Ten and Five: Theological Themes in 2 Corinthians
Frank G. Carver
I will glory in the cross In the cross Lest His suffering all be in vain I will weep no more for the cross that He bore I will glory in the cross.
May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (5:17).
Introduction Paul writes with passionate concern for the welfare of “the church of God that is in Corinth” (1:1). What he says and how he says it is captive to his inner drive for the integrity of “the gospel of Christ” (Gal 1:7) in the minds and hearts of the Christian community. A biblical theology forms and informs Paul’s proclamation. Christian homiletics is doing theology!
Paul wrote with power: “His letters are weighty and strong” (10:10). The secret of his power was in part that he lived in the Scriptures. His quotations from and seemingly limitless allusions to Old Testament texts make this obvious. His reading and pondering of his Bible shaped his understanding both of himself and of the situation in the church at Corinth. Paul “‘lived in the Bible’ to the point where the Bible has formed his whole outlook on how the world is and what his place in it might be.” The whole range of his Scriptures—the Law, the Prophets and the Writings—impacted his mind and heart. The language of the Psalms was in Paul’s blood stream. The Psalms were his lifelong prayer book and hymnbook.
Paul reveals his biblical hermeneutic as he interprets Exodus 34:29-35 in 2 Corinthians 3:7-18. Here he appeals to the Law or Torah, the most authoritative portion of Scripture for the Jewish community. From the prophets Paul had understood the historical failure of the old covenant, a covenant that possessed God’s glory. He had seen the consequences of destruction, death, and the exile for the people of God. Paul understood the need of the prophetically promised new covenant (Jeremiah and Ezekiel) and saw its fulfillment in a new covenant of the Spirit. With a dynamic hermeneutic of the Spirit he interpreted the realization of the covenant as coming to completion in the person and work of Christ. In Paul’s view, “the entire history of God’s dealing with mankind could be summed up by the formula ‘God in Christ.’”
As Paul reflects on the biblical text, the impact of the word of God overwhelms him with transforming insight into the living Christ, “the Lord is the Spirit.” Caught up in the raptured creativity of fulfilled hope, he writes with fresh boldness, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, . . . are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (3:17-18). Paul has soaked his mind and heart in the whole of the Scriptural narrative. He submits himself to the Spirit of God and hears the biblical witness to its ultimate end and meaning in Christ. He believed with the Quakers that “the Scriptures are profitable in proportion as they are read in the same spirit which gave them forth” and that as Scripture they are directed to its readers in every age.
Paul knows the Old Testament Scriptures, but he is also fully aware of the situation in Corinth. In this matrix, listening to the Spirit and to the needs of the church, he understands anew the Scriptures in relation to the condition of the recipients of his apostolic labors in Corinth. This is the witness, the understanding of Scripture that he brings to bear on the world of his day. We can then infer from 2 Corinthians that the key to our reading of Scripture as Scripture is Scripture itself, and that the primary interpretive stance for our proclamation of the message of Scripture is found in Scripture.
Paul points the way for the role of the Church’s sacred text in the lives of God’s people in our day: the Bible read as Scripture. Second Corinthians is divinely designed to speak to us in our personal reading, in our understanding of our calling to be witnesses, and not least, in the preaching and teaching tasks. Through 2 Corinthians the Spirit can illumine for us a transforming word from the biblical text for our people: As Wesley put it, “The Spirit of God not only once inspired those who wrote it, but continually inspires, supernaturally assists, those that read it with earnest prayer.”
This Spirit-inspired function in the context of the faithful community primarily constitutes the authority and power of Scripture for us as it has for the Church through the centuries. As Green phrases it, “What is needed most are people deeply embedded in faithful communities of discipleship, people in whom the Spirit is actualizing the Word of God and, thus for whom the Word of God is authenticated.” Richard Hays suggests that if we would learn from Paul how to read Scripture, “we would read it ecclesiocentrically, as a word for and about the community of faith.” Twenty plus years later, turning the phrase around, Hays writes, “cut off from Scripture, the church has no life and no future, . . . cut off from the church, Scripture has no future. . . . Scripture and church have a common future.”
To sum up, a contemporary hermeneutical and homiletical approach to 2 Corinthians can learn from Paul’s Spirit-empowered witness to the person and work of Christ. He applies this Christological witness under the Spirit’s guidance to every aspect of the life of the Church, to its ministry, and to the individual lives of its people in obedience to the revealed and living Christ. In the language of the Fourth Gospel the Spirit, the Advocate, makes known to us what is Christ’s (John 16:15), The Spirit will guide us “into all the truth,” and tell us “the things that are to come” (John 16:13). This means that primarily the Spirit will inspire us to know what Jesus means for us now, where we are in life and community.
Thus the Scriptures face us with what James F. Kay labels “the arduous task of interpretation” as we seek to relate the ancient text to the life of the present Church. Scripture does belong to the past as well as to the future where, “as the Scripture of the community of faith, these texts challenge us, call us to account, console us, heal us, carry promises—and therefore draw us on into an eschatological future that we can glimpse only darkly.” There is an indispensable place for the information and illumination provided by serious study of language, history, and culture relating to the biblical text, but it must be kept in its place as a tool and not as an end in itself. Its authority does not lie primarily in the results of critical research as if only scholars can hear the Word of God—sometimes they are the last to hear!
We are faced with needing a hermeneutic appropriate to the biblical text. Paul asserts that “the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (3:17). This “freedom,” as 2 Corinthians shows in nearly every line, involves inherently a Christological-ethical imperative. Thus Paul’s “model of hermeneutical freedom” is at the same time a model of hermeneutical responsibility. We cannot just take off to anywhere we happen to think or feel the Spirit leads. As James Kay comments, “what a risk the Western Church takes with its high valuation of preaching,” for it has been said “‘that man by nature is a fanatic.’”
Yet, as a famous marginal heading in the Second Helvetic Confession (1566) puts it, “The Preaching of the Word of God Is the Word of God.” For when “we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord,” God shines “in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (4:5-6). This is the power of the Scriptures when with the Quakers “they are read [and proclaimed] in the same spirit which gave them forth” for nothing “can really teach us the nature and meaning of inspiration but personal experience of it.” With the Reformed tradition at its heart, we come “to the open Bible and the Spirit who speaks from it to the Spirit”: The Christ, the one to whom the Scriptures witness, speaks by his Spirit to his Spirit within us.
In our contemporary Christian proclamation, if we do not have confidence in the Scriptures as Scripture to speak transformingly to us and through us in the Church and to the world, we need to look for another text! After all, with our historical mentor, John Wesley, we read the Scriptures primarily “to know one thing—the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore.” We look for a “way,” a journey, a life path.
As a Christian minister, as a preacher in apostolic tradition there are
Ten things I would say in a sermon series on 2 Corinthians
One: I Would Proclaim Christ as Pre-eminent For Our Christian Faith.
For the Apostle Paul, Christology, or how one understands Jesus as the Christ, was primary. He was concerned that the Corinthians would embrace “another Jesus than the one we proclaimed” (11:4). A mere word count in 2 Corinthians indicates that he used “Christ” forty seven times and “Jesus” seventeen (NRSV). There is significance to this frequency for, when counting all his letters, the title “Christ” occurs a grand total of 385 times. “Christ” was on Paul’s lips at every turn; Christology was an indispensable foundation for his life, for his gospel, and for his ministry (1 Cor 3:11)—and in his mind for the very existence and integrity of the Church of God.
Paul expresses this pre-eminence of his Christology most vividly in 4:4-6: “God . . . said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness.’” From his reflection on Genesis 1:3a, “Then God said, let their be light,’” and Isaiah 9:2b, “those who have lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined,” Paul speaks of his proclamation as “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” This “Jesus Christ” was “the image of God” in whose “face” shines “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.” God speaks and God speaks through Scripture “in our hearts.” No wonder Paul confessed that “we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.”
No matter what Paul writes about, Christology is at the heart of his proclamation and apostolic care. It is his all-penetrating and all-controlling theme: “For the love of Christ controls us” (5:14 NASB). Christ crucified and risen functions for Paul as both telescope and microscope. He looks through the Christ of his faith at everything he faces in his apostolic calling. This is true whether his gaze is lifted up to God the Father or brought down to the humiliations, hardships, and dangers he encounters in the course of his ministry.
Every aspect of Paul’s ministry takes on meaning only in relation to “Jesus Christ,” the full expression of “the knowledge of the glory of God.” From this he never wavers. Whether Paul is probing the grandeur of the work of the Holy Spirit or defining his ministry to those who look down on it with disdain, the key to each is the person of the Christ. So with the long-ago song writer,
What more can He say than to you He hath said, To you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?
Nada! Nothing!
