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THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD

I

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) of his own admirers. Do not your own words—I am of Paul! I am of Apollos!—show that you are yet carnal 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 disquieting void, into which God plunges us when the Cross really becomes the criterion of knowledge of God), that is stronger than man. Where are we then? Where is there room for us between heaven and earth? What then means salvation?

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 time not only might no leavened bread be eaten, but no leaven was allowed to exist at all. Ye are unleavened and our own paschal lamb is slain: Christ. And still more distinct and partly without imagery (6:11): “but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” (Note the “but” twice repeated with which this assertion is categorically detached from what has preceded it.) This other new thing, which is here asserted is, according to Paul, an unheard-of, boundless promise under which the Church is placed. Nor should this positive side of the matter be here overlooked. Let us keep the feast … with the unleavened bread of “sincerity and truth,” he also exclaims in the essentially more sharply pointed chapter 5 (verse 8), with a suppressed joy. “Awake, Easter Day is here 1” And the viewpoint from which he immediately opens the discussion of the lawsuit question (6:2) is, if possible, even bolder and more joyful. Christians, as such, are not only, as 2:15 prescribes, fundamentally in the position, but are called, to judge the world, and even the angels, to test and distinguish spirits, to recognize and pronounce the last clearest truth. But this high promise, as such, is at the same time also the judgment under which the Church stands. In so far as it is not realized in the Church, the latter is necessarily open to accusations and judgments. But the Passover cannot be kept with the old leaven. The unrighteous shall not inherit the Kingdom of God (6:9). Be it observed that these accusations are not directed in a moralizing way against the sins of the world. 5:9–13, very distinctly asks what call had he to judge them that were without. “Do not ye judge them that are within” (5:12). The majesty of the claim and the menace that are here set up, is indeed hidden from those that are without; just as, according to 2:14, the hidden wisdom of God is also utter foolishness to them. Therefore, we are concerned with the new negation that is here visible; hence not to criticize the world, nor to raise oneself above it, not to distinguish Christians before the heathen. Christians cannot and ought not to go out of the world (5:10). Consequently, the question is to enforce the right of God. That is what is to happen in the Christian Church. That is the place in the world (in the world) where the right of God, and therefore accusation and judgment regarding the wrong-doing of man, come to light. Be it further noted, that this accusation also is not directed in moralizing fashion against the individual who has transgressed. It is directed against the Church, as such, and runs: It—the Church—is not what it yet is in Christ! It does not know instinctively, that it must, not out of pharisaism, but simply as a matter of order while lamenting the necessity, cut off from its body such a member as the person guilty of incest (5:2); not in order to anticipate God’s judgment upon him with its own hands, but so that God’s honour here in the flesh, so far as in it lies, will not be stained (5:5). And it does not know instinctively that, without confusing heavenly and earthly things, it may not calmly look on while its members appeal to a right and a judgment which it, the Church, cannot recognize in their dignity and validity with all seriousness. Paul says it more sharply: those who are least esteemed! (6:4). Why does it not draw the strength out of its own resources to settle such disputes concerning “mine” and “thine.” Why, indeed, have such disputes arisen among them at all? Why is it not preferred in such cases to suffer wrong than to do wrong? (6:7). To the accusation 5:3–5 is attached the express injunction, to deal with the guilty person in the manner prescribed. He, Paul, although absent in body, yet among them in the spirit, will himself execute the terrible act of purification, the delivery up of the rebel to Satan, who alone can save him. For only when judgment is executed upon the flesh can the spirit be saved in the day of judgment. The Church does not so much owe to itself as to its Master, and to that extent just to its unworthy and impossible members, to execute the Either-Or, not only by words, but by significant actions visible from afar.

In the second case, Paul gave no express injunction. But it will not for this reason be found that he expresses his opinion of what ought to be done in a less binding and urgent manner. Chapter 6:12–20 develops the principle of this section in a special glance at the first case. It sounds as if he were answering an unspoken objection when in 6:12 he again interposes with: “All things are lawful for me.” This was, according to 2:15; 3:21; 6:2, Paul’s own preaching. Does this mean that the Christian, made lord of all things, has in Christ the right, and probably the duty, simply to be a man again like all other men, to assert his personality, to satisfy his instincts, to seek his right where he finds it? Manifestly as little as God can employ His omnipotence and freedom anywhere and anyhow to be no longer God. Paul gives first two provisional answers (6:12); he says first: “All things are not expedient,” and then (to explain what he regards as inexpedient): “I will not be brought under the power of any.” The limit of my power over all is exactly where I have power over things, the point where it is not transformed into power over me. Where that happens, and that is happening in Corinth, things have just gained power over men. What passes for freedom there, is in reality slavery. But this answer is only preparatory; the decisive is now to follow: Man in his earthly existence is not only belly, he not only vegetates, he is body; he is in and with his vegetating corporeality created by God and destined for God. Is the belly corruptible; is it subject for God’s sake to the judgment of death, then the body is due to the Lord, whom God raised up, as He will also raise up us, our body, through the power of this Lord (6:13–14). Our corporeality as God’s work and property (as such, to be sure, here and now invisible) are members of the body of the risen Christ, one Spirit with it. Fornication, and all human hybris, however, signify that not only our corruptible, but also our incorruptible part is surrendered. Christ’s members become in the members of the harlot one flesh with Him (6:15–17). That is the great impossibility of unbridled human vitality, the dragging down into the dust not only of man, but (Paul did not, according to 6–15, shrink from this thought) of the Lord, His being made captive by matter, by something earthly, by a thing. The authority of God may not be threatened; it is that to which our power must set iron barriers. And it is threatened when man persists in thinking that he is permitted to follow his vital impulses. Christ’s right over us and consequently Christ Himself are in that case subordinated to the world’s right. That Paul actually saw this danger of sexual license in a specially revolting form, is from his “Flee fornication” (6:18) very clear. But the quite special accentuation of this remarkable passage unmistakably emphasizes what is fundamental: We are in no sense to regard our earthly existence, our body, as an opportunity to exhaust our vitality. We are not our own masters. “Ye are not your own.” Rather are we dearly bought. We belong to Another. We have a Master. The Holy Ghost dwells in us; we are His temple. To praise God with our body and with our spirit is the purpose of our existence (6:19–20). Hence the protest and the demand which Paul made (5:1; 6:11). It must be clear how and to what extent this section with its peculiar severity, with its occasional passages of mordant incisiveness, especially at the end, is sensibly connected with the preceding one. The flaming sword, “from God,” which was there unsheathed as the Christian truth against the religious velleities of the Corinthians, is raised here accusingly and menacingly over their natural life, in which they feel secure or even strengthened by the Pauline “All things are lawful for me.” Christianity brings not peace but unrest into the natural life; it transforms it into the members of the body of the risen Lord, which, as such, shall be sanctified. Against the life urge of man, Paul opposes the unassailable truth that he cannot do what he wants: the imperious question, whether and how in his actions he will honour or dishonour the Lord. A hand has been held out to man which will not let him go. Paul does not pursue this theme further. It is not an independent theme, but a paradigm like the preceding. Again, from a new angle, something has become visible in outline, of what he will, in chapter 15, proclaim as the Resurrection of the Dead.

