The Resurrection of the Dead. Karl Barth

and walk after the manner of men, and have not yet grasped who has made you what you are? What is Apollos? What is Paul? (3:3–5). What, indeed, can men be, with their names, standpoints, and partisan outlooks? Ministers at best, through whose testimony belief is awakened, each according to the special gift given him by the common Lord! answers Paul (3:5). For we are God’s fellow-workers (3:9; the emphasis is on the first, and not on the second word, as is the recent fashion of interpretation). Ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God (4:1), and you, who think you may or must swear by our name, you are God’s husbandry, God’s building (3:9), the temple of the holy God, which, for the latter’s sake alone holy, may not be defiled by over-weening self-deception (3:16–17). We men may plant and water, but “God giveth the increase” (3:6–7), and the fire of judgment, wherein will be made manifest what our work is worth or not worth, will pass over us all without exception; and we must make up our minds to see the whole of our work perish, rejoicing to escape this fire ourselves: to be saved, not because of, but in spite of, the work in which we took such pride (3:12–15). Paul therefore withstood the Corinthian factions: they take God for their own, His right of judgment, His honour, His freedom. You do not belong to, you are not in the service of Paul, Apollos, or Peter: on the contrary, everything is yours in Christ, is at your feet, at your service, is your property—the world, life, death, present and future, all are yours, and ye are Christ’s and Christ is God’s! (3:21–23). You could and should accept our testimony, the burden of which is man’s direct relationship to God, gratefully dismissing the witness after he has rendered God’s service to you, giving God Himself the honour! And now Paul does not dismiss as just modesty and humility, as the expression of a natural and justifiable need of assistance, the fact that the Corinthians make no use of this “All is yours!” of this sovereignty over all human leaders and followers, but deliberately range themselves under this or that flag. He condemns this proceeding, not as a proof of their weakness, but as an expression of the puffed-up egoism and consciousness of strength of the homo religiosus, albeit under the sun of Christian grace. With such religious movements, with such cultus of human programmes and names, one is apt to puff himself up, in a spirit far removed from real humility, against others who do not belong to the school or the clique (4:6), “that no one of you be puffed up for one against another.” The point he is making here is that they no longer realize that all they are and all they have has been received from God; that they feel full, rich, masters—in striking contrast to the feelings of him to whom they were appealing. Paul adds: “I would like to king it as you do!” (4:8). Strange inversion: while you are enthusing and intoxicating yourselves, and growing heated about what you have received from us, we ourselves, the messengers and bearers, stand there as the last, as those appointed to death, a spectacle for the world, for angels and men; fools for Christ’s sake; whereas you are wise in that same Christ, knowing everything so much better; strong where we are weak, honoured where we are despised … we scapegoats for the whole world, an offscouring of all! (4:9–13). Such are the religious individuals in whose admiration and under whose flag the Corinthians have made such splendid headway that they have forgotten to fear God, and have thus lost that which these individuals in reality brought them! The warning which closes this train of thought is comparatively simple; it runs: Turn over a new leaf, return to the cause, to God’s cause now, to the origin of your Christianity, to your begetting in Christ, which Paul might claim as his own achievement, though “ten thousand instructors” have passed over them. As a summons to return to Paulinism this would be a denial of all that has been said above: it is, however, a return to Paulinism only in so far as the last fragment of Paulinism consists in its own abnegation and suppression. “Wherefore, I beseech you, be ye followers of me” (4:16). The context makes this unmistakably clear: Come down from your wisdom, from your self-content, from your wealth, from the kingly consciousness which now fills you as Christians; come down from the brilliance of the all too Greek Christianity into which you have strayed, and, if you want to sail under the Pauline flag, come down into the foolishness and ignominy of Christ, where the truth is, where not man, not even the Christian man, but God is great, and where I, Paul, your father in Christ, am to be found.

      The fundamental significance of this remarkable harangue, which I have substantially reproduced as it appears in chapters 3 and 4, emerges mainly from chapters 1 and 2, to which we must therefore revert. Here Paul sets out the theoretical assumption on which his exhortation is based. It is not meet that the testimony of Christ should be made an object of religious athleticism and brilliance, as the Greek religious world was fond of doing, regarding in an all too human manner the Great, the Estimable, the Amazing simply in the relation of Either-Or. Paul said: It is simply the relationship of foolishness to wisdom, the wisdom of God, which is not as the wisdom of a man. He who with the Greeks seeks wisdom, his own wisdom, which he can inscribe upon a banner, with which he can posture, with which he can dogmatize, with which he can acquire something, such an one is as much astray as if, like the Jews, he had sought after the visible signs of the advent of the Son of Man. He finds only foolishness, nothing but sheer unintelligibility, just as the other, the Jew, finds here nothing but disgust and disappointment at the manifest absence of signs of majestic splendour (1:22–23). Even as is God’s wisdom, so too is the testimony of Christ shrouded in complete obscurity, and eludes any clumsy attempt to apprehend or comprehend it. It is the word of the Cross (1:18), of salvation, that is only of God, that can only come to us from God, and ever and always comes from God alone. So are things placed in the scales in the Cross of Christ, which is the focus of the testimony of Him; on the one side, death is the last, the absolute last which we can see and understand; on the other side is life, of which we know nothing at all, which we can only comprehend as the life of God Himself, without having in our hands anything more than an empty conception thereof—apart from the fullness that God alone gives and His revelation in the resurrection. But in this section Paul, assuredly of set purpose, is not yet speaking of the resurrection. He intends here to enforce the preaching of the Cross against the religious vivacity of the Corinthians in its remorseless negativeness as the insoluble paradox, as the angel with the flaming sword in front of the shut gates of Paradise. Incisively he says (1:17) that to preach the gospel with wisdom of words (perhaps it would be nearer the meaning to translate this “wisdom of life”) is to make the Cross of Christ void; when he declares (1:18) that the power of God, the royal freedom of God, which creates and gives salvation to the saved, can only be foolishness in the eyes of those who are perishing; that God destroys the wisdom of the wise and brings to naught the understanding of the prudent; when he inquires almost ironically: “Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” (1:20); when he says that, according to the wisdom of God, the world with its wisdom could not know God (1:21). As exclusively as this is the salvation which the gospel of Christ testifies to be understood as God’s salvation. The seriousness which characterizes the Christian relationship to God is that the things between God and man are of this nature. Perhaps the Corinthians, in spite of their acknowledged wealth in utterance and knowledge and gifts, or perhaps just because they are all too rich in these things, have not yet grasped this seriousness. The somewhat more positive things that Paul goes on to say are, at any rate, not designed to create a speedy reassurance here. He has already (1:18) left it in no doubt: the word of the Cross is God’s power to save, but, but—the word of the Cross, none other, is foolishness, only foolishness to the lost. He then says (1:21) that it is, indeed, God’s pleasure to save them that believe, but through that in the preaching which can only appear as wrong-headedness to them that believe not. To believe, therefore, means absolutely to believe this wrong-headedness, and to preach is to preach the crucified Christ, and the Jews and Greeks who are called are those who, where they, in the capacity of Jews and Greeks, can only find a stumbling-block and foolishness, are not vouchsafed a higher or deeper insight, but meet Christ, God’s power, God’s wisdom (1:22–25). It is a very small consolation, as soon as we attempt to ponder over these reflections as spectators and outsiders—and all of us here are spectators and outsiders, and always must be—to find Paul continuing (1:25): The foolishness of God—the only thing that we of ourselves can grasp about God: that in Him our thoughts are confounded, become foolishness (and that not only by reason of our own incapacity, but also through God’s will and ordinance, 1:21)—that is wiser than man; God’s weakness (the