For Paul in Christ “every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes.’ For this reason it is through him that we say ‘Amen,’ to the glory of God” (1:20) through our apostolic ministry. In the recent work of theologian Kathryn Tanner, Christ is central “for all Christian thought and life: if the divine and the human are united in Christ, then Jesus can be seen as key to the pattern that organizes the whole, even while God’s ways remain beyond our grasp.” For Paul with Tanner, Jesus as the Christ is at the heart of all that God is doing everywhere: “that foundation is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:11).
As Christians, how does Christ define who we are? To what extent does he define who you are in your own eyes? To what degree do we take our self-image from what God has done for us in him? As a minister of the gospel, where is this Jesus, this Christ in our hierarchy of proclamation, and how does he function there?
Two: I Would Proclaim the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus as Central To Our Life in God
The primary focus of Paul’s gospel was that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (5:19, NASB). In view are the entire life and ministry of Christ, his incarnate life and death, and his resurrection and resultant exaltation in and through which God is carrying out his redemptive activity in the world. In his greeting to the church at Corinth, all three designations count: “the Lord Jesus Christ” (1:2).
Paul’s theology of Christian life and ministry imbedded in 2 Corinthians comes to a climactic expression in 13:4: “For he was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we are weak in him, but in dealing with you we will live with him by the power of God.” His focus is on the mysterious and profound deed of Christ incarnate, crucified, and risen. This Christ Paul preaches for the integrity and nature of the life of both the Church and the Christian. His Christology radically transforms all he touches.
Christ was crucified “in weakness” as an actual mortal human being—one who was physically born, lived, and died-- not merely an apparent weakness as seen by the world. Yet he “lives by the power of God.” That is, the “God who raises the dead” (1:9) powerfully raised Christ from death. His death was not just a past event followed by a resurrection that canceled it. In an earlier letter Paul had proclaimed to the Corinthian church that “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (2:2).
Thus Paul could write later that “[we are] always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies” (4:10). For him the two events are theologically one complex event, an event continually present; “the Risen One remains the Crucified One and the Crucified One remains the Risen One.” But the stress is as Käsemann originally put it, “The Rising and Exalted One Remains the Crucified One.” With the apostle Paul, “Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God” (3:4).
Margaret Spufford, an English historian and Anglican laywoman lived with physical pain from an incurable bone disease most of her life. Further she had the emotional pain of her daughter’s incurable metabolic disease from infancy; her daughter, Bridget, died in her early twenties. Margaret tells of being dropped a mere two inches by ambulance men before they caught her:
. . . the effect was terrifying. All my reflexes seemed to go berserk with pain. I, who so much valued control, was completely out of control. I was screaming, not even able to stop in case my son would hear. My fingers were clenched in someone’s hair, the world ran amok, and my husband, who was there, was utterly irrelevant through the pain, He could not reach me.
Of this experience she writes that
It was months before I dared tell even my husband, who . . . knew I did not go in for pious or saccharine imager, that quite extraordinarily at that moment of unreachability, I had suddenly been aware even as I screamed, of the presence of the Crucified. He did not cancel the moment, or assuage it, but was inside it.
Later in her book Spufford seeks to come to terms theologically with her suffering. She found Job’s answer of the Creator God’s omnipotence of no help and out of integrity, as she says, would have had to hand in her ticket. She cites the example of Elie Wiesal who in the face of the horror of the holocaust, did hand in his ticket to any belief in God. She writes:
In the end, unless my image of a Creator had not been capable of transformation, by the very words of the Creed, into belief in the truth of a Creator who had himself entered into his creation to suffer with it, and to amend and redeem it, I too would have quit like Elie Wiesel. To the knowledge of the Incarnation, not to the image of an omnipotent Creator, I have clung like a limpet.
But such is not to define and circumscribe the infinite and “other” God within our doctrinal and moral certitudes, for as Augustine cautions us, “If you think you understand, it’s not God you are talking about.” As Jesus himself said, “no one knows . . . who the Father is except the Son.” Yet he adds, “and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Luke 10:22). So what we see in the incarnate Jesus and risen Christ is the key to what God is doing everywhere. This is the kind of God—the Christ of the biblical witness--we proclaim. And it is at this very point--our witness to Christ crucified and risen--where we supremely touch the holy in proclamation and meditative reflection!
Three: I Would Proclaim a New Covenant Life in and of the Spirit
I find this covenant/Spirit life expressed supremely in 3:4-8 and 17-18. Paul’s “competence,” the “confidence” that he has “through Christ to God” (3:4-5), is as a minister of “a new covenant . . . of spirit” for “the Spirit gives life” (3:6). A covenant by nature is with a people, here the age-long people of God—“Moses” and “the people of Israel” (3:7)--with whom the Church lives in acknowledged continuity.
But it is a “new covenant,” a new agreement that fulfils the eternal purpose of the God of creation and the “LORD” of the Exodus. It is “new” as “not of letter but of spirit” (3:6), for as Paul describes the life of the new people of God, “God . . . has anointed us, . . . giving us his Spirit in our hearts as a first installment” (1:21-22). If the former covenant “came in glory, . . . how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory?” (3:7-8).
Paul concludes his discussion of the new covenant life in and of the Spirit with a mind-boggling description of the quite unbelievable privilege of the Christian in community,
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (3:17-18).
We have or “we are engaged in this ministry” (4:2) are Paul’s very next words. We are graced to announce the transforming reality of this Spirit “kind of life,” a life both in the realm of and constituted by the Spirit of God as its source, whom we know best as “the Spirit of Christ” (Rom 8:9). This is resurrection life, life in Eugene Pederson’s words in which we are set free to “practice the resurrection”:
the resurrection of Jesus established the conditions in which we live and mature in the Christian life. . . . Jesus alive and present. . . . We live our lives in the practice of what we do not originate and cannot anticipate. When we practice resurrection, we continuously enter into what is more than we are. When we practice resurrection, we keep company with Jesus, alive and present, who knows where we are going better than we do, which is always :from “glory unto glory.”
It is no surprise then that Paul can write about this new “kind of life” that “from now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view. . . . So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God” (5:16-18a). And that he finally concludes his letter to the church at Corinth with “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” (13:13).
As we noted earlier, these first three theological affirmations inform and penetrate every practical and theological issue Paul deals with in the letter. These three are foundational for all else I would say from 2 Corinthians.
Four: I Would Proclaim the Way of the Cross in Christian Life and Ministry
For the Apostle, the pattern of the Christ furnishes the pattern for the life and ministry of the Christian: “you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together” (7:3). Using a conventional expression of loyalty between friends, Paul is alluding to the death and life of Christ that is integral to the dynamic of his ministry. He had hardly begun this letter to the Corinthians when he declared that “the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us” (1:5). Such were indispensible for his ministry to the church at Corinth: “If we are being afflicted, it is for your consolation and salvation” (1:6). Paul’s sufferings on their behalf as they partook of the sufferings of Jesus mediated to them the comfort of the Spirit of the resurrected Christ.
Paul could say these things because he had confidence in the “God who raises the dead” (1:9). For him the Christian’s redemptive participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is at the heart of being “in Christ.” As the essence of our relation to God, this participation permeates the quality of our living; it determines the manner of our personal relationships and empowers our ministry to others. So as we live and serve, we identify by faith with the cross of Jesus in order that the resurrection life of the Christ might be released through us into the lives of others: “So death is at work in us, but life in you” (4:12).
The classic passage for the way of the cross is 4:7-12 where Paul describes Christian life and ministry as a “treasure in clay jars” (4:7). He first expresses this in terms of “the great paradoxes of the Christian life”: “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (4:8-9). Rather than spell defeat, Paul experienced these life-paradoxes as “carrying in the body the death [dying] of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies” (4:10). He identifies his life by faith with the physical weakness displayed in the life and death of the earthly Christ.
Genuine Christian faith sees all of life taken up into the likeness of the Incarnation and the Cross. Before her “resurrection ministry” to the “poorest of the poor” began, Mother Teresa wrote of her special call, “Now I rejoice with my whole heart that I have joyfully carried my cross with Jesus.” Her unique ministry had its root in her early and joyful identification with the sufferings of Jesus.
The harsh and tragic realities of life need never be meaningless for any of us, for they can partake of the redemptive presence of God in Christ in the world. Just as Paul’s faith saw in his human vulnerability an opportunity for God, so we, by faith in his Son may open our lives to the resurrection life of Jesus. “So that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (v 10) are the apostle’s words. This is “the vocation and job description of the church.”