§ 3

Chapter 7 constitutes a section by itself. An unspoken question is in the air, just as in the immediately preceding case. If, then, man in Christ is forbidden to expend his vitality; if the sphere of sexuality is that in which the danger is particularly great of his doing so; if, then, for the sake of God’s honour, it is just here that we must remember the phrase “All things are lawful unto me” has its necessary inner limitation—must, then, the struggle against human wilfulness and presumption not also and perhaps mainly become a struggle against all sexuality, a struggle against marriage? For what distinguishes the captivity in which man and his heavenly Lord are involved through fornication from that which holds sway even in the orderly sexual relations of civic life? Is it worth while, then, when once the sanctity of the body created by God, and destined for God, its waiting for the resurrection, is known, to halt just at this point, and be indulgent? That was the question which was obviously more or less energetically denied by one of the many sections in the Corinthian Church. Sexual abstinence was recommended and practised in marriage according to 7:3. According to 7:12–13, marriages were dissolved where one of the partners was not Christian, and virginity was proclaimed (7:25 et seq.) as the Christian ideal. The all-embracing tolerance with which obviously the majority of the Church let things run their course was confronted by the rigorism of a radical-ethical group. We shall meet their traces again. In dealing with them Paul was not in an easy position; for there can be no doubt that, so far as he was concerned, he was in practical agreement with their trend of thought. He might perhaps repudiate and oppose their motives, their theology, but he could not say no, at least for himself, to the results of their deliberations. “It is good for a man not to touch a woman,” he begins by saying in 7:1. Temporary sexual abstinence in marriage seems to him advisable in order to gain time for prayer (7:3), and in the impossibility of entirely keeping it he sees plainly incontinence. To him, marriage is a divinely ordained condition only in so far as it is a means of avoiding adultery or “burning” (7:5; 9:26). To refrain from divorcing an unbelieving wife he ventures to recommend as his own, not as the Lord’s command (7:12). To marry is no sin, but whoever does so is inviting trouble, which Paul would gladly spare him (7:28). He that is married is forced to care for the things of the world, and how he may please his wife (7:33). He that marries does well; but he that marries not does better (7:38). Happier is a widow who does not marry again, in his opinion (7:40). And Paul’s concluding words to this very last sentence run: “And I think also that I have the Spirit of God.” All this betrays a fundamentally different sentiment from that which prompted Luther to describe the “sacred” state of marriage as a state and order altogether pleasing to God. No, here sexuality is manifestly under the heaviest shadow and suspicion, and Paul’s personal opinion is that, in order to seek the honour of the Lord, it is better to remain single (7:31–35). Nevertheless, as an apostle, as a responsible witness of revelation, he did not say yes to the tendencies of that ascetic school. He contented himself by emphasizing through his public example all those injunctions to the married: “for the fashion of this world passeth away” (7:31). Moreover, if one is married, he can only be married as if he were not (7:29). A last remnant of freedom, a last glimmer of consciousness of being neither man nor woman, nor a sexual being, must also be kept alive in marriage as the retrieved recollection of the corruptibility which governs this life, if it is impossible to shape one’s life entirely in the light of such a recollection. In so far as the chapter emphasizes this “inner-worldly” asceticism in its acutest form, it is to be regarded as a simple supplement to chapter 6 But in its main intention—and here Paul is writing formally against himself—it also designs to expound something else, namely: not a justification of marriage (which will be found here no more than a justification of the State in Rom. 13) but a warning against the hybris of sexual asceticism (just as Rom. 13 is a warning against the hybris of revolution and nothing else).

Sexual abstinence or celibacy is, in Paul’s view, a gift of God, a condition that is desirable, but only to be bestowed by God. Above his own well-founded opinion on this matter, and against the enthusiasm of those who made the matter into a principle, Paul also employs here the words “from God.” So that not even the opposite of sensuality, not even asceticism, may be elevated into any principle that infringes God’s sovereign right, into an intrinsic truth. “Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God” (7:19). It is God who stands in the way of the licentious, but it is also God who stands in the way of the radical moralists. “Let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God” (7:24). “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called” (7:20). Can there be any worse presumption than to disturb this order under the pretext of designing to serve heaven? Regarded from this side—we have thrown the other side into strong relief—this chapter also falls into line. It makes it clear that the severity of “from God” applies not only to the wicked, but also to the good and the “unco guid”; that the meaning of the goal to which the whole Epistle is moving is the glory of God and really only the glory of God.

§ 4

The next perceptible unity is comprised in chapters 8–10. The subject of which Paul speaks in 8:1, and to which he reverts in 10:25, is the dispute raging at Corinth around the question whether and to what extent a Christian is permitted to eat flesh that has been slaughtered for pagan sacrificial purposes and subsequently sold in the market. An emphatic negative was confronted by an equally sweeping affirmative opinion and practice, the self-consciousness reposing on the freedom of their conscience of some, the irritated and wounded susceptibility of others. The practical counsel that Paul gives is found in 10:25–28; its purport is not to inquire over-anxiously into the origin of publicly or privately offered food, but emphatically to reject it once its origin from a heathen temple, without any specific inquiry from others, has been established. We are dealing with a certain meditated and noteworthy proposal to discover some sort of a path between freedom and constraint of conscience, or the conscience temporum ratione, similar to the more or less peremptory or cautious pastoral advice with which we have become acquainted in chapters 5–7. But Paul did not write either chapters 5–7 or chapters 8–10 for the sake of these practical injunctions. Each time the way is more important than the goal, or rather the way, the real teaching on which the imparting of these counsels is based, is the real goal of this section. Thus here too, it is as if Paul took a sponge and sponged out all the advice he had just imparted, when he writes in 10:31, “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” That is the goal of this section.

