At all events, the wheel has now turned and what people want now is information about religion, the primary things people do when they set out to worship. What does the Christian do in his Church, the Moslem do in his mosque, the Buddhist do in his Temple and so on? Now all this is interesting enough in its way, like the odd ceremonies of a university congregation, but it is not theology, and by itself it is not Christianity either. And since there is nothing intrinsically better in the religious procedures of a Christian than in those of a Moslem, and since most people are not religious sociologists anyway, this sort of thing is not likely to win the masses nor to build up the faithful. The Church has to get back to a far more theological awareness of itself, its being and its actions. And this is where 1 Corinthians 13 comes in.
For this chapter is about the limitations of religion. I may do all the religious things there are; in themselves these are not enough. I may for example speak with tongues. People in Corinth did, and some people do today. There is no more popular religious manifestation in the world, and the charismatic movement has reached Durham also. There is no reason why it shouldn’t, there is nothing wrong in it, but if that is all, if for me Christianity is an enthusiastic emotionalism and nothing more, I have not begun to understand what it’s about.
I may have the gift of prophecy, to intervene, perhaps, like the prophets of the Old Testament, and apply religion to material life, not the gift of the predictor who can tell you what will happen next Thursday, but the gift of an Amos who can tell you what ought to happen. I may have this, I may understand all mysteries and all knowledge, but if that is all, it is nothing.
I may qualify as a director of Oxfam or Christian Aid, giving all I have for the benefit of the poor, teaching the philanthropists on the efficient use of religion, I may be so made a religious fanatic that I give up life itself. All this; but if it is all this and nothing more, what good does it do? I may have religion to the highest degree and in all its varieties, but that in itself will get me nowhere. What will?
This is the place where Paul begins to talk about faith, hope, and love, not only about love, but about all three. “Well,” you say, “is this not the story of religion all over again? Is not faith just a sort of faculty that some people seem to have? I don’t perhaps, and I therefore feel this doesn’t apply to me. What of peering into the unseen and having contact with a spiritual world? Perhaps the spiritual world is there and real, perhaps it isn’t. In any case it is only there for religious people. And is not hope the virtue of endurance, of never giving up, of believing against the probabilities, that things will turn out right in the end? A sort of optimism? A hunt for silver linings and a capacity for seeing them even when they are invisible? Or to put it less grandly, isn’t it the old opium of the masses, the pie in the sky when you die? Put up with all the rich and the powerful do to you now, but the positions will be reversed in heaven?”
“And have we not had love already do good to the poor, by pure and practical religion, the kind a person can practice who has no thirst for prayer, or sermons or hymns? Is this not just the old commandment, ‘be good,’ with a special flavor to it? Morality with more emotion?”
Now I have no intention at all of suggesting that insight, endurance, and charity are bad things, or that faith, hope, and charity are not practical. But it is not for nothing that Christians have always called faith, hope, and love the theological virtues over against the cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice) that we inherited from the classical past from Plato and Aristotle. Faith, hope and love say something about God before they say anything about us. And these theological virtues are what human beings are running away from, they are therefore what I am emphasizing most here, in the very core of this sermon. If we love them in God, we shall love them in the practice of religion.
The first thing to say about God is that God is faithful, as the Bible declares that he is. It is because God is faithful that humans put their faith in Him. The faithfulness of God is antecedent to the faith of human beings and this is the only way into a coherent, adventurous, meaningful life in the world. Faith that begins merely as a blind quest for spiritual reality, can in its way be a noble thing, but it can be a grievously misleading thing. The early explorers sailed west across the Atlantic in hopes that they might find the Indies and Cathay, a splendid story of adventure, but just look where they landed, Watergate! In our days people have sailed out across the oceans of drugs and psychological experiment, some seeking no more than the trip, others genuinely looking for spiritual reality.
It is well to start with the faithfulness of God. Christian faith does not generate its own blast-off, the initiative is with God. The same is true with hope. God is our hope and he will always be our hope for we shall never possess Him. Because he is hope, hope is not a mockery. I have a future, the world has a future. These are not easy propositions to believe. For myself, I have made a mess of most of the really important things I tried to do; and in the world I do not feel entirely alone in this. If I leave God out of account, hope for the world in its various social, political, economic, moral chances, demands more optimism than I can command. But if I start with God, if I see hope as a theological virtue, then it acquires substance and reality. I do not gain hope from Robin Day’s swingometer, whichever way it goes, right or left. God is hope.
Last and greatest God is love. That doesn’t mean as Tolstoy says somewhere, “I went and sowed corn in my enemy’s field, that God might exist.” Quite the reverse; love is a theological virtue, and God’s is prior to my love. We love because he first loved us. And only in this love, in which we give ourselves to one another, as he gives himself to us all, can we know God.
One thing more. You may think that I have been making too heavy a theological meal of a very simple affair. Perhaps I have—though I shall not apologize. Paul is profound and it may do no harm once in a while to peer into the deep water. But the greatest profundity and the most perfect simplicity comes when you see that Paul in this chapter is speaking about Jesus Christ. I do not mean merely that he is the model who sat for the portrait of love, though that is true. I mean that he is faith, hope, and love, that he is the place where these come true in God and in humankind.
If there is a spiritual reality for the common unmystical person, he is it, his faithfulness and his faith alike are mine. If there is hope for me, hope for the world, he is that hope—the realization and reaffirmation of the promise. And he is the love of God, the love of God for me, the love of God within me.
“Every attempt to understand love as a virtue and a work inverts the Gospel of 1 Corinthians 13 into a law” (G. Bornkamm). That means that here is no interesting sort of religious phenomena, no religious or moral code demanding obedience, here Jesus Christ offers himself—faith, hope, and love, to us all.
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“WITH THE SPIRIT AND THE MIND”—1 Corinthians 14.15
[Preached five times from 5/14/89 at Elm Ridge to 6/6/99 at Harrowgate Hill]
The choir’s weekend, and Whitsunday, Pentecost, the Spirit’s weekend too. What can we do about that? In my time I have read a good many books about Paul, but I have never found one on Paul and Music, Paul the Musicologist. And yet, when you look for it, there is quite a quantity of material to work on, especially just about this point in 1 Corinthians. It occurred to me that you could fill in a page of a full score for a full orchestra. You begin, as you know, at the top of the page with the woodwind, blowing instruments made of wood. Paul knows them; here in this chapter “if even lifeless instruments such as the flute do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is played?” In fact, what the Greeks had was not so much like a flute as an oboe or a clarinet; it had a reed and two tubes, and if you had puff enough and were clever enough you could play two notes at once. One perhaps, may have worked like the drone on a bagpipe.
After the woodwind comes the brass, blowing instruments made of metal. Paul knows all