible, a mere dream of the Philo school and sympathetic philosophers who sought it as their goal? No, he answers: we have the mind of Christ. We are not bound to the individual soul’s measure. The mind that formed and sustains all things is with us; Christ is in us, knowable if we give up ourselves.
Chapter III
He now strikes hard at the Alexandrian conceit while using one of its own distinctions. “I fed you with milk, not meat,” he says. “Ah,” they say, “then you accept our division of novices and adepts, of those needing sensual forms and those receiving pure essence.” Not so fast. It is precisely to you, the aspirants who scorned the vulgar herd and thought yourselves discerning of mysteries, that I gave children’s food — because that’s all you could bear. You are not, as you fancy, spiritual men — you are plainly carnal, for division is the sign of carnality, self-exaltation the sign of carnality. Setting up earthly teachers keeps you carnal. What are those teachers for? To build you, as a Church, on the only foundation humans can stand on: no other foundation can be laid than Jesus Christ. Here is the doctrine of the Epistle — the condemnation and the justification of Paulites, Apollosites, Cephasites alike, and the ground of Church unity. The foundation is laid; Christ is at humanity’s root. Preaching by Apollos or Paul can only declare facts, not change them — either may preach best, God will judge that. What is built on the foundation, precious or worthless, will be tried by fire, and we ourselves tried by fire — but the foundation remains, and you remain, for you, not our notions, are God’s building on this foundation. You are God’s temple; defile it and God will destroy the defiler. Rightly seeing your own glory, then, give up glorying in wisdom and party-leaders. All things are yours — life, death, present, future, Apollos, Cephas, Paul, all nature, all men — for you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.
Chapter IV
What are Apollos and I, whom you’ve made into party-heads, destroyers of Christ’s Church? Servants of Christ, stewards of God’s mysteries, appointed to share deep truths with the whole household. We are stewards for you, but you are not our judges — God judges us; his light will reveal what each of us is and has done. Our own consciences may not accuse us, but that is not our justification. Give up this futile attempt to judge us, which is only dividing you further. Here Paul lays bare their deepest wound — gently, even with humor, yet cutting sharply, combining affection with severity. You Corinthians have become wise, great, judges and kings — would that we shared your exaltation! But that’s not our calling: we apostles are God’s outcasts, the offscouring of the earth, perhaps like criminals thrown to beasts when the show’s best part is over. He feels the bitterness of these words, contrasting self-conceited pupils with those they should look to as guides — but he claims a father’s right to speak, not a sophist’s or leader’s dignity, which he disclaims as inconsistent with the Gospel and the Church itself; the paternal claim he asserts because he preached the Gospel and the Church needs such strict government.
Chapter V
An immediate instance shows the Apostle, though absent, exercising this power — a passage as important as any in the Epistle. The Church, so proud of its illumination, had a member committing fornication with his father’s wife, and had done nothing about it. Paul pronounces sentence in a dreadful formula: in the name of the Lord Jesus, the Church gathered, Paul present in spirit with Christ’s power, decrees the man delivered to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.
This is the formula of excommunication. Modern Protestants are unsure what to make of it — surely it can’t mean what it says, just a phrase for exclusion from fellowship. Romanists ask what separates this from the anathemas they’re accused of, the curses Irish priests pronounce at the altar. To the first I answer: yes, it means exclusion, but what does that mean? Paul could have simply said, don’t share the Eucharist with him, or avoid him — why mention Satan, delivering to Satan, if the words mean nothing? He had condemned rhetoric as unfit for a herald of Truth — would he forget that rule now? I think we cannot avoid the conclusion that he saw the Gospel as deliverance from devil-service, and the Church as united in confessing the one who destroys the devil’s works. A distinct renunciation of Christ, a distinct assertion of fleshly self-will, is also a choice of the devil as master, a surrender to him — sometimes broad and obvious enough that the Church must treat the man as what he has chosen to be, for his own sake: treating him as outcast is the way to truly keep him within the Church’s unity. Delivered to Satan for the flesh’s punishment, that his spirit may be saved in the Lord’s day — I cannot explain these words away; they contain the essence of Christian philosophy and benevolence. Had priests studied them, they could never have sported with curses as they have. The truth must be told plainly: the priest’s malediction has too often been not this final reluctant declaration that a man who chose an evil master should feel that bondage until he loathes it and turns to his true Lord, but rather a prayer to the devil as his real god, to punish enemies he hated.
The law of excommunication as it concerns the sufferer is thus explained; its ground as it concerns the Church appears next: “a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump,” “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us,” “ye are unleavened.” These are texts of vast subjects — Church history is their expansion. The Corinthians’ glorying, as we’ve seen, did not reflect a high view of their corporate standing but individual boasting of wisdom and insight as exclusive property. Setting before them the Church’s own sanctity and dignity is Paul’s corrective. You are a holy body, the leaven cast out; the pure Paschal Lamb sacrificed for you, in whom you are perfectly holy. Impurity enters with separation, with self-will breaking from the divine fellowship’s principle — that is the leaven Christ casts out, and which we seek cast out when we come together to the feast. Where this self-will reaches a head in some flagrant act, like the man’s incest, the body’s holiness must be asserted by excising that member — a doctrine inherent in the Church’s existence, yet one that can be so emphasized as to destroy the truth it springs from. Excommunication can be imagined apart from communion, as if the Church were a set of people with special qualifications, all others to be excluded — making excommunication the rule and defeating Paul’s actual reasoning, which grounds the body’s purity in its relation to Christ, not in members’ individual graces. This opens the door to pride, censoriousness, hypocrisy, and immorality, which so troubled Paul at Corinth.
Next he addresses another form of the same error. He had told them to avoid fornicators, covetous men, extortioners, idolaters — an instruction easily misused. They couldn’t literally avoid all such people without abandoning society and their power to benefit it. But they could judge and despise the heathen while still mixing with them, counting themselves pure by comparison. Did they? Then let them prove it. What business had they judging the heathen? Who gave them that commission? How could they gauge the evil in an idolater’s sin? Their calling was to witness to a righteous society that loved its neighbors and so could not harm them — let them keep the body to that office. God will judge the world outside.
Chapter VI
Every Greek trait reappeared in the Church, including litigiousness. Nothing could more starkly contradict the Church’s profession before the heathen than brother suing brother. It came from the same cause as the parties — glorification of individual gifts, no real sense of brotherhood, no understanding of a spiritual body’s function; they acted like atoms accidentally associated. As always, Paul crushes their individual conceit by making them conscious of their corporate greatness: you go to heathens to judge small property matters? Don’t you know the saints shall judge the world? How could Paul assume they knew this, unless such a function belongs to the very nature of a spiritual society? He had said the spiritual man judges all things but is judged by none — raised to higher ground, we can survey what lies below; truly seeing by God’s light and partaking his mind, once fleshly bias is overcome, we exercise fully that discernment the humble already partly possess.