The front upon which he fights in these three chapters is directed altogether specially against his own followers in the Church; for it can scarcely be doubted that the conception to which he appeals here as a warning and corrective was fundamentally his own. We have seen how, in chapter 7. Paul wrote to a certain extent against himself, against the experiment of sexual abstinence embarked upon by a few in Corinth, which, for his own person, he quite unequivocally regarded as right. Here, in chapters 8–10, in the case of antagonism between a free and a legally emasculated and solicitous Christianity, Paul must feel much more concerned, and this time far in excess of the mere personal equation. The whole ninth chapter would be incomprehensible if Paul had not obviously felt at one with the Corinthians who thought freely and untrammelled upon this question. They were certainly not identical with the people who were in agreement with him regarding the subject dealt with in chapter 7. Paul, however, is the same person who there expressed as his own personal opinion the unambiguous sentiment: “It is better not to marry,” and here the freedom of the Christian conscience from all pettiness and restriction. Independent, wilful, and regardless of the reproach of inconsistency, he plunges with his opinion, straight through the various camps into which the Church was split up, indifferent whether he appears now as an ascetic, now as a man of the world. He has his own programme and his own way. We do not know whether the ethical radicals of chapter 7 also appealed to his name; it may be. What is certain is that in chapter 8 he stepped into the camp of his own, the real Pauline, people. It is a question of freedom (9:1, 19; 10:29) of power (9:4, 12) to do or refrain from doing this or that; and 10:23 takes up again with due emphasis the theme of 6:12: “All things are lawful.” The question he is discussing is the freedom created in Christ, the power conferred upon him as an apostle, which Paul quotes in the ninth chapter as an analogy, and the whole Epistle to the Galatians testifies how vitally important this freedom was to him. We find in 8:4–6 a short description of the fundamental standpoint which had been adopted by the Pauline Corinthians and approved by Paul himself. Their objection to the rigorous Christians in the matter of meat offered to idols was profound and fundamental; “an idol is nothing … and there is none other God but one” (8:4). With the hypothetical, yes, even with the real, existence of many gods and lords in heaven and on earth, Paul is, indeed, quite prepared to reckon: “For though there be many that are called gods,” verse 8 expressly states. But 8:6 majestically continues “but to us the one God the Father, of whom all things, and we in Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom all things, and we by Him.” It will be noted that the word “is” relating to God and Christ is missing from this sentence in the Greek. The gods exist: the one God, the Father, does not “exist.” In place of “to be” or any other predicate he uses with proud satisfaction the word hēmin—he is God “to us,” and the character of His relations to the world and to us is indicated by the prepositions “of whom,” “in whom,” and “by whom.” This evinces an insight which is not less important because, like the expression “things which are not” (1:28), it is clothed in philosophical language and was at least not alien in form to the deeper conception of his Greek contemporaries. It might very well have been that Paul used here the language of his Greek followers rather than his own. What remains valuable to us is that he was able to say here what he wanted: the fundamental (like the distinction between being and non-being) distinction between the gods and our God, the God, Father and Lord, who has the power to command is: in the world, in the world of existing things are the former: the latter, the one revealed to us is the origin, the Creator of all things. But what did Paul mean here? He omitted to complete the antithesis. We can only guess what he meant by the following: According to 8:7, there were in Corinth certain persons who had not yet broken away from familiarity with idols, although they were Christians. They had not yet grasped that shattering distinction between God and idols. They were still peering timidly into the world, at things existent, at the fact that idols, at least, exist; the words “to us there is but one God,” although they even uttered them as a Christian confession, had not yet availed to depress the idols into the sphere of relativity, in which they, in spite of, nay, because of, their existence, must appear to be as nothings. They were still reckoning with them as with powers which could at least compete with God. The pagan-sacramental sphere was repugnant and dangerous to them, but must still be taken with religious severity, and, precisely because they continued to take them with religious severity, they appeared to them repugnant and dangerous. Hence the meat offered to idols was to them real meat offered to idols, repellent as such, and a serious matter. Their Christianity still consisted essentially in a convulsive tension between the regard fixed on God and the regard fixed on idols, between pure and impure, between pious and impious acts. To eat meat offered to idols would be for them a violent and illegitimate disturbance of the tension, an invasion, a relapse into the necessity of idols and lords, a stain on their consciences. Paul’s attitude towards them is plain enough: the “familiarity with idols” is broken. The glance fixed on God, and the distinction between Him and the other gods, has wrought such a devastating effect that the glance fixed on the latter loses all significance; if they exist, they do not compete with God. The tension between them and God is so radical, that all struggle and convulsion can cease. They no longer even count in their relation to God; the pagan-sacramental sphere has ceased to be dangerous, because it is recognised as merely profane. There is no such thing as meat offered to idols; there is only ordinary meat. Why should it not be bought and eaten? Paul later indicates all this incidentally: “All things are lawful” (10:23) only because, according to 8:6, all things are from God the Father and all things are by the Lord Jesus Christ. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof (10:26); over Him the gods have no dominion. We can eat, drink, and do whatever else, all to the glory of God (10:31), when we know, according to 8:5, that we are created in Him and by Him, by the Lord Jesus Christ. This therefore is the real Pauline opinion about sacrifices to idols—his standpoint, so to speak; just as respecting the subject of chapter 7 his opinion was that it was better not only for him, but for everyone, not to marry than to marry, if that were possible. Nor has Paul, here, cheaply surrendered his own opinion upon the matter to another and more arresting consideration. Instead, he proceeded first to support it in the ninth chapter by a rather far-reaching analogy: He, Paul, also knows what it is to do this or that for the sake of the self-consciousness and right of a free conscience through God. Towards the Corinthians, and in this case especially towards the strict among them, he feels with pride that he is, what no one else can be to them, the apostle (9:1–2). Appealing to this fact, and to the fact that he has seen the Lord (9:1), he proceeds to shatter all criticism of his attitude (9:3). He claims the right to do what he likes with regard to eating and drinking, and to found a family after the example of Peter and the brethren of Jesus (9:5–6). He claims, above all, the right to be supported by the community instead of earning his own livelihood (9:7). To the soldier his pay, to the vine-grower and the shepherd their share in the results of their labour, and “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn!” In hope, i.e., not in vain, shall the ploughman plough and the thresher thresh as God has ordained (9:9–10). “If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things” (9:11). Just as, according to the law of the Old Testament, the priests and their assistants were permitted to partake of the sacrifice, so has the Lord ordained (Paul might have recollected Luke 10:7: “The labourer is worthy of his hire”) that they who preach the gospel should live by the gospel (9:13–14). If he has made no use of this right to reward, no one at least is entitled to minimize the glory, the justifiable pride which he gains by way of reward for his voluntary activity—he seems to mean in the obscure, perhaps textually mutilated verse 9:15. So far the analogy is intended to show the reader that Paul also knows the meaning of permission, freedom, having the right, having control of extensive and delightful worldly possibilities. But the meaning even of these three chapters is not just the continuous enforcement of the Pauline standpoint. The line which we have so far followed is strongly intersected by another, and the latter remains determinative and victorious. Stronger even than in chapter 7 respecting his particular opinion of marriage, it is here shown that even his doctrine of freedom, however profound and intimately bound up with his gospel, also has its limits; that an inflexible Pauline dogma does not exist so far as he, its author, is concerned. This manifest, temporary self-suppression, this subdual of Paul by Paul, this shaking of his own standpoint to its very foundations looking to the object of this standpoint, that is what makes this chapter, after Rom. 14–15, most particularly important and significant. The decisive thing that Paul has to urge against himself and his school transpires at once from the three first verses of the section, 8:1–3, where he calls knowledge the proper standpoint from which to regard offering meat to idols. We all of us have this proper standpoint, he says, somewhat ironically, perhaps quoting a letter addressed to him. In verse 7 this pronouncement is supplemented and corrected by the other: “not in every man is this knowledge.” Here, in verse 1, the fact that all have the gnosis, the knowledge, contributes, at any rate, to place the gnosis, despite its incontestable correctness, in a somewhat fatal light immediately. A standpoint that “we all” have is apt for this reason, whatever its nature may be, to become a questionable thing. “Knowledge puffeth up,” he continues. How, it may be asked: the opinion that there are no gods, the opinion that there is no God but one? Yes, undoubtedly, precisely this opinion! This opinion, too, this standpoint like every other (4:6, 19), Paul shows here—that what he had to say generally in the first chapter about the religious sections in Corinth was inspired by a spirit of impartial severity. An unnatural and arrogant puffing up of men is everywhere apparent where an attempt is made to set up an opinion as true in itself, to enforce it, to assert it continuously, unmindful of its object. Not that in the least, even were it a thousand times truer! Precisely not a knowledge in itself! Not a firm and consistent knowledge that has become unshakable, not a gnosis that by virtue of its own gravity now stands square with the dignity of its own inner righteousness, and thus, in the last resort, for its own sake; not a mere belief that we possess knowledge (8:2), not an idea that on this point we have settled and finished and thought out the matter to the end. Else knowledge, this high and serious matter, were no longer knowledge, and whoever regards it as such has not yet understood, as he ought to, that word “Love edifieth” (8:1). The great theme of chapter 13 appears here for the first time. A glance at 8:3 shows that here at any rate we are concerned with the love of God. In this connexion love must at any rate mean devotion of the subject of knowledge to its object, objective reality instead of subjective, severity not towards one’s own conviction (which would be the knowledge that puffeth up itself and can be no real knowledge), but severity of interest for that which, in one’s own conviction, might perhaps appear to be really against it; severity of the gravity and dignity of truth, which resides not in man but in God, the severity of frankness and humility, in which God, the true God, known as distinct from all other gods, rejoices less to be understood as Object, than in allowing Himself to be understood as Subject, that He is right and not man. This love (in knowledge) edifies, says Paul. It is the positive element, the truth in all knowledge. Where it is (8:3), man is known of God, and God Himself enters as the positive element, the truth in knowledge, and makes it, if not fertile and creative, as we should doubtless like to see, yet solid and significant, judicial and teeming with imagery. Cogitor, ergo sum, “I am thought of, therefore I am,” it may mean then, and this cogitari, this “being thought of,” its logic, consistency, and certitude will prevail over the knowing man, although, indeed, just because the cogitare, the self-thinking, with its logic about it and from it, in new and other newer forms can only come to naught, even if our subjective knowing manifestly continues to consist of a series of broken beginnings apparently talking into the void. God is then true in this cogitor, this “being thought-of” (by God), and all men with their cogitare, with their self-thinking, are liars. It is not difficult for us to recognize here in a new shape the fundamental idea of the first section, chapters 1–4 especially the pneumatological doctrine of that vital sub-section 2:6–16, except that now it is even more distinct than there; that Paul is not perhaps thinking of building his own theology with his “from God” and defending it against the other people, that he rather sees this flaming sword turned against himself and those who march with him as much as against anybody. The execution of the “diastasis” between God and man, the discovery of the unheard-of change of subject and object into what is called Revelation, signifies for him not, as in a well-known theological work of our time, the criticism of this or that, but the crisis of all theology, including the best, and including his own. From this standpoint, therefore, from that of Love, or what is the same thing, from the standpoint of the Knowledge of God, in which God is subject, he will now set limits to his own bold, and to him so vitally important, doctrine of freedom.

