The Malady of the Christian Body

A Theological Exposition of Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, Volume 1

Brian Brock, Bernd Wannenwetsch

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498234191
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

The ailments of the contemporary church are remarkably similar to those suffered by the fractious Corinthian church in the first century. This is the challenge presented in The Malady of the Christian Body, a two-volume commentary by Brian Brock and Bernd Wannenwetsch.The manner in which Paul engages questions of factionalism, sexuality, legal conflict, idolatry, dress codes, and eating habits reveals that neither the malady he diagnoses nor the therapy he offers track the dominant accounts currently on offer of the malaise suffered by today's church. This volume depicts the Apostle as carefully examining the organic whole that is the body of Christ in order to detectobstacles to the healthy flow of powers that sustain its life. The therapy that is then offered comes by way of a redirection of the Corinthian believers' attention to the ways in which they can embrace God's active working among them to heal their broken unity.This book breaks new ground in crossing and reconfiguring the traditional disciplinary boundaries between biblical studies, systematic theology, and theological ethics.

1 Corinthians 1

Called to Differentiated Unity

1 Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes . . .

In the very first line of Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians we hear the opening note of a theme that will resound throughout the Apostle’s letter: to be in Christ is to be characterized by the practice of naming without boasting. As Paul will soon elaborate in greater detail, this naming of both oneself and others proceeds very differently than the naming that has fueled the factionalization of the Corinthian church. In a move that we will discover to be characteristic of his apostolate, Paul opens his letter by immediately exemplifying that to which he will later (in 3:5–9) explicitly call the Corinthians: a form of church unity characterized by equality in differentiated cooperation. Accordingly, we must recognize that in presenting himself as writing with our brother Sosthenes Paul cannot be drawing attention to status differentials. Whether Sosthenes took Paul’s dictation or discussed the letter with him,1 such a subordinate figure would easily have been ignored in a greeting. Yet, by explicitly naming him, Paul affirms Sosthenes not as a servant but as a co-worker, a co-producer of this letter.

Commentators modern and ancient have tended to portray this act of inclusion as one of “political tact”2 toward the wayward Corinthians—Paul hoped to “be more successful with the name of Sosthenes in the prescript of his letter” because “the appearance of that name . . . would give his argument more persuasive force and reliability in the eyes of the Corinthians.”3 For reasons intrinsic to the theological logic Paul will soon be developing about the appropriate rhetorical stance of the preacher and apostle, we prefer to read the mention of Sosthenes not as a mollifying gesture but as a genuine pastoral act, one marked by its very form as a word from two brothers, so exemplifying the type of unity to which Paul will soon exhort the Corinthian believers.

This extension of Paul’s authorship by linking it with his Christian brother does not, however, amount to an extension of his apostolate. How then to read Paul’s opening self-presentation as an apostle? Perhaps Paul is mentioning his apostolate as one offers a credential to signal the rights of authority, as the later threat to “come with a rod” (4:21) seems to corroborate?

Historical research has suggested that such a gesture of “waving one’s credentials” was as familiar in the ancient world as it is in ours. In both contexts it is one of the power moves available to a speaker who wishes to claim an elite vantage point in order to legitimate the correction of those now established as inferiors, a claim typically shored up by some claim to possess exclusive knowledge or expertise. We understand Paul to be making a very different gesture, reminding the Corinthians that as an apostle his purpose is very different: it is his God-given vocation to set both himself and the Corinthians under one and the same Lord. The naming of the will of God as the source of his apostolicity is thus to be understood as of special importance because of the claim it will lay on the form his apostolate takes. For Paul, any invocation of God’s will cannot avoid an implied reference to the well-known overthrow of his own will in his conversion.4 In a memorable act of divine irony, God has inverted Paul’s publicly expressed will to undermine churches by turning it into the very public and visible activity of building them up. By emphasizing from the start the role of God’s will in his life, Paul signals that he does not understand his epistle as the intervention of an apostle determined to overcome what he sees as the stubborn and perverse wills of the Corinthians. Rather, with this salutation Paul signals that his letter will be a move within God’s gracious action to overcome the stubborn wills of both Paul and the people.