Their failure to judge came not from intellectual defect but from intellectual pride — and see how that pride punished itself in practical incapacity: they, with their great illumination, couldn’t find members competent to settle small property disputes! The sarcasm must have stung. But it reveals Paul’s view of the Church: high gifts and low alike come from the eternal Spirit; prudence dwells with wisdom; handling life’s pettiest details is as much a divine endowment, as necessary to the Church, as grasping spiritual truths.
These lawsuits revealed not just ignorance but a moral defect. Why couldn’t they bear wrongs from one another, or avoid committing them? Didn’t they know the Gospel meant deliverance from moral evil, that such wrongs were fatal hindrances to living in God’s kingdom? No — this simple truth was exactly what they hadn’t grasped. Too fine and spiritual to think about gross outward evils, absorbed in high mysteries, they forgot that the old grovelling sensualism’s temptations were as strong as ever, even though washed and sanctified. Covetousness, envy, strife invaded them. Some Paulite would object: are you, preacher of Christian liberty above law, becoming a mere moralist? No, he says — I still say all things are lawful to me; God gave the earth and the appetites to enjoy it, but not as masters. Belly and food are both good, but I won’t be enslaved to either — God will destroy them, and means me to live on. This is commonplace, perhaps scorned by both parties, yet vital and ever fresh, needing constant new application through bitter experience — the text for the larger subject of Christian liberty Paul will address further, perhaps with fresh light on both an earlier subject and matters the Corinthians had consulted him about.
Many are troubled by why the Apostles at Jerusalem mixed a moral prohibition — fornication — with temporary rules for Gentile converts. Three weighty answers exist: first, fornication was tied to idolatry, part of certain festival worship, so forbidding idol-offerings guarded against the moral sin and named its root; second, those freed from the old law needed reminding that authority deserved obedience even without understood reasons; third, Jewish-Gentile relations made otherwise innocent acts scandalous to those raised under the old Covenant. These deserve consideration and teach later times much — but we profit more if we assume the early churches faced the same difficulty we do, and expect from Paul himself an examination resolving it more fully than our partial answers.
Paul had said all things are lawful, God provides meats for the belly — we must simply judge case by case when his gifts threaten spiritual liberty. But he saw how this could be twisted: fornication classed with mere excess, governed by the same personal-expediency rule as food. No, he says — our membership in Christ, who redeemed our bodies, makes this offence entirely different. The Gospel does what Law cannot: Law could and did forbid adultery, violation of a formal bond, but evils that gravely wound the conscience without breaking any recognized bond, Law can frown at but not reach — attempting to legislate them brings disaster, as Puritan New England shows. Only acknowledging our spiritual relation to Christ and each other, only believing our bodies are temples of the Holy Ghost, effectively guards against this evil.
Chapter VII
The transition is natural to questions the Corinthians asked about marriage versus single life. Paul’s unusual caution here is striking — compare Gregory the Great’s far more decisive, minute answers to Augustine’s similar questions about Anglo-Saxon converts in Bede. His phrases “I speak by permission, not commandment,” “I speak, not the Lord” have oddly affected readers: some, out of mere reverence for Scripture, disbelieve the very distinction Paul makes, fearing they won’t know what’s divine if some words are the Master’s and some the servant’s — such reverence borders on real irreverence, even disbelief, and needs replacing with something better. Others actually value the hesitant passages above the rest, imagining the Lord’s words are general rules for ordinary people while Paul’s hints suit the refined and saintly aiming higher. There’s a latent truth here, grievously distorted — nearly inverted. The better distinction is: what is of universal obligation versus what concerns local circumstances and individual temperament. Principles the Spirit-endued teacher knows are grounded in God’s own being and his relation to humanity, he states absolutely, without hesitation — “they are the Lord’s.” All teaching on marriage’s nature and permanence, forbidding separation at mere pleasure or for supposed religious advantage, belongs here — riding over private judgment and even over Apostles, Bishops, Councils, who must declare but cannot alter them. But when consulted about what’s right for one person and wrong for another, the teacher should tremble — not doubting he has God’s Spirit, but fearing to misapply a truth meant for a part as if for the whole, imposing one age’s or place’s rule on another. Beyond the case of conscience itself, there’s the more terrible difficulty of the patient’s morbid feeling that universal principles mean nothing beside his own idiosyncrasy — anyone who addresses that first, providing a tailored rule, seems a sympathetic guide and risks becoming an absolute authority, opening the door to spiritual quackery and, once such prescriptions are organized and imposed generally, spiritual despotism.
The more I consider this chapter, the more important it seems — not for its pronouncements but for this very distinction between what should and shouldn’t be pronounced; for the sacredness it grants the universal and the uncertainty it leaves the particular, offering just enough hint to help conscience without overwhelming it, and enough notice of special circumstances to remind each time and place of its own responsibility in applying universal law — profiting from others’ experience without being bound by it. These lessons, I suspect, will prove far more valuable in studying Church History and in our own lives’ emergencies than the direct Yes or No the Corinthian questioners wanted, and modern readers still wish for.
Remember that a — perhaps the — great disease of the Corinthian Church was each group’s desire for its own standard: Apollos’s party trusting their intuitions above the vulgar, Paulites claiming liberty they despised timid Judaists for lacking, Judaists feeling safer for keeping old ceremonies. Paul, combating this throughout the Epistle, was unlikely to encourage it now by laying down separate codes for ordinary devotion and higher aspiration. Such a design has been imagined here with little justification from Paul’s actual words — there’s no question of high devotion, only of avoiding the low vices the Corinthians were tempted to. Marriage’s Old Testament meaning, its role in spreading God’s kingdom, its highest Christian sanctity as in Ephesians — none of this is addressed here. Paul, likely questioned by an Apollos-school mystic, answers as plainly and briefly as possible, without either indecent detail or false delicacy: it’s honorable for a man not to touch a woman at all, but the married conduct they supposed holy was neither especially honorable nor safe. Read the whole passage together, not piecemeal, remembering the introduction “concerning the things ye wrote unto me” explains why the topic arises at all. Next, asked about the “virgins” and “widows” who held certain Church offices — should they marry or stay single? Some wanted to marry, some thought it a fault. He believes they’ll serve with less distraction single, but should marry if otherwise troubled — the goal is moral freedom to serve God, achieved differently by each; he himself prefers singleness, expecting trouble in the flesh if he marries — basing his own abstinence not on holiness but on freedom for missionary work. His fear for them stems from their low view of marriage, balanced against caution about dissuading them from it. The phrase “they shall have trouble in the flesh, but I spare you” seems to concern a peculiar case — reading all clauses together (which drove even careful interpreters like Locke to strained readings), it seems young women were placed under guardians, perhaps deacons, for church training, and on reaching marriageable age awkward, risky relations arose, raising questions whether guardians might marry their wards, marry them elsewhere, or maintain the current arrangement. Where the last is possible, with full self-command and no wounded feelings, Paul recommends it as best, though he regards either alternative as harmless where conditions allow. I may guess wrongly about the specific difficulty, but no careful reader can doubt some urgent, complicated case — one that might recur with variations — demanded his judgment. My conclusion: the whole chapter is a manual worth constant study by the spiritual guide, precisely because it teaches him, following the most inspired of guides, not to affect certainty where none exists, not to fear showing doubt, and not to relieve those consulting him of their own responsibility to judge.