The “dying” of Jesus entails the resurrection of Jesus. In the crucible of life our faith is not in a half but in a whole Christ, a Jesus who remains both crucified and risen! We cannot separate the two—in either Jesus’ life or in ours. The apostle declared to the Corinthians that in his ministry to them, “death is at work in us, but life in you” (v 12). Such is the nature of Christian life and witness in the world. With the Church Father Chrysostom (344/354-407), “we bear about the power of his dying that the power of his life may be manifest.” Ministry in essence, as Paul writes later in the letter, is “power made perfect in weakness” (12:9). Just as Christ “was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God,” so we who “are weak in him . . . will live with him by the power of God” (13:4).
As a result, we Christians experience a freedom to be and a release to speak (4:13-15). Paul was convinced that we all share in the “same spirit of faith” as the Psalmist (116:10): “we also believe and so we speak.” From the biblical perspective, sharing our faith, teaching Christian truth, and preaching the Word all partake of the character of witness, which, by its very nature, demands authenticity. We are to live in the house of which we speak.
In this “spirit of faith” it is no wonder that Paul wrote earlier to the Corinthians, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2), and that he later shared his deepest yearning with the Philippians: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10-11).
Five: I Would Proclaim the Hope of Life After Death
The certainty of life after death is inherent in the unified package of our “Cross-and-Resurrection” faith: God “will raise us also with Jesus” (4:14). This is true both for us and for those to whom we minister. Paul wrote, “everything is for your sake . . . for he will bring us with you into his presence” (4:15, 14). The power of the Resurrection does not end with Jesus. It reaches the lives of all who conduct their vulnerable earthly years in the “faith-light” of the Cross. Otherwise life can be simply tragic, containing suffering without purpose or meaning.
Second Corinthians 4:16—5:10, placed within the context of Paul’s confidence in ministry, complements his great resurrection chapter in 1 Corinthians 15 when studied together. The theme of 4:1 continues as Paul returns to the ground of his courage: “So we do not lose heart” (4:16). His reason now for maintaining his confidence becomes that although his outer nature may be wasting away, his “inner nature is being renewed day by day.” He explains further: “this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal” (4:17-18). Paul recognizes the existence of realities human eyes cannot yet see, the eschatological dimension, the “not yet” of God’s purpose for his children (Rom 8:23-25), the certainty of their heavenly home (5:1-10).
In contrast to our present temporary and destructible earthly tent, Paul declares that “we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (5:10). Here he has described in a threefold manner this future hope when “what is mortal” will “be swallowed up by life” (5:4) in the resurrection body. For the fulfillment of this hope, God has been preparing us all along: “for this very thing” he “has given us the Spirit as a guarantee” (5:5).
This hope, guaranteed by our walk in the Spirit, is our confidence even “while we are at home in the body, . . . for we walk by faith, not by sight” (5:7). The connection between this life and the next for Paul is real, personal, and spiritual, for he grounds the certainty of our hope in God’s own work evident in his own present life and displayed in the lives of the Corinthians.
Paul’s hope prompts him to state the supreme motivation of his life and ministry as “whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him” (5:9; see Eph 5:10). This leads to his expression of another dimension of life after death, mankind’s final and absolute accountability to a holy God: “For all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil” (5:10). Paul here brings to bear “an explicit warrant for moral action.” As in life, so also in death we proclaim not half a gospel but a whole gospel for all—both continuity of and accountability for life, for our proclamation includes our accountability to God for the ethical and spiritual quality of our living. Paul seeks “to please him” both before and after death (see Phil 1:20-24).
The reality of divine judgment as an integral part of our Christian hope leads us into our next theme.
Six: I Would Proclaim the Final Triumph of the Holy
Paul is more at home with us Wesleyans than he is with some Reform theologians in his stress on the nature and role of sanctification in this life. He expands his “aim to please” God as now in life into “cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and of spirit, making holiness perfect in the fear of God” (7:1). The expression “the fear of God” reaches back to the specific “all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (5:10). At the end, at the future consummation of our lives, we will give an account of our living as a holy people (6:14-18). For “before the judgment seat of Christ” we are each to receive “what has been done in the body, whether good or evil” (5:10).
Paul’s intention in 5:10 appears quite specific. Although we are saved by free grace (Eph 2:8), what we receive at the judgment is the resultant moral and spiritual quality of our own lives viewed as a unity. As Christians, our basic reward at the judgment is the kind of person we have chosen to be! Paul sought to eliminate the worthless in his life of service to Christ for he was convinced that there is a direct and distinct continuity between his earthly existence and the eternal one to come.
God’s judgment thus is in no way arbitrary; rather, it involves a natural retribution (11:15; Ps 81:12). The punishment of the godless is fundamentally that they will receive what they are; they are sentenced to pass into eternity as the persons they have chosen to become! Interestingly, the Wisdom of Solomon, an intertestamental writing, which Paul no doubt knew, expresses a similar view: "Therefore those who lived unrighteously, in a life of folly, [God] tormented through their own abominations" (12:23; see Rom 1:17-32). Sǿren Kirkegaard in Purity of Heart suggests that
in eternity there are chambers enough so that each may be placed alone in one. For wherever conscience is present, and it is and shall be present in each person, there exists in eternity a lonely prison or the blessed chamber of salvation.
If the biblical witness is correct that God is indeed holy, we live in a moral and spiritual universe. The holy will triumph in the end! This is the obvious implication of 6:14—7:1, called by some “a six verse conundrum.” Thus there is no “partnership . . . between righteousness and lawlessness,” there is no “fellowship . . . between light and darkness,” and there is no “agreement” of “the temple of God with idols.”
Rather, “we are the temple of the living God.” God has said of us, “I will live in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people, . . . and I will be your father, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.” We are to separate ourselves “and touch nothing unclean, cleansing “ourselves from every defilement of body and of spirit, making holiness perfect in the fear of God.”
In a moral universe the ethics of the holy are of ultimate value, as problematic as that may be to assert when we look around. The spiritual and the moral are what is most ultimately real. The sanctification of life is an eternal matter in the mind of Paul. The holy will be victorious in God’s universe. This we must proclaim if we are to have hope in this life. Grace is not cheap! In marketplace terms, our investment in a life of integrity and in a holy character pays dividends. It is “worth it all.” We are to make purses for ourselves “that do not wear out” (Luke 12:33)! Christian ethics possess the sanction of the holy, they are “the way everlasting” (Ps 139:24).
Seven: I Would Proclaim Reconciliation for All Humanity in Christ
Paul declares boldly to the Corinthians that both “Jesus Christ is in you” (13:5) and that they are “in Christ” (5:17). The implications stagger the mind, spur the imagination, and entrance the heart. The latter assertion is at the heart of our primary text, 5:16—6:1, a passage of “lyrical grandeur, cosmic scope, theological depth, and emotional appeal.” The controlling theme is that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” The key word in the passage is “reconciliation,” the central object of Paul’s Christian life and ministry: “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (5:19).
Out of the death and resurrection of Christ “a new creation” has come into being; a new world-order “in Christ” has been born. The connotations are both individual and corporate: “everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” If the background of Paul’s thinking is found in the themes of Isaiah 40—66 as some suggest, he sees the complete eschatological (end-time) expectation of Isaia to be comprehended by his term “new creation.”
The Jesus/Christ event has created a new situation, a new order of humanity has come into being, God’s future kind of people. These are folk who “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another . . . from the Lord, the Spirit” (3:18). This renewal of individuals prefigures the renewal of the cosmos—all part of the long-range Christian hope (Matt 19:28; Rom 8:19-23).
The reconciliation, the overcoming of the alienation of humanity from God through the death of Jesus, begins with an objective change at that time in the situation (Rom 5:10; Col 1:20-22). God “in Christ” has adequately dealt with human sin and its devastating effects: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (5:21).
Christ not only represented us in his life and death but also fully participated in our sin in some real sense beyond our comprehension. Thus neither the justice nor the holiness of God is in any way compromised. Paul declares in Romans that “God displayed [him] publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith” (Rom 3:25; NASB). God did this, states Paul, “to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26). We can say that with the death of Christ “God propitiates God” (1 John 2:2; 4:10).
The “world” as the object of reconciliation refers to the created world and everything that belongs to it as hostile to God and lost in its sinfulness (Rom 8:19-22; 1 Cor 3:22). Perhaps it even reaches to the cosmic proportions of all things: “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col 1:20).
In the death and resurrection of Jesus, we proclaim with Paul the advent of the new creation “in Christ.” This entails the dramatic recovery of this alienated and dislocated world by God. He has acted eschatologically in Christ and placed the world under his rule. This, Christians dare to believe!
Eight: I Would Proclaim the Sacramental Nature of all of God’s Creation
A “a new creation” (5:17) is what Scripture is all about; “a new creation is everything!” (Gal 6:15):
I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert (Isaiah 43:19).
“See, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5).
