And then Paul illustrates this need—we can hardly call it anything else—by what has been already mentioned as regards the mainly proletarian composition of the Church. He uses it as a simile for the paradox of Christian selection, upon which, in fact, their Christianity is based, and which yet so threateningly calls into question the vitality, the sweep, and the élan with which they cultivate and nourish their Christianity: the chosen are, indeed, always the most foolish in the world—the weak, the base, the despised of the world—to shame the wise, to shame the strong. God has chosen—states 1:28, in philosophizing vein—the things that are not, to bring to naught the things that are. And all this (1:29) so “that no flesh should glory in His presence.” Of this God, however—that is, of the God who has chosen the things that are not—are you; you have your being in Jesus Christ (so Weizsäcker), who was made unto you wisdom from God, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption, in which only the Lord can be glorified (1:30–31). This is now, indeed, the fullness, the positive, the creative force, which has made the Corinthian Christians. But it is not the fullness of their possessions; utterance, knowledge of God, and spiritual gifts are undoubtedly not referred to here, but the fullness of revelation, the wisdom in God’s foolishness, the strength in God’s weakness, the fullness in vacant space, which cannot be filled except by the reality, by the real speech and action of God Himself. The real speech and action of God at this place is the burden of the testimony of Christ, which has been established among the Corinthians. Paul wants to lead them back to this point, in order to see them confirmed.
The second illustration of this hopeful need (2:1–5) is the recalling of Paul’s own preaching, which was once the instrument of the call that came to the Corinthians. What happened then? Wisdom? Eloquent words, persuasive words? Nothing of the sort; on the contrary, on his part there was weakness, fear, and trembling. An impressive apostle as such would be no apostle. A winsome testimony would as such be no Christian testimony. The impressive and the persuasive may in its own sphere be necessary and right: from the apostle and his testimony it must always be, so to speak, subtracted: beyond this his greatness, there, where in his own name and by his commission he has nothing more to say; there, the Christly begins, the testimony of Christ the crucified on the side of the speaker, and the faith which is not man’s wisdom but God’s power on the part of the listener, the demonstration of the Spirit and of power (2:4–5). With any other argument than this, against which there is no appeal, Paul would have had no reason to have come to Corinth at all. Whatsoever does not grow from the soil of this argument is, the Corinthians must be made to realize, not the legitimate continuation of the Christianity evoked by his preaching. And now the conclusion of the second chapter (6–16) carries this fundamental conception to its highest point. The wisdom we refer to when we speak of righteousness, sanctification, redemption, is wisdom for the perfect, the wisdom and mystery that is hidden (2:6–7). But be it clearly understood: Man does not attain to this wisdom through the pursuit of some esoteric knowledge and the like. Nor is it reached by some such way as that of Christian speculation, and the “perfect” who possess it are not to be sought in the higher world of spirits and devils, the rulers of this world. Therefore, according to Paul, even the so-called dæmoniacal is not some kind of organ for revelation. It is a question of the wisdom of God. In its presence the lower human as well as the higher dæmoniacal world fail; and it avails us little if, as men, we should happen to stumble upon their knowledge. By rejecting and crucifying Christ, the highest and best world-powers just proved their blindness for God. But: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him!” quotes Paul from an unknown source (2:9). Only God Himself can be the subject of the knowledge of God: The Spirit which God gives, and which, as the Spirit of God, searcheth the “deep things” of God, which it alone can know (2:10–11). As those who had received the Spirit of God, we know what is sent us from God in Christ the crucified. As such and to such we also speak. All speaking and listening in the Christian Church is based upon the assumption of the divine, holy Spirit, which opens here the mouth, there the ears. The third thing excluded, however, is wisdom, about which not Spirit with spirit, but man with other men, converse. Paul complains movingly (3:1–2) that he had obviously not yet succeeded in speaking to them in the Spirit, and in being understood by them in the Spirit. As carnal, as babes in Christ, he fed them with milk and not with meat, not with a pædagogic intention, as this passage is usually but quite absurdly and incoherently interpreted, but because they, the Corinthians, were not yet able to hear his word as the word of God. The words in question mean, “I have not managed.” It was not the intention, but the melancholy consequence, that he gave them milk instead of meat, because most regrettably they thought they were going to hear expositions of “human wisdom,” a new philosophy or theology, whereas Paul was concerned with the testimony of God’s self-revelation. A Christian pneumatologist would be a man who, in contrast to the things which they prized and cultivated, “has the mind of Christ” (2:16), the knowledge of which God is not only object but also subject. Therefore they would not be able to digest this meat with which he, Paul, had once actually fed them. Their incapacity (3:2) transformed the wisdom of God which was offered them into wisdom of man. That this was still true of them is shown by the partisanship of which the third and fourth chapters speak. This is the profoundly insufficient and unsatisfactory character of their situation, which Paul, in acknowledging all that has to be acknowledged, above all reveals, and out of which he wants to help them. What Christianity is specially concerned about is Christian knowledge; not about this and that, about things, even though they be the last things, but about the Either-Or, the understanding or the failure to understand the three words apo tou theou (from God). Unless everything deceives, that is the trend of Paul’s utterance (1 Cor. 1–4). Are not position and counter-position in the conflict about the resurrection, which 1 Cor. 15 will disclose, already visible here in outline?
§ 2
We will now turn first to chapters 5 and 6, which have this in common, that Paul’s criticism levelled at Corinthian Christianity assumes a predominantly ethical character. Here, in contrast to the preceding section, the practical paranese comes first (5:1–6) and the basic viewpoints follow (6:12–20), although prepared by important elucidations (5:6–13 and 6:8–11). Two concrete occasions prompt Paul’s complaints. The first is the fact that the community has allowed one of its members to contract a marriage, inadmissible even according to pagan sentiment and Roman law (5:1). The other is the fact that the community is not shocked at its members’ appealing to pagan judges in cases of legal dispute (6:1). The treatment of both cases is entirely similar. Both, in his view, signify a regrettable lapse on the part of the Corinthians. “Know ye not,” is asked again and again (5:6; 6:2, 9, 15, 16, 19). An urgent reminder of assumptions that should go without saying is the tenor of the whole section. It has been forgotten that there is one kind of development of human vitality which in the Christian Churches, here only, but here absolutely, is forbidden and excluded; that the Church is sick if it does not react against such egoistic exuberance of man in its midst, however natural and understandable it otherwise is, however little surprised one may be to see it everywhere occurring. We are not concerned here with the pride of the religious man, as in chapters 1–4, but we find ourselves several stages lower, in the sphere of sexuality and of the impulses of physical life (6:3), the meum and tuum interests of the self-same man. But with all their variety, all these things are, from Paul’s standpoint, fundamentally on one and the same level; the manner in which, in 5, he refers directly to the incestuous person in speaking of those who find the Kingdom of God in the word of man (4:20), is a plain indication in this respect. Here as there, we are concerned with the same thing: chapters 1 to 4 are also to be understood in an ethical sense, and what is complained of in chapters 5 and 6 is also a lack of knowledge. Here as there, it has been forgotten by the Corinthians that the Christian Church in relation to Logos and Ethos is the crisis of the natural, savage man and his higher or lower spiritual vitality. It is that. Paul speaks of it not in the imperative or the optative but in the indicative mood. On the plane of the Christian Church, there is an altogether other, a new thing. “Ye are ‘unleavened,’ ” we read in 5:7, with allusion to the Old Testament injunction, that at Passover