Chapters VIII. IX. and X
These chapters shouldn’t be separated, nor should attention to their details obscure the swift movement of Paul’s thought. The question, probably raised by a Paulite, runs: doesn’t forbidding food offered to idols restrain the liberty you granted us? Isn’t the meat still good, still God’s creature? Does others’ absurd worship make it evil? What is an idol — a mere fiction? Can fiction destroy fact? Good reasoning, says Paul — a sign of great knowledge, but too much knowledge, not yet enough to discover: we know nothing. An idol is nothing; whatever many gods or lords exist, for us, members of Christ, there is one God the Father and one Lord by whom all things are. Yet on this knowledge you build a right to acts that pain your brethren — acts that would be sinful if they imitated you. Because you have one God who freed you from these dividing idols, you set your knowledge against theirs, grieving — mortally grieving — a brother for whom Christ died!
And you do this because I preached liberty. I have preached it — now see how I assert it myself. I might claim to live by the Gospel I proclaim; law, reason, God’s own ordinance permit it; I might marry, be supported by the Church. Have I? No — I claim the privilege of not doing so. I assert my right to preach the Gospel unpaid; that is my reward. I must preach regardless, as a steward dispensing what’s entrusted to me — but I may have the luxury of doing it free. In all things I act on this principle: the liberty I claim is the liberty to defer to Jews’ and Gentiles’ feelings. I don’t cast off the law from burden or craving independence, but to win Gentiles, to assert their share in the divine fellowship — the one object being the Gospel’s spread, the universal fellowship’s establishment. With that object before us, like wrestlers training and enduring hardship for the prize, I must bring my body into subjection — not wanting freedom to eat this or that, but the freedom of a body fully my servant. If it masters me, I’ll be found useless after telling others how to become God’s children and citizens of his kingdom.
Here are two paradoxes, one growing from the other: I submit to others because I am free; I subject my body to keep my freedom. He develops the second in the next chapter, applying it directly to a Corinthian fallacy, especially among his own named party: supposing that their calling and sainthood exempted them from self-restraint required of lesser folk. He reminds them that belonging to a called body isn’t new — the Old Testament tells of such a body, truly baptized and sacramented, Christ himself present with them as their manna and rock-water testify. Yet that history shows them murmuring, lustful, cowardly, severely punished. The lesson: election and consecration didn’t prevent faithlessness but threw it into relief. Temptations from the world and from their own flesh were no less for the called. A protector was always at hand, with signs and pledges of protection — but they wouldn’t trust God’s faithfulness unless they distrusted their own. Paul strikes not just at Corinthian self-conceit but at their forgetting that privilege belongs to them as members of a society — glorifying individual knowledge and sainthood instead. Every Jew who tempted Christ did so by forgetting his calling as a Jew, presuming on his own power or God’s favor; every Corinthian would tempt Christ from the same forgetfulness, the same eagerness to claim private liberties. The Jew’s great temptation, idolatry, summed up all his temptations. Were the Corinthians free from this danger — weren’t they exposed to it, most dangerously when they felt safest, believing their old habits infinitely distant?
So the specific question about idol-offered food connects again to Paul’s broader discourse — he hasn’t forgotten his starting topic, though we might. Now, tied closely to everything he’s said about partial, dividing, self-exalting tendencies, comes the communion of Christ’s body and blood.
The cup of blessing we bless — is it not communion in the blood of Christ? The bread we break — communion in the body of Christ? Since there is one bread, we many are one body, sharing that one bread. Look at Israel: those who eat the sacrifices share in the altar. What then do I say — that an idol-offering, or the idol itself, is something? No — but that what they sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, not God, and I don’t want you sharing with demons. You cannot drink the Lord’s cup and demons’ cup, cannot share the Lord’s table and demons’ table.
Until now Paul hadn’t fully answered the objection that idol-offerings and idols are nothing. He identified the state of mind behind it, distinguishing false liberty from true. Now he goes deeper: all worship is communion. You’re brought into communion with the eternal Father; in Christ’s body and blood you’re united to him and each other. Sharing that body and blood means you’ve been taken from subjection to lower beings into direct fellowship with the Lord of all — bread and wine being to you what manna and rock-water were to the Jews, but signifying a higher fellowship through your ascended Lord. Idol-offerings, by contrast, express communion with lower beings, subjection to mere natural powers — a denial of your privilege, an abdication of your high state.
I don’t assume, as our translators do, that “demons” here means devils. Much Greek and Roman — why not Jewish? — worship was indeed becoming devil-worship, worship of malevolent beings opposed to the Divine nature. But this passage is weakened, not strengthened, by that reading. Paul’s contrast is between the lower, divided powers men worshipped — rulers of nature’s various domains — and the one eternal God, Father of Spirits. Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension delivered them from these powers, raising them to the highest glory possible — what a notion of liberty, to throw this all away merely to prove they weren’t narrow Judaizers!
Paul propounds this doctrine of communion as if it were already familiar to the Corinthians, so implied is it in the Church’s very existence — yet we can’t conclude they weren’t ignorant of it, nor that it isn’t among the deepest truths. This whole Epistle teaches commonplaces the Corinthians disliked, preferring novelties and disputes over teachers’ peculiarities — this frivolity kept them from seeing the facts of their own existence, the principles connecting man to God. Paul’s surprised tone at their not knowing what was so near them would evoke an answering surprise in his readers — as if discovering something always known yet suddenly striking, like a familiar landscape at sunset. “Is not the bread we eat communion in Christ’s body?” Yes, certainly — we’ve always called it that, and it meant something real! It applies to our dispute, giving it new importance while making our pettiness plain: the reason for avoiding idol-offerings is that we’re actually joined in fellowship with the Lord of heaven and earth, redeemed from idol-service by our very membership in the Church, signified in the feast — reason to flee anything drawing us back to that slavery. Yet this equally justifies the liberty Paul asserted for us in using all God’s creatures: whatever I find in the market I may eat without question, for it is the Lord’s good creature and the earth is his fullness — but whatever is pointed out to me as offered to idols, I must not eat, for the same reason, since nothing lawfully belongs to another besides the Lord. And this holds even if my own conscience tells me I’m offering it to God, not an idol — for I am not alone; I belong to a Church, and must consider every Jew or Gentile within or without it. If I corrupt their conscience, I bear false witness to them, misunderstanding and betraying the very state God has brought me into.
