“Though Christ offers us in the Gospel,” says Calvin (Instit. ii. 9, 3), “a present plenitude of spiritual blessings, yet the enjoyment of them always lies hid under the custody of hope till we are divested of our corruptible body and transfigured into the glory of Him who is our first-fruits, our forerunner. In the meantime, the Spirit commands us to rely on the promises. Nor, indeed, have we otherwise any enjoyment of Christ any further than we embrace Him, as He is garbed in His promises. By which it comes to pass that He Himself now dwells in our hearts and yet we live like pilgrims at a distance from Him, because we walk by faith and not by sight.”
JOHN CALVIN.
The translator desires to acknowledge the valuable assistance which the Rev. R. Birch Hoyle has rendered in checking and revising this English version of The Resurrection of the Dead.
CONTENTS
I.THE TREND OF 1 CORINTHIANS 1–14
III.EXPLANATION OF 1 CORINTHIANS 15
1.THE RESURRECTION GOSPEL AS THE FOUNDATION OF THE CHURCH
2.THE RESURRECTION AS THE MEANING OF FAITH
3.THE RESURRECTION AS TRUTH
4.THE RESURRECTION AS REALITY
THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD
THE TREND OF FIRST CORINTHIANS 1–14
§ 1
IN Corinth, Paul had to deal with an active and alert Church of a peculiar intellectual complexion. It was one of the first and probably the most important of the Christian Churches established upon pronounced Greek soil. Here the new religious matter, brought by the apostolic preaching, must have been accepted with passion, and, although not immediately assimilated, was yet absorbed in large understood-misunderstood lumps, and made available for that Church’s own needs. The preponderantly proletarian composition of the Church was no obstacle to its participation in a philosophic-theological, cultic and ethical interest, of the intensity of which we can scarcely form an approximate idea. The force with which religious vitality was flowing through the new river-bed we may again divine from the opening words of the Epistle, where Paul testified that the Corinthian Christians have been enriched by God’s grace (1:5) in all utterance and all knowledge, in gifts and extraordinary capacities of every kind. But then a corrective is gently applied. The testimony of Christ is indeed confirmed in them (1:7), a standard planted in a captured position; but their own confirming, in contrast to their enrichment, is placed in the future (1:8): it is because God is faithful that Paul really gives thanks in these opening words (1:9; cf. 1:4). Clearly, Paul’s intention is to bring them to their senses, to provoke reflection, a reflection which is designed to lift the eyes above the subjective gifts of the Corinthian Christians to the Giver of all these good things: utterance and knowledge and spiritual gifts are to him manifestly no ends in themselves, religious vitality itself no guarantee for Christian severity that, blameless, awaits the end (1:7–8).
The idea that Paul wants to explain and bring home to the Church founded by his gospel finds direct expression in the long, coherent section, (1:10–4:21), which was evoked by the existence and activity of three, perhaps four, different religious groups, schools, or movements (schisms) constituting the Corinthian Christians. In his observations upon this fact, Paul makes hardly more than a few allusions to the actual character of the ideas represented by these movements; although one of the schools of thought expressly carried on its agitation under the flag of his own name, and although under the name of Apollos, and probably also under that of Peter, ideas were put forward which could not fail to challenge him most sharply. It was far from his thoughts to rush in helpfully to the assistance of this, his own party, in its controversies with others; or to intervene as arbitrator and peacemaker between it and those which called themselves after Apollos and Peter (1:12). In his view, the question as to which amongst these groups was relatively most right, and the other question as to how the disputants could be reconciled, were manifestly quite secondary in comparison with the need for making all of them realize that it was not meet that the testimony of Christ set up among them, in contrast to the phenomena of the variegated religious fair, in the midst of which the Church life of the Corinthian Christians was lived, should be made into a cause, an idea, a programme, an occasion for intellectual exuberance and spiritual heroics, as this obviously is the essence of all religious movements and schools of thought, however excellent their intentions and deep rooted their foundations. The main defect of Corinthian conditions, from this point of view, Paul sees to consist in the boldness, assurance, and enthusiasm with which they believe, not in God, but in their own belief in God and in particular leaders and heroes; in the fact that they confuse belief with specific human experiences, convictions, trends of thought and theories—the special human content of which logically makes the recollection of particular human names unavoidable. In Corinth the testimony of Christ is threatening to become an object of energetic human activity, a vehicle of real human needs. Against this, the clarion call of Paul rings out: “Let no man glory in men” (3:21), or, expressed in positive form: “He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord” (1:31). “We preach Christ, who is the power of God and the Wisdom of God unto them that are called” (1:24). Judge nothing before the time, i.e. do not be hasty in pronouncing final judgments upon the worth or worthlessness of your own and all other human experiences and motives, by your own too resolute decisions; for “every man shall have praise of God” (4:5). This “of God” is clearly the secret nerve of this whole (and perhaps not only this) section. The truth and the worth of the testimony of Christ lie in what in them happens to the man, happens from God; not what he is as man, nor what he makes of it, not in the word or the “gnosis” in man’s acceptance of it. “The Kingdom of God is not in word” (generally understood: not in the subjective constitution of man) “but in power” (I interpret: to be and abide in the freedom of God the Lord) (4:20). “For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (3:11). God always remains the subject in the relationship created by this testimony. He is not transformed into the object, into man’s having the right to the last word: otherwise it is no longer this testimony, this relationship. “For who maketh thee to differ? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? but if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?” (4:7). “Was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul?” he inquires (1:13)