§ 5

We shall perhaps best follow him first in the interim discussion of the ninth chapter, as the conclusion of the eighth chapter, verses 3–9, although placed at the beginning, is actually nothing less than the preparation for that confession (10, 25 et seq.) which, apart from the concluding words, crowns the whole. The discussion, in the ninth chapter, of apostolic freedom, is first (9:12) abruptly interrupted by the sentence, “Nevertheless we have not used this power!” He repeats himself at the commencement of verse 15, and, after that somewhat obscure intermediate sentence, in 9:16, lays down the foundation: the preaching of the gospel yields me nothing, not even glory, let alone the reward that might at least be reserved to a voluntary worker. Constraint, necessity, is imposed on me: woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! If I did it on my own deliberation, I should expect a reward, I should have the right to make use of that freedom: but if I do it in despite of my own resolve, then I am only entrusted with a dispensation (9:17). My reward consists in having no reward (9:18). That is the limitation which Paul sees drawn around him as an apostle. He hears himself called to do what he (6:19) calls upon others: “Ye are not your own.” Thou livest not in thine own business: thou dost not bear the tidings, but the tidings bear thee; it does not need thee, but thou needest it; here thou hast no right to enforce, but here right is enforced against thee. Or, to put it in the words of 8:1–3: “Not thou has known God, but God knows thee.” That, as we saw in 1:1, he is an apostle by the will of God, and not by virtue of his religious talent; that he did not find God, but God found him and set him on his path, took him captive, entrusted him with his stewardship, without making any covenant with him, without making him promises for his person, simply as the Lord who can command, as a compelling necessity (9:16)—this fact now finds expression in the fact that while in possession of his freedom he is bound, while in possession of the fullest power he is obliged to abstain. It is, in fact, the freedom and power of the apostle—that is, the freedom and power bestowed upon him by God, and not his personal freedom and power. 9:19–23 describes what this means for him: it means that as the holder of his office he must everywhere and always be just what he is not as a man. Why? Because he has to discharge his office towards other men. And, because they are other men, whether he likes it or not, they are always just what he himself is not. If he wanted to assert himself, he could not discharge his office. Constraint is upon him. God is in the scheme with His right. Upon this is shattered his human right to self-assertion, as thus: to become a servant, to become a Jew, to become a man under the law, perhaps even to become a man without the law, to become a weak man, to become all things—wherefore? In order to win, in order to save, in order to carry out the office committed to me, which is more important than my person and its justifiable claim upon life, in order not to lose my own share in the gospel (9:23), in order that, while I may be preaching to others, I may not wear myself out and become a castaway (9:27). The metaphor of the runner in the race (9:24–26) illustrates what he means. A victorious contest is impossible without self-discipline! Consequently, because Paul is such a runner in the stadium, not by his own, but by God’s will, not for a corruptible, but for an incorruptible crown, limits are set to his freedom, and hence he will not do everything he is undoubtedly permitted to do.