Chapter XI
This chapter opens with Paul commending the Corinthians for keeping his traditions. It seems some members, especially some women, had protested against a rule the Church generally enforced. Though not numerous, they showed a tendency working throughout the society in various forms. “Why may we not eat things offered to idols?” was one form of this cry for spiritual independence dressed up as freedom. Others were as obvious: why shouldn’t a woman prophesy as well as a man, why not claim equality with him? Who could control the Spirit’s workings? Who could tell a woman to be silent when she felt an inner power urging her to speak?
Very plausible, pious, spiritual arguments—and the Corinthian women acted on them quickly. What was natural, customary, and decorous for ordinary people, these “inspired sisters,” carried away by a divine afflatus, avoided. Yet for all their inspiration they fell to imitating models they knew well—the priestesses of Aphrodite with uncovered heads and disheveled hair, the familiar symptoms of Pythian frenzy—adapting these to Christian assemblies. Would Paul, a mere man, dare check this? Yes: whatever names the sisters of the free spirit call him, he tells them plainly they are violating the first principles of Christian society. The head of the woman is the man, as the head of the man is Christ, as the head of Christ is God. The Church is first of all a divine, eternal order grounded on Christ’s headship over man; whatever interferes with that is antichristian and is simply to be put down. But he has a further lesson for these highflown prophetesses: they are to obey Nature. There is a customary order in women’s behavior which their own consciences ordinarily approve; that, and no other, is to govern them in the Church too. However people elsewhere dress their hair is how they are to dress it there. For the Church does not supersede any natural law or custom—even a merely local one belonging to a particular race—but grounds it more deeply.
This is, I think, the general sense of the passage. Asked for the particular meaning of the clause about the woman covering her head because of the angels, I cannot say for certain. I sense a meaning, but putting it into words I might blunder and get in the way of a better interpretation someone else may offer. What I care about is that the mysteriousness of that clause should not obscure the thoroughly human, almost anti-mystical, character of the rest of the passage—though I do not deny it is mystical in another sense of that word. When Paul appeals to nature’s teaching he does not contradict what he has said about the Church’s spiritual economy; that economy vindicates and sanctifies what might otherwise seem mere convention. The principle that man is head of woman has always been recognized, has suffered great perversions, provoked protests, and yet given rise to customs bound up with society’s very existence. The truth that Christ is head of every man justifies that imperfect human belief, removes the tyrannies it produced, and makes any rude breach of even its secondary consequences a moral offense. I suppose the women-and-angels relation is somehow bound up in that same principle—implying an intercourse between the visible and invisible worlds that we do not commonly recognize, and could not safely recognize unless our belief in Christ’s relation to us were more serious than it usually is. But I hope no one gets lost in speculation on this point before taking to heart the Apostle’s correction of spiritual ambition and self-conceit.
Paul had been pleased that the Corinthians generally kept his traditions; he is now displeased that they had entirely abandoned what he taught them about the Lord’s Supper. This error was characteristic of their state of mind as we have already seen it. They could not grasp a common feast: each brought his own supper, reducing it to a meal for bodily satisfaction. The Church’s heresies and schisms were both the parent and the offspring of this habit. Nothing is more instructive than Paul’s way of dealing with the offense. Gross as the eating and drunkenness were, he does not treat it as mere excess. A great principle involving the Church’s very nature had been outraged. He first states the rule they had carelessly or willfully altered. But then he shows that no ordinance in a Church—least of all this one—can be merely an ordinance; there must be profound significance in it, or observing it is empty formalism. The same self-willed habit that made them alter the sign made them unable to grasp the thing signified. They did not discern the Lord’s body; they drew lines between rich and poor, shaming the Church that was home to both. Not discerning the Lord’s body is the root of all these errors—failing to perceive that they were members of his body, sharers in one life and one communion. This was the dreadful loss and judgment they incurred, and none could be greater: the loss of the very blessings won when they abandoned their divided idolatrous worship to confess one Lord and one Father. The lesser judgments following from their own wrongdoing—weakness, bodily torpor—they should take as merciful punishments, warnings that God was waking them to judge themselves, to exercise the spiritual powers that would let them discern Christ as the root of their own life and their brothers’.
Chapters XII. XIII. XIV
The way is now prepared for the great passages that follow—the very essence of the epistle—which make the Corinthians’ ignorance and strife the means of revealing the principle on which the whole Church, and human society itself, is founded. Paul does not want them ignorant “concerning the things of the Spirit,” an expression we are hardly justified in narrowing to “gifts,” especially if by that we mean merely the powers bestowed on the Church then or since. He does go on to explain the nature and purpose of these powers and connect them to the nature and purpose of the Church. But he begins earlier: while Gentiles, unacquainted with the Gospel, they were still under spiritual influence, not mere creatures of sense; they had the instinct and need of worship, but it was turned toward dumb, dead idols. “Wherefore” no one speaking by God’s Spirit calls Jesus Anathema, and no one can call him Lord but by the Holy Ghost. Why “wherefore”—what connects these two statements? This, I think: the Corinthians’ impulse was to believe in a Spirit and glory in possessing it; the new gift of tongues was as much an excuse for intellectual pride as any pre-conversion gift had been. Paul wants them to understand first what Spirit had taken hold of them and where it was leading. Their secret thought was that it had come to make them independent, above law and order—the same habit that showed itself in the women. He tells them the Spirit of God leads them to confess a Lord, to bow their spirits to a government, and to confess the crucified Jesus as the one exercising it. If they set him aside for some mere spiritual power, claiming the liberty to say and do as they please, they are not speaking by the Spirit of God; if they confess Jesus Lord of their inmost thoughts and speech, that is the token of true submission to the Spirit. Some may actually have said “Jesus is anathema” in a moment of supposed ecstasy, declaring that mere acknowledgment of Jesus was a low form of Christianity from which the spiritually intuitive were emancipated—as one might suspect from the Everlasting Gospel of the thirteenth century and similar movements since. Even if only a few spoke the words, the principle pervaded many hearts, and nothing may have startled the Corinthians more than being told that the highest work of the Spirit was to teach them Jesus’s dominion over them. Had they not believed that since their baptism? Might they not hope for something higher now? No—this was the very truth they had so imperfectly grasped, needed to cure their strife, needed to become a Church, a spiritual body. Their sense of being exalted, high-souled men worked against their sense of belonging to a body, and therefore—as throughout this epistle—against their spirituality. The psychical man boasts of what belongs to him alone, distinguishing him from others; the spiritual man seeks only what is common, the joint inheritance of himself and his brother.