Such is constituted by the holy presence of God in his world “ín Christ” (5:17)—God’s incarnate Son. All relationships and all use of what is in God’s creation are to be kept consistent with that divine embrace; they are to be kept holy. “Be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch nothing unclean” is the Pauline exhortation at the heart of a significant passage about the Church in the world as “the temple of the living God” (6:14—7:1).
The issue is idolatry: “What agreement has the temple of God with idols?” Every thing that God had made, “indeed it was very good” (Gen 1:31). Idolatry is the misuse of all that God has placed in our world, from the material things and opportunities he has given us to the societal institutions in which we find ourselves to us as well as all the inter-personal relationships that he has graced to us. The absolute incongruity between what is right and what is wrong Paul expresses in five antithetical questions: righteousness or lawlessness? Light or darkness? Christ of Beliar? Believer or unbeliever? Temple of God or idols? (6:14-16).
God’s promise to the Church and to the Christian as “the temple of the living God” is “I will live in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. . . and I will be your father, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.” It is among his people and in his world that God lives. In the incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col 1:19). He lived and lives on the earth which “is the Lord’s and all that is in it” (Pss 24:2; 50:12; 89:11).
Therefore, as we live in God’s world, we seek to “cleanse ourselves” and to make “holiness perfect in the fear of God.” With the help of the ever-present Christ we seek to avoid all the “quarreling, jealousy, anger, selfishness, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder” as well as “the impurity, sexual immorality, and licentiousness” (12:20-21) that is prone to accompany idolatrous living. We proclaim the privilege of treating all of life as sacred for we live in the presence of a holy God whose glory fills the earth (Isaiah 6:3)!
We proclaim the sanctification of all of life and the presentation of ourselves “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God as [our] spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1). As Dean Nelson so readably reminds us out of his own life, Christians are to have a sacramental view of life.
Nine: I Would Proclaim Stewardship as a Grace
The Apostle Paul talks about money. Significant for his apostolic ministry is the collection he has been promoting among his missionary churches for the economic needs of the Jerusalem Christian community (Rom 15:22-28; 1 Cor 16:1-4; see Gal 2:10). To this project he applies “the grace of Christian giving.” His rhetorical strategy involves a play on the Greek word for grace, charis, throughout chapters 8-9 with the focus on “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, . . . he became poor, so that you . . . might become rich” (8:9 NIV; see 8:1, 4, 6, 7, 9; 16, 19; 9:12, 14, 15).
“Grace” (charis) is one of several terms of rich theological significance that Paul uses to impress on the Corinthians that their participation in the offering was integral to their very being as Christians. All the terms express a profound understanding of stewardship of material resources (8:2, 4, 20; 9:5, 12). All are informed by a theology of grace originating in the graciousness of the God revealed in Jesus the Christ who “graces” people to be gracious and generous in his name:
For you know the generous act [grace, charin] of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich (8:9).
Paul sees a living connection between giving and theology; “Christian” givers are theologians, theology has everything to do with giving, giving has everything to do with theology!
When Paul uses “grace” (charis) in direct reference to the offering itself, “grace” is a “privilege” or a “generous undertaking” (8:6, 19). When the apostle urges the Corinthians to be generous and cheerful givers, “grace” is offered as their fully adequate resource, which enables them to serve others: “God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work” (9:8; see vv 6-11).
Paul’s life and apostolic ministry were totally within the embrace of the grace of God in Jesus Christ: “we have behaved in the world with frankness and godly sincerity, not by earthly wisdom but by the grace of God—all the more toward you” (1:12; see 12:9). Paul applies this grace that he knew so well, the grace of God revealed in Christ, to the task of the collection as the measure of all our giving. Thus the entire scope of God’s revelation in Christ from the incarnation to the resurrection informs and motivates the stewardship of our resources as grace. This we are “graced” to proclaim!
Ten: I Would Proclaim the Trinitarian“fullness of God” in the life of the Church
From the beginning of his letter and throughout until the very end, Paul roots the Christian life and ministry in a trinitarian God (see 1:19-22). His greetings to the Corinthians are “grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1:2). His concluding benediction expresses his desire that the church fully enjoy the blessing of God in all its ethical implications: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” (13:13). Paul’s
final words are the mountain peak of his letter. They reflect the bright sunlight as they send forth like lightening encased in a peal of thunder the meaning of the whole. The apostle’s pastoral heart, the character of his ministry, the cruciform nature of the gospel, and the power of the Spirit of the Resurrection in the lives of even a factious and fractious people, are all here. To end such a letter in such a manner to such a church . . . simply staggers the Christian imagination.
The benediction expresses the Corinthian’s highest good in a breathtaking summary of the Christian faith: (1) the grace of Christ (2) revealing the love of God (3) by their fellowship in the Holy Spirit. Paul’s three-in-one benediction comprehends the order of the faith and experience of the Early Church. The order, Christ, God/Father, Spirit, reveals the way the gospel came to the Corinthians. This is not as yet the full Trinitarian formula of the ecumenical creeds, for it is “trinitarian in form but not in substance.” But it does give voice to “both the goal of the letter and the means whereby it is to be achieved.” With his spiritual hands thus spread over the Corinthians in benediction, the apostle’s voice sinks into silence.
“The Lord Jesus Christ” is the source of “grace”; the “love” is seen as coming from “God” and is of course brought near in “the grace of . . . Christ.” “The fellowship of the Holy Spirit,” following Paul’s normal use of koinōnia (e.g., 8:4; 1 Cor 10:16; Phil 3:10), would designate the Corinthians’ participation in the life and power of the Holy Spirit. All three phrases thus speak of the personal relationship of the believers in Corinth with “Christ” the Son, “God” the Father, and “the Holy Spirit.”
Their participation in the Holy Spirit brings to experiential reality in the life of the church the objective, redemptive reality resident in the person of Christ by virtue of his incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and exaltation (1 Cor 1:9). “The Lord is the Spirit” (3:17) indicates that the identity between the Son and the Spirit is thus a dynamic one of redemptive action, rooted in the fact that the Spirit is the life of the resurrected and exalted Lord (13:4; Rom 1:4; 6:4; 8:11; 1 Cor 6:14; 15:45).
Although the vertical dimension of koinōnia is primary here, there is “a surplus of meaning” as the term always carries with it the horizontal dimension as well (1 Cor 10:16-17; Acts 2:42; Phil 2:1; Phlm 6; 1 John 1:3). So the apostle prays for a mutuality of participation in redemption that seeks for ethical transformation in the life of the church--a truly Trinitarian fellowship. Their common experience of the one Spirit constitutes the Corinthians as the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:12-13). As they open themselves more and more to the Holy Spirit, he will bring about the perfection (13:9) Paul desires for them.
God reveals his power in a “Trinitarian” mystery. The divine economy of salvation is comprehended in terms vibrating with life—grace, . . . love, . . . fellowship—as the Church experiences them. Each term is theologically overloaded with transforming implications for the ongoing life of the Church that are as relevant to the churches in modern cities as it was in the ancient church at Corinth. All that Paul has said to the Corinthians is in essence here.
This is the tip of the shining peak of Paul’s literarily encased soul-cry for the folk to whom he gave spiritual birth. The deepest desire of all Christian ministers for the people under their care is expressed in a formula defying reason! Christian life and service is itself Trinitarian in form in relation to Father, Son and Holy Spirit. With our 18th century mentor, John Wesley, we proclaim the truth of “this awful [= awe-full] benediction.”
Five things I would not say in a sermon series on 2 Corinthians
All five of the things I would not say from 2 Corinthians flow ultimately from Paul’s concern as expressed in 11:3-4:
But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough.
All five are rooted in “another Jesus . . . a different spirit . . . a different gospel” from that which Paul had received and proclaimed and what the Corinthians had received from him—the apostolic gospel (1 Cor 15:1-11).
One: I Would Not Proclaim a Mystical Relationship With God That Minimizes an Incarnate Jesus.
Although Paul’s knowledge of Jesus as a historical figure was not his last word, he did “know Christ from a human point of view” (5:16). The name Jesus, appearing seventeen times in this letter, meant one fully human, suffering, and dying—dead and buried--flesh and blood. Paul’s reference to “the meekness and gentleness of Christ” (10:1; see Matt 11:29) is primarily descriptive of Jesus’ “gentle demeanor throughout his earthly life” including his “non-retaliation during his passion” (1 Pet 2:21-24). An incarnate Christ, a “very man,” the one that God raised from actual death, was indispensible for the apostle’s gospel.
Paul’s supreme faith-expression of this was “the face of Jesus Christ” in which God “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God” (4:6). This “theological heart of the letter,” embraces the whole gospel that Paul proclaims. In the Gospel record we view this “face” of Jesus “with unveiled faces” and are being transformed into the image of Christ by “the Lord, the Spirit” (3:18). A “Christian” knowledge of God is mediated only through the incarnate Jesus the Christ. Of the human face it has been observed that it “carries mystery and is the exposure point of the mystery of the individual life.”
Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), famous for her classic study, Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness published in 1911, was converted from agnosticism around that same period. Twenty years later she wrote that “I was a convinced Theocentric, and thought Christocentric language and practice sentimental and superstitious. . . . This position I thought to be that of a broadminded intelligent Christian.” In 1921 she came under the direction of Baron Friedrich von Hȕgel (1852-1925): She writes of his spiritual counsel:
when I went to the Baron he said I wasn’t much better than a Unitarian. Somehow by his prayers or something, he compelled me to experience Christ. . . . It took about four months—it was like watching the sun rise very slowly—and then suddenly one knew what it was. Now for some months after that I remained predominantly Theocentric. But for the next two or three years, and especially lately, more and more my whole religious life and experience seem to centre with increasing vividness on our Lord—that sort of quasi involuntary prayer which springs up of itself at odd moments is always now directed to Him. I seem to have to try as it were to live more and more towards Him only—and it is this that makes it so utterly heartbreaking when one is horrid. The New Testament, which once I couldn’t make much of, or meditate on, now seems full of things never noticed—all gets more and more alive and compellingly beautiful.
Evelyn Underhill discovered that only Christianity comes “right down to one in the dust.” The historical Jesus, resurrected from the dead as the Christ of God, became essential for her Christian faith. A non-incarnate God-mysticism was for Paul “a different gospel.”
At this point, however, I would not want to deny nor minimize the reality of prevenient grace, the work of the “hidden” Christ in the heart of every person. John Wesley defined this prevenient grace as simply: “The grace or love of God, whence cometh our salvation, is FREE IN ALL, and FREE FOR ALL.” A century earlier the Quaker founder George Fox said, “In every man there is something that is not of dust or earth or flesh or time, but of God.”
Yet I would not proclaim from Paul a mystical relationship to God in which that One who “was revealed in the flesh” and “taken up in glory” (1 Tim 3:16) is not front and central.
Two: I Would Not Proclaim a Resurrected Triumphant Lord Apart From a Suffering and Dying Christ.
Paul warned the Corinthians against submitting to “another Jesus than the one we proclaimed” (11:4). The Jesus that Paul had preached to them was plainly Jesus crucified and risen (1 Cor 15:3-4): “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:3). What would be “another Jesus” be like for Paul? The tenor of the letter and especially his references to his opponents in Corinth (12:9) suggest an interpretation of Jesus’ ministry that would deny or minimize his humiliation and suffering culminating in a death by crucifixion. They were “attempting to water down the offence caused by the cross.” Paul’s opponents objected to the nature of his apostolic ministry as one in which “power is made perfect in weakness” (12:9). Their Christ would lead them only “in triumphal procession” (2:14).
At stake appears to be a theology of the Resurrection apart from a theology of the Cross. That is, the Cross becomes only a past event to be left behind and the Church lives on in a consistent “resurrection-type” victory, which is now separated from the Cross viewed as being two consecutive events. But for Paul the Resurrection was rather “a chapter in the theology of the cross,” for “the exalted Christ still bears the nail-marks of the earthly Jesus, but for which he would not be identical with Jesus.” In Käsemann’s words the Cross was not merely “the last station on his earthly way,” for as he insists, for “Paul any theology of resurrection must not only start from Christology but also remain with it.”
Paul can be seen then as correcting a triumphalist misperception of what it meant to be “in Christ.” The implications of this “another Jesus” are far-reaching. They result, writes the apostle, in a “different spirit” and a “different gospel” from the one the church in Corinth had received from him. Authentic Christian faith may be indeed at stake.
The crucial issues are threefold both then and now. The natures of the Christian life, the Christian ministry, and even Christian salvation face a disturbing challenge from such a “gospel.” In Christian life (1) there would be such a sense of having so fully arrived spirituality that ethics are no longer an issue, they are automatic with us—what we do is therefore right. Christian freedom, the freedom to live with ultimate meaning, is misunderstood and therefore lost.
Along with this comes a triumphalist approach to human suffering and tragedy. In stark contrast, Margaret Spufford testifies:
But it is because the celebration of the Eucharist and Christ’s offering of Himself in it seems to comprehend all the realities of acute pain and death that I have not handed in my ticket. I have spoken openly here of suffering and of death, breaking my own taboos, because it seems to me that a faith which cannot comprehend these realities, and contain them within its central paradox of life through Christ’s death, is not worth having.
A contemporary author expresses the same truth: “a faith that doesn’t comprehend the reality of suffering and death simply isn’t worth having.” In a recent article in which he deals with his own illness, the writer distinguishes between superstitious and faithful prayer observing that
faithful prayer certainly may ask for healing, but it does not ask only for healing. It seeks wisdom to see how Christ is reflected in circumstances—and not just as triumphal Christ but a suffering Christ, a Christ who underwent pain and want before he attained glory. Faithful prayer then, asks not merely for healing but for patience and discernment and continuing faithfulness.
A Mennonite author, interestingly also an associate of a the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans and a member of a local Baptist Church, in a meditation on Job‘s quest for wisdom, spoke pungently of those “dark and mysterious places [in our lives] illuminated only by the cross of Christ.”
Spufford completes her thought by adding,
We have to learn to live in the tension which seems so much the crux of Christianity, in which present agony is also permeated with joy or the promise of joy. If we cannot, we are only subscribing to pious platitudes. So our own discovery that events which stretch us to the limit, and then beyond what we think we are capable of, these times of acute suffering can bring with them an insight into joy beyond rational conception, is fundamental to our growth. I can at least bear witness to some of this kind of reality.”
In a contrary or “different spirit,” some would say that true Christians have the victory, not just in and through, but also over such. Such kind of false perceptions Paul counters throughout the letter.
As for the Christian ministry (2), when Paul wrote that God “in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession” (2:14), the image for his opponents is that of a conquering Roman general on a magnificent white stallion prancing in the lead. But for Paul the image is that of a captive staggering in chains at the rear who is “the aroma of Christ to God, . . . a fragrance from death to death, . . . a fragrance from life to life” (2:15-16). The apostolic methodology of fully Christian ministry is found in the weakness of the Crucifixion and the resultant power of the Resurrection (13:4)—a “treasure in clay jars” (4:7; see vv 7-12): “you are in our hearts, to die together and to live together” (7:3). With Parker J. Palmer “the cross calls to recognize that reality has a cruciform shape.”
Christian salvation (3) is defined and determined by the person and work of the Christ, who, “though he was rich, yet for [our] sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty [we] might become rich” (8:9). It is thus that “the love of Christ urges us on, because . . . one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them” (5:14-15). Essential for our spiritual lives and basic to our service is that “for our sake” God “made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (5:21).
Paul employs sacrificial language (see also Rom 3:25; 1 Cor 5:7) to indicate that because of our sin Christ fully participated with us in our alienation from God. This was true for his entire incarnate life, not only as climaxed in his death and resurrection (see Matthew 3:15). He identified personally with us in our lot becoming “obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross!” (Phil 2:8). With James Denney over a century ago “there is something in God as well as something in man which has to be dealt with.” God treated Christ as sin, aligning him so completely with sin and its consequences that, from the divine perspective, Christ became indistinguishable from sin itself. Thus, “in the last resort, in the man Jesus of Nazareth God took death upon himself.”
In relation to our second proclamation, “Proclaim the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus as Central to Our Life in God,” there are those who seem to object to or at least somewhat ignore Pauline Christology for understanding Jesus’ earthly life and death. That is, they so "re-construct" the witness of the Gospels to the person and work of Jesus that they appear to come close to "another Jesus" (2 Cor 11:4). Their critical research into the historical Jesus centers on the great example of "love" in the life and death of Jesus stressing “the faith of Jesus” making it primarily a supreme moral example vindicated someway by a resurrection of Jesus that ushers us into a "Spirit" (“spirit”) age in some sense.
One can view Jesus’ death then primarily as a powerful metaphor for the grace of God. A Pauline text like 2 Cor 5:21 is not allowed to have its full force. Understanding Jesus' death in sacrificial terms is said to be a metaphorical interpretation made after their Easter experience by the New Testament writers. The abhorrence of many of us for a penal substitutionary atonement with its impersonal legal and transactional metaphors has seduced us into taking away much of our traditional emphasis on "atoning" as applied to Jesus' death.
In my mind, however, we do greater biblical justice to the atonement when we employ more personal and participatory categories in our thinking. How we understood 5:21 above is in line with the divine declaration in the Old Testament that “the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you for making atonement for your lives on the altar; for, as life, it is the blood that makes atonement” (Leviticus 17:11).