The tenth chapter is obviously connected with 9:27, where Paul threatened himself: “What if I, although an apostle, and as an apostle, should come to grief?” This would happen, he opines, if, perchance, I should exercise any other freedom than the freedom of God which imposes limits to my freedom. If that be done, if you Christians of Corinth, with your human knowledge and the laxer practice that goes with it, perhaps do this, then you will become like the people of Israel in the wilderness (10:1 et seq.) who, in spite of the most wondrous proofs of divine grace, found only the slightest portion of God’s favour. What, then, was their case? They lusted after evil things; they ate and drank; they whored and tempted the Lord and prayed to idols, and, instead of favour upon favour, punishment upon punishment began to assail them. But that is not the meaning! Might not the meaning of freedom have been something like this: That in face of this purer, deeper insight that God alone is God, the idols in the world are again invested in their rights, quite harmlessly and in the joyful consciousness that they are not dangerous, that to the pure all things are pure, that all things are lawful? Might not this have been the meaning of, and the way in which we are to interpret, the wonderful Pauline doctrine of the sovereignty of God—of the unconstraint in which His children may and will serve Him in the midst of the world, of the free and self-confident flexibility of the Christian conscience? Might it not be possible to discover an excellent Pauline foundation for the despised service of the world and idolatry, and then, at any rate, to be “free” and call oneself a Christian, but as a “free” Christian to come to grief most ignominiously? Paul does not say that this is the case with the Corinthians, but he warns them: “All … were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea,” he says, with a happy allegorical touch, in 10:1–2, and we are reminded of 8:1: “We all have knowledge.” Christ, with His spiritual meat and drink, was in their midst, 10:2–4 states bluntly—but 10:5: With many of them God was not well pleased … and they were destroyed of the destroyer (10:10). Therefore: “Let him that thinketh he stand take heed lest he fall” (10:12). Obviously, what temptation is, the claim to dominion of a world hostile to God, offered, not to its own children, but to God’s elect, with all the awfulness of backsliding and getting lost that lurks behind it, they do not yet know. God’s faithfulness alone is a match for the force of this claim. It is above the secular power, and, when temptation comes, it provides a way of escape for its own, so that they are able to endure and conquer it (10:13). It is just God! Therefore, flee idolatry! (10:14). The word was uttered in 10:7. Paul does not spare his readers hearing it again. Only by virtue of God’s faithfulness is it true that the pagan-sacramental sphere, which they enter when they buy and eat flesh that has been offered to idols, is not dangerous to them because it is profane. Merely by virtue of their human knowledge this is not true. What the Corinthians are thinking of, their consciousness of freedom and superiority, does not protect them from idolatry, from the reality of temptation, to which only the quite other reality of God is superior. Paul appeals to the reader’s intelligence, to his discriminating capacity (10:5). The Lord’s Supper which Christians celebrate or, more strictly, the reality of God which is designated by the Lord’s Supper, or, according to 11:26, announced thereby, is living communion with Christ (10:16), (and, as 10:17 shows, Paul immediately identifies this with their living communion with one another), just as the sacrifice in Israel designated, preached, and guaranteed “the communion of the altar” (what is meant is the community of those sacrificing upon the altar) with God. What, however, is the communion into which they enter who sacrifice to idols, or even only sojourn in the whole sphere of this sacrifice, in the incense of the pagan world of religion? Certainly, meat offered to idols is nothing in itself, and the place whither it is brought is also nothing in itself. In uttering this warning it did not perhaps occur to Paul to take the pagan world of religion seriously as a magical element in nature (10:19), but that sacrifices are here offered to devils and not to God—that, at any rate, is something. It goes without saying that Paul was familiar with contemporary ideas and customs, especially those relating to sacramental eating and drinking: as, for example, the wholly secular banquets which were expressly and solemnly arranged under the auspices of Serapis, Anubis, Jupiter, and Hercules (details of which are quoted in Lietzmann’s commentary on these verses). But I do not believe that this contemporary historical interpretation can supply the clue in the understanding of the passage. Paul was quite serious, whatever he may have thought in concreto (and he was, of course, thinking of perfectly concrete things), when in 8:5 he said: Not idols as such and idols’ meat as such, but gods and lords exist. The devils are the invisible, but extremely real, world powers, from whence came the temptation to which the majority of the Israelites succumbed in the wilderness, and the strength of which even exceeds the strength of Christians. These world powers constitute the meaning, the object, and the reality of pagan idolatry. Whatever its gods are called, paganism is the worship of devils, the religious veneration of world spirits and world forces instead of God. To be in contact with this atmosphere and not to be severed from paganism, that which the Corinthians cherish and prize as their freedom, may, regarded objectively, be communion with devils every time, and the subjective element, their human knowledge, will not prevent its actually being so. Then the comrade of Christ becomes the comrade of devils; blind just because of his knowledge, upon which he builds, he falls into their hands. Subjectively one may be an absolutely honest Christian, full of the most sincere confidence in his pure conscience and in the “all things are lawful for me,” and objectively may serve the devil as long as he lives, and will and may not once observe it just because of his certitude! And then arises the Either-Or which Paul sketches in 10:20–21. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils; ye cannot be partaker of the Lord’s table and of the table of devils. Ye cannot. If you do so—and what guarantees you against doing so? your freedom perhaps!—then the cup and the table of the Lord become nothing but lies, nothing but Greek religious magic, like others may also have. In the formula “Christianity and …” lurks betrayal of Christianity, backsliding and perishing. In the face of this threatening danger, it is not the free disposition of man that is the abode of the real, the sacred freedom, but the freedom alone that God has and confers. We are not to challenge God, to provoke Him to anger by presumption, by aiming to be stronger than He, by recklessly availing ourselves of our freedom, where He in His freedom perhaps just halts, and also bids us halt (10:22). That is what Paul designs to offer as food for reflection to the discriminating faculties of the Corinthians, and, indeed, of his own supporters in Corinth in particular. Is not your freedom perchance this freedom from the fear and the trembling of the man of God, who has to be faithful not so much to himself as to his Lord? If it were that, then would judgment already be upon you. If it be not that, then it cannot profess to be an unrestricted freedom.