Here, then, is the principle of the chapter and the epistle: you must be a body to know what the Spirit is and receive benefit from his workings; you must have a Spirit to be a body, not a mere set of scattered limbs. The various gifts had been mistaken for the one Gift, the living Spirit from which they came. So Paul lays down that these distinctions all imply the same Spirit. There were also different offices, each an excuse for some class distinction; these he calls ministries, referred not to the Inspirer but to the Lord they serve. And there are differences of energies: it is not enough to speak of gifts or even services; one must refer all to a divine Energizer, believing that God himself makes gifts, persons, and ministries alive, reviving the Spirit he has bestowed. So the great theological mystery becomes the source of the great human one: God the ground of all, Christ the Lord of man, the Spirit of the Father and the Son the perpetual fellow-worker with men.
Given this, Paul goes on: the manifestation of this power in each man is not accidental but lawful, given for the common benefit. Through the Spirit come the word of wisdom, the word of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, miracles, tongues, interpretation of tongues. Whether a gift grows by patient cultivation or appears suddenly, its author is the Spirit and its end the good of the society. None of the powers he describes is merely marvelous in the vulgar sense; none could not be stripped of marvel and exercised, as we would say, professionally. His aim is not to explain the phenomena of his own age but to show how they illustrate the constitution of the Church and of humanity.
To appreciate what follows and recover the force familiarity has dulled, compare it with Hobbes’s Leviathan. That clear-sighted man saw the truth of Paul’s image at once—that the body and its members are the true type of the distinctness and unity a polity implies; the “body politic” was no idle phrase to him. But he takes the body as natural and society as wholly artificial, manufactured, with many awkward deviations, after nature’s pattern. The whole difference between the world’s order, which Hobbes represents fully and truly, and the Christian order Paul develops, lies just there, and it is worth pressing on ourselves. We are apt to think Paul is picturing a peculiarly beautiful, seraphic social state: how glorious that the foot should never say to the hand “I have no need of thee,” that if one member suffers all suffer together—glorious when people understand their condition and stop struggling against it. That is indeed a seraphic vision. But Paul says the foot cannot, now or ever, dispense with the hand; if one member suffers, all must suffer, always. We cannot make our own body other than God made it—that is a law daily experience teaches us. Nor can we make the whole human body other than God made it; and if Christ’s revelation is no imposture, this is that body’s constitution. The particular Church at Corinth, with its rivalries, heresies, idol-food disputes, abused Communion, exalted gifts, is being taught its own law through all these contradictions—and we are to learn ours from it. It would be perverse to imagine we are reading of some celestial, paradisaical people when Paul is pointing out their ignorance and willfulness at every turn. We must say plainly that their condition was theirs because it is also ours, or admit that Paul was no true teacher of either them or us.
The first purpose of chapter 12 is to explain the law governing the whole society; the second, to show how members’ particular gifts and offices are determined by, and illustrate, that law. Everything depends on keeping this order. If individuals’ gifts and graces are considered first, as though the body were made of limbs each previously endowed with separate life, then Christian society becomes as artificial as Hobbes’s—his idea, not Paul’s, becomes the true account of a Church. Christ then becomes merely the king or leader the Corinthians chose over another, not the corner-stone binding living, spiritual beings together. I slip here into Peter’s illustration from the Old Testament—so closely connected with Paul’s, and so aptly fitted to a different side of human life, that one naturally suggests the other. But the human body remains the great illustration to which all others must be referred and tested. The stones of the temple must be made “living” by a kind of violence before they can represent members of a society; the members of a body must necessarily be alive, and their life necessarily implies unity. Only in the scattered, distracted condition Ezekiel saw in his vision can we conceive them as utterly dead; nothing has truly perished until it has lost what unites it to the rest. I hardly know how to state these simple truths simply enough—any effort to abstract them weakens them, and we always stumble back to Paul’s own words as the fullest explanation of our explanations. Yet we forget this truth constantly, not only in daily practice but in our most elaborate theological theories. Each one evades the plain question: “because the hand, the eye, or the foot says, I am not of the body, is it therefore not of the body?” Each tries to claim either the right to say it is not, or that it has no right to say it is—that it should be modest and diffident about claiming such an honor. Each eye strains to find salvation for itself alone; each hand reaches to grasp it or its shadow; each foot tries to walk toward it alone. And the eye goes blind, the hand withers, the foot is paralyzed, because each is driven to a vain, impossible experiment instead of being told of its relation to Him in whom the whole body is fitly joined and who nourishes every part. So each gift is absurdly overvalued, made an excuse for idolatry, and yet serves no one properly, lacking the strength it would draw from fellowship with the rest, and awakening no due thankfulness to the Giver.
The Apostle’s list of gifts at the chapter’s end has puzzled many, since human persons are so oddly mixed up with their endowments: “God hath set some in the Church, first apostles, then prophets, then teachers, then powers, healings, helps, governments, tongues.” But the order makes sense given the preceding sentence and the chapter’s whole purpose. Apostles, prophets, teachers, as far as office goes, are as ministerial to the body as gifts of speech or healing. The human being is placed highest: a man is a greater gift to the Church than anything he does—Paul is more than any word he speaks or wonder he performs. Yet the man is given to the Church exactly as the energies working through him are. Man and gift alike stand in a fixed relation; nothing in this society is arbitrary. The teacher is subordinate to the prophet, the prophet to the apostle. Even influences that seem overpowering, uncontrollable inspirations, are subject to order, because spiritual gifts belong to an order. What is unspiritual, fleshly, idolatrous always tries to be strange and startling. The Corinthians’ errors demanded this principle be asserted, and so does our own age, which seems to think everything spiritual must be irregular and anomalous. Once we live habitually in the opposite conviction, the wonder-monger’s trade will be obsolete, his wares known for what they are worth and treated with due scorn. That day will not come until we earnestly desire the best gifts, count every art of healing and every capacity for government as a divine trust—most divine when most regularly and scientifically exercised—and enter the more excellent way the Apostle points to after praising the worth of gifts.