We can thus gloss Paul’s self-presentation in this opening line as follows: “You may will to establish all sorts of other authorities, and I may even will to escape becoming embroiled in this conflict, but God has set us into this relationship of church and apostle, and situated all our human wills within one unifying divine will.” It is instinctive for us modern Westerners to position Paul’s relationship to the Corinthians in terms of a clash of wills, shaped as our sensibilities are by the ideas of Weber and Nietzsche. In a mirror image contrasting starkly with the divine irony of Paul’s conversion, such a reading recapitulates a core component of the problem that besets the Corinthians: it obscures Paul’s attention to the dynamics of God’s chosen way of overcoming the antagonism caused by all human willfulness—a willfulness from which no one is exempt, even an apostle.

It is on these grounds that we read the invocation of Paul’s apostleship as his first pastoral act toward the Corinthian believers, his first compressed and exemplary articulation of the truth that the operative agency governing their situation is God’s. God’s will stands over, contradicting and so claiming and reformulating all these human wills. That Paul was called by the will of God is a further specification of what he is indicating when he speaks of God’s will. Not only do human agents only properly understand themselves when aware that they exist within the superior realm of God’s action, but, more importantly, they must recognize that divine action has already been concretized in their very existence. To speak of one’s self as called is to indicate that God’s willing has been embodied in specific claims on human lives, paradigmatically displayed here in the bond with which God has bound Paul to the Corinthian believers (4:8–9). Though Paul may not always be happy about having been given this role, he embraces the fatherly authority that has been laid upon him. In a move similar to his inclusion of Sosthenes, Paul extends his own identity in verse 1 as called (κλητὸς/klētos) to the members of the Corinthian church in verse 2. This unity in vocation prepares the ground for Paul’s paraenesis to follow, a specific and often repeated form of address to the brothers (ἀδελφοί/adelphoi) (v. 10).5

Paul as Apostle, Parent, and Midwife

2 To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:

3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Having presented himself as “one of the called,” Paul now turns to name his addressees, clarifying the sense in which he and the Corinthians share a single calling—they stand with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours. The middle/passive participle construction sanctified in Christ Jesus (ἡγιασμένοις/hēgiasmenois) emphasizes that the term sanctification does not refer to moral faultlessness but to a state of living within and under continual divine refashioning. To address the faithful as those who are called to be saints is therefore a gesture aimed at heightening their awareness of the sanctifying work of God that is already underway. The Apostle’s highly qualified use of the language of sanctification thus offers us a compressed introduction to the content of verses 4–9 as they relate to verses 11ff. We cannot appreciate the theological force of this chapter if we fail to note the striking fact that it is precisely a community shot through with factions and immorality that Paul addresses as sanctified in Christ Jesus. How are we to take such an apparent “misnaming” of his recipients? We will only grasp the implications of Paul’s naming precisely these believers “sanctified” if we continue on to his further specification that they are such a community together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

With this formulation Paul simultaneously points to that which threatens the church’s sanctification and invokes the power that overcomes this threat. The Corinthian believers are undermining their sanctification in a variety of ways, but the forms these individual threats take in reality share one single grammar. Though the immediate issues in Corinth are factionalism and immoral behavior, Paul is already tracing the link that will recur in many of his responses to individual problems: the issues that plague the local church in Corinth cannot be properly resolved without becoming aware of how they inevitably affect all the other churches, in every place. The Corinthians must not think that their local conflicts and arguably immoral behavior can be addressed in separation from the problem of church unity. There are ways for local communities to seek holiness and define right action that can corrode the essential ligatures that bind the whole together. We are therefore warranted in thinking of Paul’s move here as enacting what we might anachronistically label an anti-Donatist presupposition.6 The fourth-century Donatists were distinctive in the seriousness with which they took th...