“All things are not expedient; all things edify not,” we now read again in 10:23, as in 6:12, but on a higher plane and in a dialectically more refined connexion than there. But what is the limitation planted in freedom by God? I would not say, like Lietzmann, that 10:17, with its at first surprising emphasis upon communio—the idea of the Lord’s Supper applied to the Church—is a digression from the main thought. Rather the plain steering direct to the leading thought is the explanation of the verse. The communion with Christ is in Paul’s view not to be severed from the communion in the Church. In 10:24 occurs the same injunction that is placed right at the beginning of the similar section Rom. 14–15. Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s. Paul has already said what is vital upon this in 8:8–13. His concern for the Corinthian gnostics and what they understood by freedom then prompted him to make this further digression 9:1–10. We must now go back to those verses in the eighth chapter. Making use of that freedom has in itself no positive value. To eat questionable meat does not commend us to God; to refrain from eating signifies no deprivation; to eat is no gain (8:8). But there is more than one “weak one” in the Church, who has not the right knowledge, the freedom and superiority which spring from the right conception of the idea of God. He makes the eating of that meat a matter of conscience. A regrettable restriction, certainly. As we saw, Paul does not conceal what he thinks of the matter. But how unimportant is this deficiency compared with the fact that he is a brother for whom Christ died (8:13). The use that the Pauline gnostic makes of his freedom may become a stumbling-block to him, may cause him to follow his example without the approbation of his conscience (8:9–10), and through that he will perish (8:11). What Paul thought about conscience was this: our own good conscience gives us no charter, does not preserve us from temptation, which only God can do. But in the alien good conscience, in the personality of another, as it is constituted, with its possibilities and limitations, we meet the inviolable majesty itself, the insurmountable check set upon our liberty. The Church may not be torn asunder. We know why: its communion is identical with the communion of the body and blood of the Lord (10:16, 17). Hence, he who sins against his brother by such maltreatment of another’s conscience sins against Christ (8:12). And hence, Paul continues (8:13) impetuously: If my eating is an offence to my brother, I will eat no flesh to all eternity. Mention has already been made of the pastoral advice which Paul gives upon the basis of this whole reflection (10:25–30). The conclusion of the section (10:31–33) shows that the question of sacrificing to idols, and its answer, was really only the occasion, but not the theme. Whether ye eat or drink, do all to the glory of God. With the vexatious modern idea that the whole of life, including eating and drinking, must be, and can be, a service of God, this, of course, has nothing to do. Paul is not concerned with eating and drinking and the other activities of man, but with using or not using the freedom that is founded in the knowledge of God. What is done in the freedom of God, really in the freedom derived from God, in the knowledge that is no puffing up of man but is his being known of God (8:3), that is done to the honour of God. In this sense, the Corinthians are enjoined to aim at giving no offence (10:32); what is meant is that they are not, through excessive religious confidence, to be the cause of stumbling-blocks, but to be bearers of the testimony of God, and for God’s honour. But it is remarkable that Paul only says the first, the negative: not to be in the way of God through our inflated pride is what we can do for God’s honour. The sweep is immeasurably wide in these two last verses: Paul visualises his Corinthians who are just nearest to him and who have understood him so well and yet have not understood him at all, provided they will take to heart his sharp warning, standing before Jews and Greeks and the Church of God, responsible and capable of responsibility, because they know that they are not to be concerned with seeking their own profit, that which is good for oneself, be it ever so good or so spiritual or so well founded, but that of the many, and that is: their salvation. For Paul it is the same as if he had once more said: God’s cause. In this sense he wants to regard the Corinthians as his successors (11:1). Like the angel of the Lord upon the path of Balaam, the great riddle once more looms across a human path, or even a solution of all riddles. Truly, it was no bad way that these Pauline gnostics took; an abundance of truth and strength was there, but Paul’s petition points the Corinthians to the better, as well as to the worse, way. Both the one and the other must accept the meeting with God at first as the end of their path.