Chapter XIII
This chapter cannot be separated from the last; its subject is still the subordination of gifts to the divine principle binding the whole Church—the gift of God. This answers Socinus’s argument against the personality of the Holy Spirit: if Paul can personify charity at length, why must he or our Lord mean more by attributing acts and sympathies to the Comforter, the Spirit of truth? I admit that if there is personification in one case there might be in the other—but really there is in neither. Paul speaks of charity suffering and being kind because he cannot separate charity from Him who is Charity; he treats Love as God’s essence, not his attribute. If you ask whether he means divine or human charity here, I answer: he must mean one if he means the other. Only God’s own charity fully answers this description. Cut man off from God, and it remains wholly, incommunicably, in Him alone—but it is a contradiction to call charity incommunicable, since its very nature implies a longing for fellowship. The words describe charity in exercise, even toward those resisting and unworthy of it. If you must believe—and you must—in a charity absolute and original, not dependent on any creature, yet longing for and establishing relationship with one, then believe in a Father. If you must believe in love manifesting itself to meet the disobedient, embracing and adopting them, believe in an only-begotten Son. If you must speak of that love not merely offered to the creature but working within it, believe in the Holy Spirit of Love. So you have the charity of this chapter in its fullness, with full allowance for the imperfect results it produces when meeting a will, or many wills, not submitted to it. This Charity remains the ground of the Church’s unity; acknowledging it at work in the Church and in ourselves is the more excellent way by which we rise to belief in God and communion with him. It belongs to the eternal and universal, while gifts and powers belong to the temporal, and even prophecies to a partial region—they may pass, may mark a period of partial illumination or childlike understanding. But Faith is abiding, for it attaches to the eternal God; Hope is abiding, for it looks to his full revelation; and Love is abiding in the highest sense, since God himself, the object of Faith and Hope, is Charity.
Chapter XIV
We have heard of what stands above all gifts, and what gives all gifts their value and lets us judge their relative worth. To the Corinthians, speaking with tongues seemed most precious because its outward show was most astonishing; prophesying seemed least, being most commonplace. Paul reverses this. If Love is the end, what benefits the whole body must rank above what serves only the individual. To establish this he must explain the nature and purpose of tongues, and his explanation contradicts much current opinion. We are often told the gift suited preachers carrying the Gospel to foreign lands—but the New Testament gives no such hint. Our translators, puzzled how to reconcile Paul’s words here with their own preconception, unjustifiably inserted the word “unknown” to make him clearer. He tells us tongues were not primarily an intellectual gift but the sign of communication between God’s Spirit and man’s spirit—witness to the deepest Christian mystery, the union of man with God effected by Christ’s acts, and the union of man with man realized in the Church’s existence. The Corinthians’ chief error, as we have seen, was confounding this “spirit of man” with the individual soul, glorifying separate powers over what is universal—and here was its climax: this very gift of tongues became a pretext for their individualizing tendency. They exulted in a divine communication precisely because no one else could understand it; they liked to think something was given to one person here or there with which the rest had nothing to do. Paul combats this tendency without disparaging what had been a great and significant witness that the Church had begun on earth, that real fellowship existed between earth and heaven. But with his usual courage he sets that sign at nought once he sees its meaning wholly subverted. He tells them to desire prophecy because it is useful, and “not to forbid speaking with tongues”—a strange, audacious phrase: how could they forbid the effect of divine inspiration? This is what he considers in the chapter’s latter part. The high-flown Corinthians cared nothing for so vulgar a thing as usefulness, and just as little for order. Paul, the inspired Apostle, insists on both, certain that the Spirit is a Spirit of order and that every manifestation of the Spirit is given for profit. Inspirations that do not benefit the body must be undervalued; those that disturb its quietness and order must be, and can be, suppressed. If anyone disputes his ruling here, he does not argue but simply overrules them: “Came the word of God from you, or to you only? If any man thinks himself a prophet, let him acknowledge that what I write is the Lord’s commandment. If any man is ignorant, let him be ignorant.”
One passage here has caused perplexity. Paul seems first to say tongues are not for believers but unbelievers, and prophesying the reverse; then to say prophesying will especially benefit an unbeliever entering their assembly, whereas hearing them speak in tongues will only make him think them mad. I think the difficulty comes from misreading the first statement. Tongues benefited the Corinthians themselves while they were still unbelieving—as a token of a spiritual communication they had not thought possible. Once they believed in the Spirit’s presence, implicit in all their fellowship and worship, the sign lost its worth; craving it afterward proved they had not truly believed what it signified. Taken this way, the statement is not at all inconsistent with the other, so evidently reasonable and confirmed by the whole Church’s experience since.
Chapter XV
The connection of this chapter with what precedes is not obvious at first, but becomes clear if we consider the question that provokes the discussion: “How say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?” Some denied the resurrection for the same reason others claimed to belong to Paul or Apollos, exalted their own wisdom, asserted a right to eat idol-food and do as they liked, wanted women to speak in church, treated Communion as an ordinary meal, or valued self-glorifying gifts above useful ones. All these “some” expressed one common failing: valuing the individual over the body, tongues and prophecy over charity. To deny bodily resurrection, holding that the only resurrection is rising to a higher spiritual state, followed naturally from such notions. The old Greek reverence for the soul and contempt for the body was reviving under Christian forms, shaping Christian doctrine to itself: whatever was common and human was therefore despicable, whatever peculiar and distinguishing was therefore glorious. The body, to the older philosophers, was death’s case from which the winged soul emerged at dissolution; the Corinthian Christians could claim to have already reached that deliverance—their spirit already winged, already regenerate. They had been buried with Christ in baptism into death, and already risen by faith in the power that raised him. What their ancestors looked forward to, they looked back on, and made this the ground of the new doctrine’s superiority. But in doing so they were really clinging to the psychical principle of the old heathenism, while abandoning even the faint hope for the future that heathenism itself had allowed.
Paul, following his usual method, begins again from the beginning. Those puffed up with their own maturity must be treated as babes and fed milk. He declares to them again the simple Gospel he first preached: Christ died for their sins and rose the third day. He dwells on these as events, apart from whatever meaning he later draws from them, insisting they accord with the Scriptures—the written word demanded them; they were no part of a philosophical theory. This, he says, was his good news: nothing better than that the Son of God and Son of Man went into death and rose out of it. Here was their salvation from sin and death, if they believed he had done this for them. If no such acts, no such victory, had occurred, they were still enslaved—not redeemed at all.
Plain and historical enough, one might think—Paul speaking of events external to the believer. But I cannot acquit him of mysticism here, if belief in Christ as the root and ground of humanity counts as mysticism, for the whole argument that follows depends on this ground and is worthless without it. If we do not rise, Christ is not risen, our preaching is vain, we are still in our sins. A daring claim—that Christ cannot have risen unless we are to rise! Yet for all that he is the Son of God, Paul affirms exactly this. Either he did not rise, or in rising he displayed the law of the race united to him. If he was not the firstborn among many brethren, it was a lie that he ever left the grave; not one part of his message but the whole was delusion. The bodily resurrection would be gone, and the vaunted resurrection of the soul just as imaginary.
