divisions and the formation of groups, whatever their aim might be, spring the dissensions, “schisms,” which necessarily arise from party opinions emphasized with individual presumption, and he pronounces this judgment upon the Church! For this is the meaning of 11:19. The δόχιμοι, in this case: those who do not take part in these divisions will then be made manifest; the rest need not be said. The question of the
Lord’s Supper comes up for discussion incidentally. Here also, a type of egoism of a simple and probably not of a merely materialistic character, but of a spiritual and intellectual nature, has spread. This meal, which has its meaning and place in the Christian Church only in the paradoxical form of an unconditional communion of all, high and low, has in Corinth developed into something apparently more refined—that is to say, a kind of festal banquet of the prosperous and probably also the educated among themselves, at which the poor must look on from a distance (11:21). Just because of this it is a profanation to make of the
Lord’s Supper a
Supper of Men (11:20–21), similar to the pagan religious feasts, an affair which the participants, as Paul sarcastically opines, could also settle at home (11:22
a). It is despising the Church of God and shaming those that have not, he bursts out angrily in 11:22
b, with the whole weight of his authority, placing himself protectively in front of the latter and in sharp antagonism to the prosperous. But then he turns over the leaf: an attack on the meal of the communion is an attack on the institution of the Lord Jesus, which he, Paul, delivered to the pure Church as he received it from the Lord (11:23). Note how the expressions “received” and “delivered” occur here, which we shall again encounter in reversed order in 15:3. The meaning in both cases is: With what has now to be said, we are dealing, not with Pauline theology, nor with information from historical sources of oral or written nature, and thus not with matters about which this or that opinion might be held in the Church of Christ, but as regards the speaker, with the word of Kyrios, the Lord Himself, and consequently for the listener with the severing alternative: for or against the Lord: “I have received it from the Lord. The Lord Himself repeated to him, Paul, what He said as the Founder of the Supper”: “in the night, when the Lord Jesus was betrayed.…” By this categorical assertion, Paul does not mean to guarantee, which would interest us, that these were the authentic words of the so-called historical Jesus. For what we call the historical Jesus, a Jesus pure and simple, who is not the Lord Jesus, but an earthly phenomenon among others to be objectively discovered, detached from His
Lordship in the Church of God, apart from the
revelation given in the Jesus of the Church and at first to the apostles—this abstraction was for Paul (and not for him alone) an impossible idea. The thought that Jesus should and could be first regarded by himself, in order then to recognize Him as Lord, could at most be for him a painful recollection of his former error.
This Jesus, who is not the
Lord, who is known
after the flesh (2 Cor. 5:16), was in fact the foe whom he persecuted; he no longer knows Him. But Paul is not now reflecting on what this Jesus, who was known after the flesh, might have said on the occasion of the Supper, but upon what
Kyrios Jesus, the Lord of the
Church, said to him, Paul, when He made him His ambassador. The Lord does not live for him in the oldest, best-attested or most credible tradition—why should it be just the Lord who lives and speaks there?—but in His supreme present
revelation to His
Church, in concreto, in the herald’s commission which it has become to Paul. He reported
direct from the source: The Lord
Himself is the tradition. That each of the individual words in which he discharges this commission has its human earthly genesis, history, and limitation, that these words of the Lord in his mouth, received from the Lord Himself, are in his pen influenced by the currents of contemporary trends of thought, he himself would probably have at least disputed. But this again, positively and negatively, had and has the least to do with
the genesis, history, and limitation, by virtue of which he, as a man living in the Hellenic age, was an
apostle of
Jesus Christ. Paul, therefore, does not
prove, but he
testifies what the will of the Founder is concerning this Supper, as it is actually celebrated in the Church. Almost at the first glance, the things he was chiefly concerned with may be perceived: (11:24–25) “this do in remembrance of Me!” Bread and wine, not in itself but eaten and drunk (where just
this bread and the cup (11:26) are enjoyed in the
Church), are the visible equivalents of the body and blood of the Lord, “
for you,” as the New Testament (11:24–25). Wherefore these equivalents? “In remembrance; (11:26) ye proclaim thereby the death of the Lord until He comes.” Paul’s interest is not, as in a later age, fixed on the relation of element and thing, but on the action as such. Those who take part in it thereby proclaim (upon that which they
receive Paul lays no stress) that they know their Lord, that, although outwardly invisible, He is immediately present with them like that which they eat and drink. In fact, they eat the bread and drink the cup of the
Lord (11:27), and, indeed, of the crucified Lord, who will come again bringing with Him the end of all things, even the end of all such celebrations. Obviously what Paul means is that, during this celebration, the shadow which Christ casts over the whole of life on this side of the grave cannot be forgotten. Can this action be performed in the Church without shuddering at the great preliminariness with which this, our world, “in the night when the Lord Jesus was betrayed,” was characterized for ever? without fear and trembling before the narrow door which leads to life? Can this Supper ever be anything else than what it was at first, a
farewell supper, at which the anxious look of man can only come to rest in the light beyond the grave? Is not hope, the hope of life, which is still inseparably bound up with the remembrance of the Lord who died for us, impossible where the severity of this death is forgotten? And it is just that, this
forgetting just where they ought to be
remembering, this unworthy eating and drinking, which is not dedicated in a serious religious spirit to the critical severity of the matter, and which is even altogether profane, with which Paul now reproaches the Corinthians. That this is so is decisively shown for him by the manner, described in 11:20
et seq., in which they have destroyed the
communio of the alleged feast of love. “They are guilty of the body and blood of the Lord” (11:27). They reel drunkenly (and that not only figuratively 11:21) along the road which the other religious fellowships boldly tread, but which shall be
closed to
them with iron bolts, if they intend to dishonour the gift given in the death of Christ. The Lord’s Supper is a question that is addressed to man 11:28. Cross and finality speak to him there; he should ask himself whether he fares well or ill with his hope of a future life, and
then eat and drink. Otherwise (11:20, the threatening tone of 11:19 returns), by not subjecting himself to this interrogation he incurs the condemnation, which he would have overcome in veritable remembrance of the Lord. He eats and drinks in his alleged Christian, but in reality paganly profane religious feast, that which must befall the
world, the doom. Paul can already see this judgment operating in their midst (11:30–32): weakness, disease, death are not incidents that go without saying, not so easily understood as by later Christian ages as ordinances of God, which are to be accepted with resignation; no, gloomy proofs that even Christians are still firmly rooted in the
world, that redemption is still distant even for them, that even over them God’s chastising hand is still outstretched. If we address ourselves, as we ought, to the question put to us by the Lord, and therefore enter into living hope in Him, we shall escape the judgment. May it, at least, serve us as a warning, so that we shall not incur damnation in the last judgment. How drastic is the criticism persistently applied in the First Epistle to the Corinthian Church, not only in fact on account of the special external conditions in Corinth, but obviously even more on account of the decisive criterion which Paul applies, is plainly shown by the second half of the eleventh chapter, in which he fearlessly declares to his readers that the centre of their Church life, their divine service, is a danger. Paul regarded the possibility that the Church might become empty under this threat as less evil than the other, that it might remain full of rank weeds of humanity.
§ 7