We stand ultimately before a mystery! But the point is that Jesus in his life and death became more than a loving example for us to emulate and interpret as we please, Jesus became sin for us in some real sense within the life of a holy God! We take the suffering and death of Christ realistically as continually constituent of who we are as those who now live in the power of his resurrection. As Paul wrote elsewhere, to know Christ and “the power of his resurrection” involves “becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10).
For these all-comprehending reasons above all I would not proclaim a triumphant Lord apart from a dying Christ, a theology of the Resurrection unbalanced by a theology of the Cross, a triumphal Christian life and ministry that is not characterized by “we are weak in him,” but “live with him by the power of God” (13:4). Christology is so crucial that I would be terrified of preaching “another Jesus” other than that of the canonical biblical witness! As William E. McCumber testified in little book published a year previous to his death in 2010, “Only the Jesus described in Scripture could do what He has done for me. A greater than He is unimaginable. A lessor than He would be inadequate.”
Three: I Would Not Proclaim a Saving Grace Independent of Character Transformation
When Paul writes about “seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ,” for him Christ was and is “the image of God” (4:4). And it is into this image, because of “his Spirit in our hearts” (1:22) that we who look openly to him in life “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (3:18). To live otherwise, is to have received “a different spirit” (11:4). The ongoing transformation of personal character is an inherent part of “a sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (11:3). Christlikeness is the goal as we “aim to please him” (5:9). The Christian by definition and nature is in the business of life-long conversion, “making holiness perfect in the fear of God” (7:1).
So in no way could I proclaim a reception of the grace of God that does not liberate us to moral and spiritual transformation: “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (3:17). I would not proclaim a salvation that is not through and through ethical (1 Thess 5:23-24). Forgiveness of sins and the cleansing of heart and life from sin and sinning (1 John 1:7, 9) are inherently related. Justification and sanctification are a unified “grace-full” work of God in Christ through the Spirit in and through our living.
Our potential for character change is beyond human description (Rom 12:1-2; Phil 2:12-13). No mere book-keeping is involved, no hiding of the human condition from the eyes of God in our walk with him! We are all “naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render account.” (Heb 4:13). We “approach the throne of grace with boldness” for there we “receive mercy and grace to help in time of need” (Heb 4:16).
Four: I Would Not Proclaim a View of Christian Living with Implications Only For This Present Life
This fully realized eschatology of “a different gospel” (11:4) has two aspects. Both partake of the oxymoron of a somewhat future-less eschatology. Both de-emphasize the future, life beyond this life, and its significance in their peculiar ways. One aspect appears positive and affirming, the other seems negative and denying. One sees the benefits of salvation fully accomplished in a “deification” of this life with no need of any future transformation—they have “arrived” spiritually. The other aspect does not sense or acknowledge the qualitative impact of this life on the next. The purpose of salvation in both is not so much moral and spiritual as it is therapeutic. Paul puts it simply, these seek to “walk . . . by sight,” not “by faith” (5:7).
In contrast Paul has two things to say. First, what is good now will be greater then: Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal” (4:16-18).
The inner renewal that is going on now will be “an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure” then for it originates in the eternal. What has begun now “in Christ” will be completed then “in him” (Eph 1:7-12); what is a matter of joy now in the Spirit (5:5) as “the first fruits” (Rom 8:23) will become fullness of joy then in the very presence of the Father. Even now by faith “we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. . . . He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee” (5:1, 5). The “temporary” will be transformed into the “eternal”!
Second for Paul, the eternal significance of the moral dimension of human and Christian existence is never far from his mind:
So we are always confident; even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord—for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we do have confidence, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil (5:6-10).
What more is there to say? Not much!
Thus for two reasons I would not proclaim a salvation that does not take seriously character transformation in this life with implications for the life to come. Present spiritual life has eternal significance because first, our present in-process Spirit enabled participation in the image of God contains the culminating promise of its full transformation into the likeness of Christ (3:18; 4:4, 6).
Second, because at “the judgment seat of Christ” our eternal fate is to exist forever as the kind of persons into which our moral and spiritual choices in this life have formed us. In our kind of world, the present cries out for future consequences, “whether good or evil.” Without eschatology there can be no solution to the problem of evil. Thus, today’s moral and spiritual character is of worth tomorrow, the quality of the future determines the value of the present. Thus I would not proclaim Christian life as of therapeutic benefit for this life alone—it has a future!
Five: I Would Not Proclaim My Inner Spiritual Experiences as Definitive for Others
Paul knew the joy of inner spiritual experience, the raptures of “visions and revelations of the Lord” (12:1). But ironically, he sandwiched the report of one such ecstatic moment between the great humiliation of his hurried escape from Damascus (11:32-33) and his unrelieved weakness exhibited by his thorn in the flesh (vv 7-10). Moreover, Paul was not even sure of the precise nature of this experience for twice he wrote, “I do not know, God knows” (12:2-3). Thus he speaks with great hesitation of this indescribable moment of intimate companionship, when for an instant he was “at home with the Lord” (5:8) within the courts of heaven itself.
Paul does not belittle charismatic experiences but always attempts to keep them in proper perspective. The influence of such experiences appears to have been incalculable for his own personal encouragement and for strength to carry on his strenuous ministry. But these were so sacred that Paul for the most part kept them between himself and his God, they were for him alone: “on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses” (12:5). At this point there seems to be those in Corinth who were of “a different spirit” (11:4) in their spiritual bravado. Is it feasible that the secret of Paul’s power in ministry lies in his hesitancy to speak of such private revelations?
Rather, writes Paul, “if I wish to boast, . . . I will be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations” (12:6-7a). As James Denney put it, “There are things too great to allow the intrusion of self.” With the great apostle, we must be extremely hesitant to mention our inner spiritual experiences. The danger is that (1) we will be exalting ourselves, calling more attention to ourselves than to Christ, and that (2) we will be speaking beyond what can be observed in our conduct and heard in our speech--the credibility of our witness is at risk!
The French Priest, Jean Nicolas Grou (1731-1803), who ministered in both France and England, devoted as much time as he could to study and writing both classic and theological works. From his writings a small volume, The Hidden Life of the Soul, was published. In it he spoke to our subject:
You must continually seek Divine Light, ask for it on every occasion, great or small, undertaking nothing without it. In the earlier stages of the interior life, it is generally very abundant. . . . You must receive this passively, letting it come and go as God wills. It is given to do a special work at the moment; and when you need it again He will renew it, but He does not choose you to claim it as a possession, or a blessing you can summon at will. The Spirit of God cannot be . . . subject to our control: you must wait patiently, certain that He will never fail you in the hour of need. It is well to make a rule to yourself not to speak of these lights to other men, under the pretext of giving God glory or of enlightening them. . . . Moreover, we waste our grace by too readily pouring it out around us. Of course, I do not mean but that you should do all in your power to forward other men in the way of holiness, but without using your personal experiences for that end.
Another spiritual light is Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) who counseled her sisters to “Believe only those who you see walking in conformity with the life of Christ.” Teresa was subject to ecstatic or extraordinary experiences, often to her embarrassment when they overcame her in public. Such things as union, raptures, locutions (words heard audibly or by interior impression), and even levitations (rising in the air in defiance of gravitation) would catch her unawares. But their only validation for her was an increase in love for God and others. She writes in “The Interior Castle” (1.4) that such favors are lost when they “fail to benefit those to whom God grants them.” Rather, they should “be delighted and awakened through these favors to a greater love of him.”
To what extent is it spiritually dangerous for us and for others to seek to instruct them from inner intimate experiences of the Lord that are meant for our affirmation and strengthening alone? Are they not pearls to be guarded (Matt 6:6)? These I would hesitate to proclaim or speak about to others, except with extreme caution.
Series Conclusion Christology . . . ! What I would proclaim from 2 Corinthians, its implications for the life and ministry, even for the theology of the Church, must be rooted firmly in Paul’s view of God “in Christ.” What I would not proclaim for Christian faith and life is anything that obscures or perverts Paul’s witness to what he sees and can be seen in “the face of Jesus Christ” (4:6). For our lives there is nothing more welcome, nothing more uplifting, nothing more transforming than the truth and power of the apostle’s proclamation:
For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus.
May our gaze never stray far from that face!
When you gaze at something, you bring it inside you. . . . It is a startling truth that how you see and what you see determine how and who you will be.
I will glory in the cross In the cross Lest His suffering all be in vain I will weep no more for the cross that He bore I will glory in the cross.