And then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have simply perished. The whole past would be nothing but a dark vision of human souls born to sorrow, enduring their span, and dying out of it. If our hope in Christ is for this life only, he adds boldly, we are more wretched than anyone—for all peoples have dreamed of another life, of heroes escaping the prison-house into a higher state, or of some champion who might lead them there. The exalted Christian’s privilege would then be precisely not to have such hope—Christ died and rose only so they could be content with their brief span and content that mankind perish, so long as they gain a temporary happiness. That this, and not some claim to be more miserable than Festus, Berenice, or Agrippa (whom he wished to be as he was, except for his chains), is what Paul meant, I think beyond doubt. He continues: “Now Christ is raised from the dead, the firstfruits of them that sleep. For as through man came death, through man also comes the resurrection of the dead; as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.” This is as sweeping as the claim in Romans 5, that as through one man’s transgression came condemnation for all, so through one man’s just act came justification of life for all. Neither statement admits limitation without destroying the very contrast being drawn. The law of death for the race is shown in Adam; the law of life for the race, in Christ. The Resurrection proved the law of life stronger than the law of death—not merely to comfort a few believers or assure later Christians their lot is better than their fathers’. Christ is the firstfruits of all who have slept; every person of the past world shares in his victory over their common tyrant, their broken chains. Theologians have labored to fit this free gospel to their narrow notions of humanity’s present state and future destiny, but the words are too strong for them; in trying to build a salvation just for themselves, they exclude themselves, leaving no ground to stand on when they must fight not a merely theoretical death but an actual one.
Every man, Paul says, rises in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then those who are Christ’s at his presence (ἐν τῇ παρουσίᾳ αὐτοῦ). I stress “those who are Christ’s” because I think our translators erred twice in rendering these words, in ways that, though seemingly minor, have seriously hindered students. “They that are Christ’s” has been taken to mean the faithful who belong to him, as against the unfaithful who are none of his; that sense may be latent in the words, but no one would draw it straight from the Greek. Christ comes first, then his companions, the members of his body; who these are must be settled by other considerations—this verse by itself excludes no one. The other, more far-reaching error concerns the word παρουσία. Should it ever be rendered “coming”? Doesn’t “appearing” or “presence” convey the sense far better? Is there any instance where those renderings would not fit, that is not distorted by importing the idea of travel?
I want readers to examine this for themselves; I have little doubt of the outcome. Consider the passage before us. On our version’s rendering, Christ is the firstfruits of a harvest, yet he rose ages before a single other grain is gathered—everyone who has died or will die for generations would rise, at some indefinitely distant day, from graves that had seen the grossest corruption, following the precedent and law set by him who saw none. On the other rendering, Christ’s appearing or manifestation is the resurrection and deliverance of each man from his deathly Adam-condition: the true Lord of his life, the source of all that has lived in him body and spirit, awakens and renews him, bringing him into the true state he has been dimly conscious of throughout his earthly life, though choked and hidden by so many perversities. This view of Christ’s presence to each man does not conflict with the gathering together of all men in him that Paul mentions elsewhere—one truth sustains the other. I do not want less emphasis on a general appearing of Christ; I want its universality felt more fully. If he is the one living Head and Root of humanity, no unity or gathering of humanity’s elements is conceivable except in him. Life means union, as death means only dispersion. If his Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, Ascension, and later judgments on Jerusalem declared him the Man, the Center of Humanity, it follows that he should go on appearing or declaring himself in that character ever after—that each individual’s death, like each nation’s judgment, is such an appearing—and that there should be a final, more perfect appearing gathering up the threads of the universe’s whole history and fulfilling the Creator’s purposes.
“Then the end,” τὸ τέλος—the point toward which all Christ’s acts have tended, the fulfillment of the design implicit in them. This need not mean only the final gathering just mentioned. In the history of each age, and of each man, a purpose may be carried out, expressed in these words: the Son, having fought the long battle of that age or with that man, and put his enemies beneath his feet, presents the fruit of his victory to the Father, subjecting himself to the One who put all things under him, so that God is all in all. Certain passages of Paul give a clear glimpse of an eternal kingdom of God, for which Christ’s kingdom prepares—a kingdom where principles still war, where world, flesh, and devil still contend for man and earth, often seeming to win—but for its fullness we must turn to the beloved disciple’s writings. If anyone imagines that kingdom to be one where the Son disappears, swallowed in the brightness of Eternal Glory, John is the best safeguard against so gloomy a thought. The Son revealing the Father, the Father revealing the Son, the perpetual strife of opposing truths reconciled in the Spirit’s perfect unity—this is the great τέλος, the satisfying vision that those who have suffered with Christ may hope to wake to, not one where he who was their only strength in the battle is no longer distinctly, personally present.
Death, Paul says, is the last enemy destroyed. Is destroyed, or to be destroyed? The next sentence, which has troubled interpreters, answers this: “Why then are they baptized for the dead?” Whatever the exact force of ὑπέρ, our translators were not far wrong. Every explanation drawn from supposed Church customs—probably antedated for the commentators’ convenience—itself needs explaining by some principle; the words of Romans 6 must account for such a practice if it existed, or for Paul’s language here if it did not. Christians were baptized for the dead: baptism witnessed that they were planted in the likeness of Christ’s death and would share his resurrection. It declared them dead with Christ, carrying that death through their whole pilgrimage—but a death no longer solitary or antihuman, a human, common death uniting them to each other rather than cutting them off. And it was a death already overcome: baptism contained not just the promise but the fact of resurrection, spoke of death already trampled as well as death yet to be trampled, for each person who puts on Christ. By Paul’s own argument, if it implies one it must imply the other. What a mockery baptism becomes for anyone who adopts the Corinthians’ notion of a merely spiritual, already-past resurrection!
If that notion were true, he goes on, why are we in peril every hour? He touches here a grave ethical question later ages have taken up fully, and seems to side with Bossuet against Fénelon. Bossuet’s school could draw from these words the moral: we need the promise of reward to bear the world’s opposition; love of God alone is not enough, or the temptation to “eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” would be irresistible. That conclusion, I think, is one-sided and hasty, though it usefully warns the mystical dreamer who turns his faith in God’s love into an excuse to accept whatever on earth contradicts that Love. How could one trust such a love if it achieved nothing, conquered no enemies, found miseries and left them? Eating and drinking would be the only refuge from so dreary a faith. But it was not the thought of a selfish reward that restrained Paul’s appetites—he was too honest and practical to trade present pleasure for a mere hoped-for future one. It was the conviction that God would not disappoint believers, that he would prove mightier than sin, death, and hell, that made Paul ready to fight beasts or men at Ephesus and to die daily—as he swore, by the very gladness and triumph he had in their common Lord and wanted them to share. He calls them to wake to this same hope, instead of substituting theories about resurrection—refinements that cannot survive real trial—for trust in and knowledge of God, theories fostered by their sects and cliques. Let them seek instead the higher blessing it should shame Church members to lack.