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The next of the four chapters which still separate us from our goal, chapter 11, stands by itself. It is a remarkable chapter not only in its first part, but also in the second. Reference is made to two details of Christian Church life, respecting which Paul has to give advice or lay down rules, 11:2–16 deals with the veiling of women in the Church meeting. The passage is perhaps one of the most difficult in Paul’s writings. Conditions of the most concrete kind, grounded upon contemporary culture and civilization, and again what are plainly incidental and individual opinions of Paul of the most concrete kind, seem to have got into an inextricable entanglement so far as we are concerned. A question, for the significance of which we at first lack all comprehension, is treated with a fullness of detail which is almost a matter for astonishment and according to a method which, for us, is quite unconvincing. We need not be surprised that a modern exegete, rejoicing in the considerable contemporary data which he assembles here in a way deserving of our gratitude, eventually groans: “The guiding ideas of the following demonstration are totally incomprehensible to us.” I do not, however, feel disposed to surrender forthwith. When we look at the matter, it is only the substance that is totally impenetrable: in 11:2–10, the meaning of the custom of veiling woman, and man going bareheaded, and in verses 13–15, the alleged natural order that man must wear short and woman long hair, a principle to which Calvin delicately objected in a sermon upon this text, referring to the old Gauls and Teutons (Op. xlix. 743). But let us take this matter as we find it, i.e. as a custom which was the definite rule then and there, and which Paul, for reasons which cannot further be established, considered to be right in itself. With such a man as Paul, the substance need not be taken so tragically, whether the intention be to elucidate its pragmatical aspect, or whether this is, as here, not the case. The assumption of the passage is that there was a disposition in Corinth to abolish the custom. This must, then, have been the expression of a tendency to make the superiority of man over woman invisible, or even to deny it altogether. Fashions are the expression of outlooks on life. In deprecating the fashion, Paul deprecates the outlook on life which it embodies. Paul’s own tenets are to be understood as the expression of an opposite outlook on life. Whoever is otherwise acquainted with Paul will not be surprised to learn that what we meet with here is also a conservative outlook on life. He is not the man to support a more or less powerful tendency designed to effect a transformation in the customary relation of the sexes. He represents the patriarchal principle that woman should be subordinate to man. It is open to argument whether this opinion is calculated to render the obscurity, that is, what is to be understood only contingently, less obscure, or whether what we are concerned with here is an insight springing from ripe wisdom into the natural limitation of human life, the significance of which goes beyond an arguable opinion. Paul expressly declares his concrete judgment upon the covering (of women) to be arguable; verse 16 teaches this, and, in point of meaning, should be compared with verses 7, 12. (“But to the rest, speak I, not the Lord.”) Whether Paul also said that from the outlook on life at the back of this judgment, is another question, probably not. But this question is not decisive. In my opinion, Paul can be understood in the main—what he means he says, although one cannot endorse the attitude towards man and woman which emerges here, as in chapter 7 with his opinion of marriage, or here, with his pronouncement upon the fashion in question. Obviously, behind his outlook on life here disclosed, there is still something else, a third something: a principle which neither stands nor falls with this outlook on life, but which finds expression for him in this outlook on life; and that is the principle that it is better, more obvious, more intelligent, in life’s relations of subordination that are naturally given, to revere the majesty of God than, out of liberal indifference or because protesting is enjoyable, to scorn this primitive, not unequivocal, not eternal, but at any rate perceptible, word of God. This passage, too, although in another sense, is a parallel to Rom. 13. Let us, then, assume as given: Paul affirms in concreto the subordination of woman to man to be a case to which that principle is to be applied, and we learn how he, prompted by that concretissimum, the veiling question, effects the application: 11:3, the metaphor of a four-runged ladder downwards: God, Christ, Man, Woman, always the higher of the lower “head.” “Kephāle,” means, in addition to head, also sum, connexion, origin, and end. It is clear that in the relation of Christ to man, that has a totally different application from the relation of man to woman. But it applies, Paul means, as much or as little as anything can apply in the corruptible shape of life and order of life amidst which we find ourselves. It is important that even in the relation between man and woman there are plain and insurmountable barriers (insurmountable at least within this world). These barriers point us to above. By their incomprehensible and yet so palpable existence, they remind us of that altogether other incomprehensible existence, of the Head of the Church in heaven, whose Head is God Himself, of the origin and end par excellence, of the first origin and the last end. In this sense, woman is to consent to her subordination to man, but man, too, shall observe this subordination, not for the sake of his own dignity, but for the sake of the dignity of the order whose representative he is on earth. The man who covers his head in the community—that is, masquerades as a woman—dishonours his Head, Christ (11:4). He forgets, not his manly honour, but the finger-post to above, which is the real meaning of his manhood. And every woman who is uncovered in the Church dishonours her head, the man, not by her rebellion against him as man, which is expressed in negligent manner, but by her rebellion against the order, which she encounters in him, by her forgetting what man signifies for her (11:5), She must have carried the neglect of manners, perhaps, somewhat further still (let her also be shorn), in order to demonstrate to herself and everybody ad oculos upon what path she was treading. If she will not do this, then let her refrain from that (11:6). 11:7–10 is a variation of the fundamental idea of 11:3: A man is to assert his manhood as the created image of God, as God’s reflection upon earth, first created, not for the sake of woman. And hence woman must wear on her head in the Church a sign of the power that is established over her, not the power of man as such, but the power of God over His creatures represented by man. The power, authority, is in fact the covering. The last words of 11:10, “because of the angels,” are difficult—what are they doing here? It was Tertullian—who was probably somewhat obsessed with such things—who first gave currency to the explanation that the angels in question were the fallen angels mentioned in Gen. 6:1 et seq., with their lust after the daughters of men, because they were fair, and Lietzmann thinks that the numerous contemporary parallels to this idea constrain us to accept this explanation, although he perceives, and himself confesses, that they “are completely foreign to the context.” The phrase “because of the angels” only fits into the context because it forms a repetition of the “For this cause” at the beginning of the verse. In that case, however, the explanation must be sought in Calvin’s direction: If women begin to masquerade as men in the Church, they thereby manifest their dishonour to the angels of Christ (the angels who serve praying believers); they make them into witnesses of the dissolution of the order of which they are guilty! And that is to be avoided! Apart from what has been said above, the explanation of the notion of the unconditional superiority of man revealed by 11:1–10 is to be sought in 11:11–12, where we are at once reminded that the same Paul (Gal. 3:28) also knows that in Christ there is neither male nor female. In the Lord, is neither the man without the woman, nor vice versa; but all things from God. The question is not one of different relation to God; compared with the great distance between God and man the little distance between woman and man is not without importance, not at all, but it is still really small, quite small, in fact nugatory. Nor is the question one of temporal order, as such, but of the divine order manifested in it—and that is twofold. In the time of Paul, Christianity was still too good to surrender itself to the sanctification of such an earthly order. Women are not to let this perturb them, said Calvin in the Geneva Chancellery: The main thing they have and enjoy! “It is a little thing that in this world we have some little superiority: for the whole is only a metaphor. A corruptible splendour!” (Op. xlix. 728). This is undoubtedly Paul’s opinion. But we are dealing with an order, that is what he means here. 11:13–15 will then, with more or less success and penetration, attempt to show how this order is also akin to nature, and 11:16 closes with the statement: in the “Churches of God” this order has so far been valid, and this ought to be known in Corinth. If we have so far rightly interpreted the whole spirit of the Epistle, we may also be permitted to place in the series this piece, this halt, which sounds this time in a very unexpected place and yet proceeds from a direction that is now no longer unknown to us, according to its critical tendency, “from God.”