This essay was first written in preparation for “The Bible Tells Me So,” a Wesley Center Conference at Northwest Nazarene University, February 10-12, 2011, then used in a revised form in a series of Sunday School lessons at First Church of the Nazarene, San Diego, CA. The changes made have been incorporated into the present document. Dottie Rambo. Sung by Keith Beresford July 4, 2010 at SDFC. Galatians 6:14-15. NRSV is our basis biblical text unless otherwise indicated. Without mention of the specific biblical book, the reference is always to 2 Corinthians, our primary text. Frances Young and David F. Ford, Meaning and Truth in 2 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987, 63. That is, “interpretive approach.” Anthony Tyrrell Hanson, Studies in Paul’s Technique and Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 241. “Quaker Strongholds by Caroline Stephen,” in Emilie Griffin and Douglas V. Steere, ed., Quaker Spirituality (Harper One, 1984, 2005), 121. Caroline Stephen’s dates are 1834-1909. She was an Anglican aristocrat who was attracted to and joined the Quakers. The literary figure Virginia Woolf was her neice. Joel B. Green, Seized By Truth: Reading the Bible as Scripture (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007), 3. Green’s book is excellent background reading for this section. See also the earlier N. T. Wright, The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005) for another helpful discussion of this issue. John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (London: The Epworth Press, 1950 [1754]), 794. Wesley continues: “Hence it is so profitable for doctrine, for instruction of the ignorant, for the reproof of them that are in error or sin, for the correction or amendment of whatever is amiss, and for instruction or training up the children of God in all righteousness.” A point stressed by Richard P. Thompson in his paper, “Misplaced Authority: Rethinking the Role of the Bible as Scripture,” read at the March 4-6, 2010 meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society at Azusa Pacific University. Green, Seized By Truth, 164. Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1989), 184. Richard B. Hays, “The Future of Scripture,” Wesleyan Theological Journal, Volume 46, Number 1 (Spring, 2011), 25. This was a guest keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society held at Azusa Pacific University, March 4-6, 2010. See Frank G. Carver, When Jesus Said Goodbye: John’s Witness to the Holy Spirit (Kansas City, Missouri: Beacon Hill Press of Kansa City 1996), 104-105. James F. Kay, Preaching and Theology (St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2007), 120. This is another book that is significant for this section, particularly Chapter 1, “Preaching as the Word of God,” pages 7-23 Jim Kay is a Pasadena College graduate from the Whittier, California, Church of the Nazarene, and is now near retirement as Professor of Homiletics and Liturgics at Princeton Theological Seminary. Hayes, “The Future of Scripture,” 24. See Green. Seized by Truth, Chapter Four, “Methods,” 103-142. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, 186. Kay, Preaching and Theology, 8. His quotation is from Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith, trans. James W. Leitch (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1963), 424. Kay, Preaching and Theology 8: “Praedicatio verbi Dei est verbum Dei.” This Confession of Faith was published by Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575), the successor to Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) at Zurich. “Quaker Strongholds by Caroline Stephen,” 121. Eberhard Busch, “The Reformed Voice,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Volume XXIII Number 3, New Series 2002, 333, The positions taken and the use of specific texts from 2 Corinthians are based on the fuller discussions in Frank G. Carver, 2 Corinthians, New Beacon Bible Commentary (Kansas City, Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 2009. For the preceding discussion see pages 63-69. John Wesley, preface to “Sermons on Several Occasions, in The Works of John Wesley, vol. 1, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984), 105-106. Six dimensions about the Word of God are suggested by verse 6: (1) “God speaks,” (2) “God speaks through scripture,” (3) “God’s word for Paul is not dead, but alive; not impotent but powerful; God’s Word is God’s act,” (4) “Paul speaks of the God ‘who has shone in our hearts,’” (5) “God’s Word gives ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God,’” \ (6) “Paul claims that the knowledge of God communicated by the Word of God comes to focus ‘in the face of Jesus Christ.’” Kay, Preaching and Theology, 10-13, Sing to the Lord (Kansas City, Missouri: Lillenas Publishing Company, 1993), 689. Said of Kathryn Tanner’s Christ the Key (Cambridge University Press, 2010), i. Reviewed in Christian Century, August 10, 2010, 37-39, by Lois Malcom: Premise: “God gives the fullness of God’s own life to us through Christ.” “Christ is the key to what God is doing everywhere”--human nature, grace, Trinity, Holy Spirit’s Involvement. Kathryn Tanner is professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School. Jerry M. McCant, 2 Corinthians. Readings: A New Biblical Commentary, edited by John Jarick (Sheffield, U.K. Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 162. Ernst Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 67. Margaret Spufford, Celebration (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1989), 38. Spufford, Celebration, 38. Spufford, Celebration, 82-83. A limpet is a marine gastropod that has a low conical shell broadly open beneath, browses over rocks or timbers, and clings very tightly when disturbed. Si comprehendis, non est Deus. Douglas John Hall, “The Case for Faith Against Religion,” Christian Century (January 11, 2011), 31. He is writing with the objections of atheist Richard Dawkins as he says, “It is not the searching but the finding that is the problem! Too much religion is entirely too successful in finding, defining and circumscribing the Infinite and in using its convictions to denounce others. It substitutes for the essential otherness and mystery of the divine the doctrinal and moral certitudes that serve precise the nefarious ends that the atheist Richard Dawkins names. The great caution uttered in the fourth century of the common era by that North African spiritual genius Augustine of Hippo needs to be writ large over all such presumption: Si comprehendis, non est Deus.” See Matthew 11:27. Eugene H. Peterson, Practice Resurrection: A Conversation On Growing Up in Christ (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 8. William Barclay, The Letters to the Corinthians, Daily Study Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster, 2nd ed., 1956, 223. Paul gives another expression to these same paradoxes in 6:3-10. “Dying” (NASB) is probably to be preferred to “death” here as the translation of nekrōsis. Brian M. C. Kolodiejchuk. Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta (New York: Doubleday, 2007) 20. February 8, 1937 The apostle explains: “For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh” (v. 11). Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 197. Gerald Bray, ed., 1-2 Corinthians, vol 7 in Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, New Testament, Thomas C Oden, ed. (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press. 1999), 211. Paul’s statement of confidence in 4:1 looks back to 3:1-8 for its basis, but in 4:16 it looks forward to 4:13—5:10. A more literal translation could be simply “receive what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.” Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, 39. As with the death and resurrection of Jesus. See Romans 6:1-5. That is, “reverence or proper respect for who and what God is.” The aorist tense of “what has been done” conceives of the ideal of judgment as a whole. For somewhat similar views see see N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 175-183, and C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: The Macmillan company, 1946). ). If our theme were primarily the nature of divine judgment there are two issues that could be discussed: (1) the role of prevenient grace in every human heart and (2) “is there yet hope?” as some in the Church have thought and think.
Quoted from Douglas V.Steere, Doors Into Life: Through Five Devotional Classics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), 148. In his edition the quotation was from pages 177-178. J. Paul Sampley, “The Second Letter to the Corinthians: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections” in vol. 11 of New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000), 1001. A recent treatment of the theme of this section is N. T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (New York: HarperOne, 2010). W. George Shillington, 2 Corinthians, Believers Church Bible Commentary, Elmer Martens and Willard M. Swartley, ed. (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald, 1998), 126. G. K. Beale, “The Old Testament Background of Reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5-7 and its Bearing on the Literary Problem of 2 Corinthians 6.14-7.1,” New Testament Studies 35 (1989), 556; see Scott J. Hafemann, 2 Corinthians, NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 243-244. I use this manner of expression to indicate that I view it as one unified event, rather than as two somewhat separately defined events, that is, I take the New Testament witness to the Incarnation seriously. “Propitiation” (KJV, NASB) translates the Greek hilastērion that can also be rendered “expiation” (NEB). The latter rendering has become popular for propitiation can mean “appeasing an angry God with an offering.” Yet apart from this handicap propitiation may preserve better than “expiation” the biblical truth that the holy character of God as well as the sin of humans necessitates “atonement.” But the terms can be employed as synonyms . NRSV has the more neutral “sacrifice of atonement.” Its strength is keeping the word “sacrifice.” First John 2:2 and 4:10 uses hilasmos similarly to Romans 3:25. In Hebrews 9:5 “mercy seat” translates hilastērion with the LXX. So a case is sometimes made for a “place of atonement” or “mercy seat” in Romans and 1 John. Interestingly last Monday I received the New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs in The Holy Bible: International Standard Version dated 2011. The translation involves some of the scholars I worked with on the NASB. The General Editor, George Giacumakis, sent me a complimentary copy. It translates hilastērion as “a place where atonement . . . would occur.” God has taken into his life that which contradicts his own holy life: “the life of the flesh is in the blood; . . . it is the blood that makes atonement” (Leviticus 17:11). Nelson is not content , however, to speak of life as sacramental, he extends the word “sacrament” to cover aspects of life beyond the Protestant two sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. Dean Nelson, God Hidden in Plain Sight: How to See the Sacred in a Chaotic World (Grand Rapids: BrazosPress, 2009), 20-21. Col 1:19. Carver, 2 Corinthians, 376. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, The Theology of the Second Letter to the Corinthians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 136. Frank J. Matera, II Corinthians: A Commentary, The New Testament Library (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 314. See Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 140-206. John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, 677. The phrase “from a human point of view” (“according to the flesh” NIV) can mean either that Paul once knew Jesus humanly or that he knew him through worldly, merely human eyes. Pauline word order and usage prefer the latter sense. Murray J. Harris, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 668. Young and Ford, Meaning and Truth in 2 Corinthians, 249, see 248-52. John O’Donohue, Anam Ċara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 42. Margaret Cropper, Evelyn Underhill (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1958), 98. Cropper, Evelyn Underhill, 98. Cropper, Evelyn Underhill, 86. John Wesley wrote: “For allowing that all the souls of men are dead in sin by nature, this excuses none, seeing there is no man that is in a state of mere nature; there is no man, unless he has quenched the Spirit, that is wholly void of the grace of God. No man living is entirely destitute of what is vulgarly called “natural conscience.” But this is not natural; it is more properly termed “preventing grace.” Every man has a greater or less measure of this, which waiteth not for the call of man. Everyone has sooner or later good desires, although the generality of men stifle them before they can strike deep root or produce any considerable fruit. Everyone has some measure of that light, some faint glimmering ray, which sooner or later, more or less, enlightens every man that cometh into the world. . . . So that no man sins because he has not grace, but because he does not use the grace which he hath” (Albert C. Outler, The Works of John Wesley, Volume III: Sermons 71-114 [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986], 207). Outler, Works, 3:544. Quoted in Douglas V. Steere, On Beginning from Within (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1943), 38. Preceding the Fox quotation Steere wrote: “For the universal God-man that speaks in the apostle [saint] has an invisible ally in the breast of every man, no matter how deeply concealed or repudiated it may be.” Martin Hengel, The Atonement: The Origin of the Doctrine in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981 [German 1980]), 89 .