“But someone will say, How are the dead raised, and with what body do they come? Fool—what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. What you sow is not the body that shall be, but a bare grain, wheat perhaps, or some other grain; but God gives it a body as he wills, and to each seed its own body.”
The doubter’s question is twofold: how does resurrection happen, and what kind of body can belong to those who have shed what we here call body? Both questions would occur naturally to Greeks taught that the body was a mere carcase, a prison for a nobler principle, expecting individual life to be absorbed into some general essence. Yet Paul treats them with real contempt, wanting the Corinthians to see how little serious thought about facts lay behind their fine speculations. A moment’s quiet attention to the most familiar things would teach them more than the wisest philosopher could. They expect the buried seed to rise; they expect wheat to yield wheat, rye to yield rye. It lies in the ground and dies. When it comes up, is it at all like what was buried? Yet it is the same seed—no one doubts it. God gives the seed a new body, yet still its own, though so changed. Does not this pattern run through all nature? Are only seeds different from one another, or also the bodies they produce? Isn’t human flesh different from that of beasts, beasts’ from birds’, birds’ from fish? Are the heavenly bodies like earthly ones—can they even be compared? Isn’t there a difference in degree, if not in kind, even among the heavenly bodies’ own glory—isn’t one star more conspicuous than another? This preserving of type alongside variety of form runs through all God’s works. What wonder, then, if from a perishable seed rises the imperishable, from an insignificant seed the glorious, from a feeble seed the mighty—if from man’s psychical body rises a spiritual one? “For there is a psychical body, and there is a spiritual body.” He cites Genesis: “The first Adam became a living soul,” adding his own comment: “the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.”
Here is Paul’s own explanation of his argument, tying back to “as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive”—and here too is the refutation of the crude notion that the seed sown in the ground stands for burying a man’s mortal remains. How could anyone read these sentences, ranging from earth to heaven and back, and suppose their basis is a trivial verbal pun one would blush to find in the poorest rhetorician? No—the seed is not sown when a man leaves this world. What he inherits from his parents, what belongs to him as Adam’s child, what has already gone through a death-process in his mother’s womb and that he carries through his whole pilgrimage—that is what is sown in corruption, dishonor, weakness; that is what the second Adam’s quickening life comes to penetrate and purify, raising it in incorruption, glory, power. The earlier part of the chapter makes no sense on any other reading, and neither does what follows. The spiritual body does not come first, but the psychical; the first man is of the earth, earthy, the second out of heaven. As is the earthy, so are the earthy; as is the heavenly, so are the heavenly; and as we have borne the image of the earthy, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly.
Man’s twofold condition is set forth here, as everywhere in Paul, but newly applied. Christ, the divine root, is the true ground of life, redemption, and resurrection for the whole man, body and soul. The old Adam is the root of the curse and of death; to bear the earthly image is to bear the image of death, and to bear Christ’s heavenly image is to have life and resurrection. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, neither can corruption inherit incorruption.” If there were no other text in the Bible, this alone might settle whether the corruptible thing we commit to earth—ashes to ashes, dust to dust—is the body destined to be made like Christ’s glorious body, inheriting his incorruption. If flesh and blood were truly the body that filled the Psalmist with rapture—if, once blood stops flowing and flesh goes cold, all its marvelous powers simply dry up—then we might indeed search the charnel-house for the only proof that the voice once heard may speak again, that the light once shining in a face may not be quenched forever. But if every word that ever cheered us came from the Divine Word, if every smile witnessed the presence of Him in whom is fullness of joy, why should not the body, as well as the spirit, dwell now in the kingdom that flesh and blood can never enter?
“Behold, I declare to you a mystery.” What follows admits two opposite readings. Our translators give: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” Lachmann’s punctuation gives: “We shall all sleep, but we shall not all be changed.” I do not think any careful reader of the next verse can reasonably doubt that the traditional reading is right, and that Lachmann sacrificed both Paul’s characteristic style and his own consistency for the sake of a more regular grammar. For what would “the twinkling of an eye, the last trumpet” refer to, if the preceding words were “we shall not be changed”? And what becomes of the clause that follows—“the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed”?
One can only suspect Lachmann of a kind of philological stubbornness in departing from the usual punctuation. But some might find it theologically convenient to have Paul speak that other way. A flat assertion “we shall all sleep” would greatly strengthen the theory that holds, as an article of faith, that the remains of the dead lie for thousands of years in their graves while disembodied souls slumber in a kind of oblivion, until the archangel’s trumpet reattaches every scrap of dust to the very creature it once burdened on earth. But however great and frightful a marvel that is, it is utterly unlike what Paul means by a “mystery.” The renewal and resurrection he has been describing has parallels throughout nature; this notion, by its own advocates’ admission, is wholly without parallel, violating every law we recognize. But what law is violated—what law is not fulfilled—by an unseen transformation, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, that ends the body’s long struggle with its case of death and announces the second Adam’s triumph? What Paul is telling the Corinthians, I think, is that those who died before Christ’s coming in the flesh would share his glorious resurrection just as fully as those still living then. Neither group’s flesh and blood, neither group’s corruption, could inherit the kingdom; but the bodies of both alike would hear the voice of the Son of Man. The very voice that on Sinai proclaimed the law of death would proclaim through God’s whole universe that death is swallowed up in victory, the last enemy conquered—a voice the unseen world would hear and echo, and that could even here, in this visible world, be repeated by the inspired Apostle: “O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the Law. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Chapter XVI
This doctrine of the resurrection is so living and practical that it touches earthly, common things as closely as it does heaven. “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, unmoved, always abounding in the Lord’s work, since you know your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” From there Paul turns to the weekly collections, his own travel plans, his wish to winter with them, Timothy, Apollos, the household of Stephanas, friends sending greetings from afar, and their greetings to one another. Those who exalted the soul and tore the Church apart for fine notions could never touch common earth; they could only dwell in the clouds. But Paul, believing that the Son of God, the Lord of Glory, had dwelt on earth and hallowed and redeemed it, that he was Head of the whole body and quickening Spirit of each member, felt nothing too glorious for humanity and nothing too mean for its minister and its Lord’s. He could say, in the sterner parts of this letter, “If anyone does not love the Lord”—setting up his own pride against him—“let him be Anathema; he must be.” But he could say, in that very same spirit: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you. My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen.”