And likewise, it now also asserts with the second half of the chapter. In 11:17–33, too, we are dealing with a repudiation of a powerfully flourishing type of man in the Corinthian Church, with his tendency to wilful and self-seeking assertion of his influence. It is that which connects the two halves of the chapter. Here, as there, it is, for the rest, in phenomena peculiar to religious life in Corinth that Paul sees this tendency in operation; there, in the breaking down of the barrier between man and woman, here, in the divisions, which, already mentioned and discussed in the first chapter, seem to have broken out directly in divine service, and then, above all, in the profanation, in fact the dissipation, of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Glancing at both, Paul says (11:17): Your coming together, your cultus, serves the worse rather than the better, and is become a direct danger. Into the first point, verses 17–19, Paul does not enter more closely. He foresees that from the divisions and the formation of groups, whatever their aim might be, spring the dissensions, “schisms,” which necessarily arise from party opinions emphasized with individual presumption, and he pronounces this judgment upon the Church! For this is the meaning of 11:19. The δόχιμοι, in this case: those who do not take part in these divisions will then be made manifest; the rest need not be said. The question of the Lord’s Supper comes up for discussion incidentally. Here also, a type of egoism of a simple and probably not of a merely materialistic character, but of a spiritual and intellectual nature, has spread. This meal, which has its meaning and place in the Christian Church only in the paradoxical form of an unconditional communion of all, high and low, has in Corinth developed into something apparently more refined—that is to say, a kind of festal banquet of the prosperous and probably also the educated among themselves, at which the poor must look on from a distance (11:21). Just because of this it is a profanation to make of the Lord’s Supper a Supper of Men (11:20–21), similar to the pagan religious feasts, an affair which the participants, as Paul sarcastically opines, could also settle at home (11:22a). It is despising the Church of God and shaming those that have not, he bursts out angrily in 11:22b, with the whole weight of his authority, placing himself protectively in front of the latter and in sharp antagonism to the prosperous. But then he turns over the leaf: an attack on the meal of the communion is an attack on the institution of the Lord Jesus, which he, Paul, delivered to the pure Church as he received it from the Lord (11:23). Note how the expressions “received” and “delivered” occur here, which we shall again encounter in reversed order in 15:3. The meaning in both cases is: With what has now to be said, we are dealing, not with Pauline theology, nor with information from historical sources of oral or written nature, and thus not with matters about which this or that opinion might be held in the Church of Christ, but as regards the speaker, with the word of Kyrios, the Lord Himself, and consequently for the listener with the severing alternative: for or against the Lord: “I have received it from the Lord. The Lord Himself repeated to him, Paul, what He said as the Founder of the Supper”: “in the night, when the Lord Jesus was betrayed.…” By this categorical assertion, Paul does not mean to guarantee, which would interest us, that these were the authentic words of the so-called historical Jesus. For what we call the historical Jesus, a Jesus pure and simple, who is not the Lord Jesus, but an earthly phenomenon among others to be objectively discovered, detached from His Lordship in the Church of God, apart from the revelation given in the Jesus of the Church and at first to the apostles—this abstraction was for Paul (and not for him alone) an impossible idea. The thought that Jesus should and could be first regarded by himself, in order then to recognize Him as Lord, could at most be for him a painful recollection of his former error. This Jesus, who is not the Lord, who is known after the flesh (2 Cor. 5:16), was in fact the foe whom he persecuted; he no longer knows Him. But Paul is not now reflecting on what this Jesus, who was known after the flesh, might have said on the occasion of the Supper, but upon what Kyrios Jesus, the Lord of the Church, said to him, Paul, when He made him His ambassador. The Lord does not live for him in the oldest, best-attested or most credible tradition—why should it be just the Lord who lives and speaks there?—but in His supreme present revelation to His Church, in concreto, in the herald’s commission which it has become to Paul. He reported direct from the source: The Lord Himself is the tradition. That each of the individual words in which he discharges this commission has its human earthly genesis, history, and limitation, that these words of the Lord in his mouth, received from the Lord Himself, are in his pen influenced by the currents of contemporary trends of thought, he himself would probably have at least disputed. But this again, positively and negatively, had and has the least to do with the genesis, history, and limitation, by virtue of which he, as a man living in the Hellenic age, was an apostle of Jesus Christ. Paul, therefore, does not prove, but he testifies what the will of the Founder is concerning this Supper, as it is actually celebrated in the Church. Almost at the first glance, the things he was chiefly concerned with may be perceived: (11:24–25) “this do in remembrance of Me!” Bread and wine, not in itself but eaten and drunk (where just this bread and the cup (11:26) are enjoyed in the Church), are the visible equivalents of the body and blood of the Lord, “for you,” as the New Testament (11:24–25). Wherefore these equivalents? “In remembrance; (11:26) ye proclaim thereby the death of the Lord until He comes.” Paul’s interest is not, as in a later age, fixed on the relation of element and thing, but on the action as such. Those who take part in it thereby proclaim (upon that which they receive Paul lays no stress) that they know their Lord, that, although outwardly invisible, He is immediately present with them like that which they eat and drink. In fact, they eat the bread and drink the cup of the Lord (11:27), and, indeed, of the crucified Lord, who will come again bringing with Him the end of all things, even the end of all such celebrations. Obviously what Paul means is that, during this celebration, the shadow which Christ casts over the whole of life on this side of the grave cannot be forgotten. Can this action be performed in the Church without shuddering at the great preliminariness with which this, our world, “in the night when the Lord Jesus was betrayed,” was characterized for ever? without fear and trembling before the narrow door which leads to life? Can this Supper ever be anything else than what it was at first, a farewell supper, at which the anxious look of man can only come to rest in the light beyond the grave? Is not hope, the hope of life, which is still inseparably bound up with the remembrance of the Lord who died for us, impossible where the severity of this death is forgotten? And it is just that, this forgetting just where they ought to be remembering, this unworthy eating and drinking, which is not dedicated in a serious religious spirit to the critical severity of the matter, and which is even altogether profane, with which Paul now reproaches the Corinthians. That this is so is decisively shown for him by the manner, described in 11:20 et seq., in which they have destroyed the communio of the alleged feast of love. “They are guilty of the body and blood of the Lord” (11:27). They reel drunkenly (and that not only figuratively 11:21) along the road which the other religious fellowships boldly tread, but which shall be closed to them with iron bolts, if they intend to dishonour the gift given in the death of Christ. The Lord’s Supper is a question that is addressed to man 11:28. Cross and finality speak to him there; he should ask himself whether he fares well or ill with his hope of a future life, and then eat and drink. Otherwise (11:20, the threatening tone of 11:19 returns), by not subjecting himself to this interrogation he incurs the condemnation, which he would have overcome in veritable remembrance of the Lord. He eats and drinks in his alleged Christian, but in reality paganly profane religious feast, that which must befall the world, the doom. Paul can already see this judgment operating in their midst (11:30–32): weakness, disease, death are not incidents that go without saying, not so easily understood as by later Christian ages as ordinances of God, which are to be accepted with resignation; no, gloomy proofs that even Christians are still firmly rooted in the world, that redemption is still distant even for them, that even over them God’s chastising hand is still outstretched. If we address ourselves, as we ought, to the question put to us by the Lord, and therefore enter into living hope in Him, we shall escape the judgment. May it, at least, serve us as a warning, so that we shall not incur damnation in the last judgment. How drastic is the criticism persistently applied in the First Epistle to the Corinthian Church, not only in fact on account of the special external conditions in Corinth, but obviously even more on account of the decisive criterion which Paul applies, is plainly shown by the second half of the eleventh chapter, in which he fearlessly declares to his readers that the centre of their Church life, their divine service, is a danger. Paul regarded the possibility that the Church might become empty under this threat as less evil than the other, that it might remain full of rank weeds of humanity.

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