Douglas John Hall in “Cross and Context,” Christian Century (September 7, 2010), 37. His essay was in the series, “How my mind has changed.” He is apparently quoting Ernst Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 68: “The point is that the resurrection is one aspect of the message of the cross, not that the cross is simply one chapter in a book of resurrection dogmatics.” Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom, 68. Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom, 67. Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom, 82. Spufford. Celebration, 86. Margaret Spufford, an English historian and Anglican laywoman lived with physical pain from an incurable bone disease most of her life; her bones were very susceptible to breakage. Further she had the emotional pain of her daughter’s incurable metabolic disease from infancy; the daughter died in her early twenties. . Deborah Smith Douglas, “Enclosed In Darkness [But Not Alone],” Weavings. Volume XXVI, Number 1, 32. Rodney Clapp, “ Superstitious prayers,” Christian Century (March 8, 2011), 45. David Rensberger, “What No Eye Has Seen,” Weavings xxvi: 3, 10. Spufford. Celebration, 86-87. Parker J. Palmer, “The Stations of the Cross,” Weavings (March/April 1991), 17. . In an illuminating meditation on how a theology of the cross works itself out in daily living, Palmer writes of “another” series of “stations on the cross” which represent “moments of an inner movement as we live our lives through death toward resurrection.” He identifies five: recognition, resistance, acceptance, affirmation, and liberation (16). We define each with a quotation. First is the recognition that the cross symbolizes that beyond naïve hope and beyond meaningless despair lies a structure of dynamic contradictions in which our lives are caught. The cross represents the way in which the world contradicts God” and “the way in which God contradicts the world. No matter how often the world says ‘no,’ God is present with an eternal ‘yes,’ bringing light out of darkness, hope out of despair, life out of death” (16-17). Second is resistance, that our resistance to God’s will “is itself an aspect of the cruciform nature of reality. If we can recognize it as such, then our resistance, our tendency to contradict God, will generate great energy for life. By living fully in these tensions, neither denying nor ignoring them, we will be pulled open to the power of the Spirit (19). Third is acceptance, in parallel with Kubler-Ross’s work, as “as the way of the cross is always a way of dying. On the cross our illusions are destroyed. On the cross our small self dies so that the true self, the God self, can emerge. On the cross we give up the fantasy that we are in control, and the death of this fantasy is central to acceptance. The cross, above all, is a place of powerlessness. . . . But again,. the cross contradicts itself. For the powerlessness of the cross, if it is fully entered, leads us to a place of power” (20-21). The fourth station on the inward way of the cross is affirmation. “The way of the cross may seem like a lonely way. But—and here is another contradiction—by walking that lonely way we find one another. . . . When we present ourselves to the world as smooth and seamless we allow each other no way in, no way into life together. But as we acknowledge and affirm that the cross is the shape of our lives, we open a space within us where community can occur” (22-23). Finally “on the cross we are liberated to live in truth, in love, in spontaneous responsiveness to the movement of the Spirit in our lives. Through the center of the cross we pass beyond contradiction into the wholeness of life in the Spirit. . . . For those of us who are Christian, it is especially important to understand that the cross liberates us from narrow and confining versions of Christian faith itself. The cross is not about one faith tradition. . . . The cross finally contradicts any system of beliefs which tries to capture the cross” (24-25). James Denney, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, vol. 5 in The Expositor’s Bible, W. Robertson Nicoll, ed. (1943, 1894), 769. See Rom 3:25; 1 John 2:2. Hengel, The Atonement), 74. I reject here the popular (theologically motivated?) translation “the faith of Jesus Christ” (διά πίστεως ΄Ιησοu Χριστοu) in Paul as the most likely translation, except for Galatians 2:20 where it is feasible in a different grammatical construction. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” That is, such can avoid the implications of an impersonal legal understanding, it still relates authentically to both the holiness of God and the sinfulness of humanity. See the excellent discussion on 2 Corinthians 5:14-21 in Daniel G. Powers, Salvation Though Participation: An Examination of the Notion of the Believer’s Corporate Unity with Christ in Early Christian Soteriology (Leiden, 2001), 51-79. This was his doctoral dissertation presented to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Dan is a Point Loma College graduate teaching at Nazarene Bible College in Colorado Springs.. This is not to make light of modern Jesus’ research, but it does recognize that there are several versions of the “historical Jesus” available for our consideration. Rather than fully accept any one reconstruction of who Jesus was and is, I prefer, for the faith of the Church and the Christian, to accept the common witness of the New Testament documents as to who he was and is. For a recent treatment of the positives and negatives of the “historical quest” see Dale C. Allison, Jr., The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009). W. E. McCumber, “This Jesus”: God’s One and Only Son, Our One and Only Savior (W. E. McCumber, 2009), 52. He concludes the book with the declaration that “Only the Jesus disclosed to us in the New Testament is relevant to our times and adequate for our salvation. To diminish Him is to destroy Ourselves” (71). In this volume he is concerned about the Christology of some Emergent Church figures. Pages 49-52 are autobiographical. Bill McCumber, as knew him, was actively pastoring First Church of the Nazarene in Gainsville, Georgia, when he passed away at the age of 87. The paragraph that precedes his conclusion is vintage McCumber: “Scholars judging the word of God instead of allowing themselves to be judged by it are radically off base. Scholars trying to improve Jesus instead of letting Him improve them have turned truth upside down. If the Bible needs post-modern scholarship to correct it, and if Jesus needs post-modern scholarship to recreate Him, the Christian faith is nothing more than human speculation and that human speculation is nothing more than sophisticated idolatry. God’s Son doesn’t need makeovers. God’s word doesn’t need censorship. Jesus as He is for sinners as they are is God’s saving provision. Through a long life spent for Jesus I have noticed that every recasting of the New Testament Jesus makes Him lesser, not greater. You can’t enlarge your faith by shrinking your Christ” (70-71)., See N. T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters as well as Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (London: Collins, Fontana Books, 1935, 1958, German, 1926), 149, sums up our point in his unique manner: “grace holds fast the demand for obedience, since real forgiveness condemns disobedience.”
Allison, Jr., The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, 111, His full comment is, “For although eschatology is not the solution to the problem of evil, without eschatology there can be no solution. If what we see on this earth is all that we will ever see, if there is no further repairingof wrongs beyond what we have already witnessed, then divine love asnd jusrtice do not really count for much.” For the contrast of this to Hellenistic views of immorality in which New Age thought participates, see N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church . These views are deficient in the continuity of moral and spiritual quality from this life to the next as is found in the more biblical miracle of the resurrection. Denney, 1943, 801. H. L. Sidney Lear, The Hidden Life of the Soul (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1935). Lear, 34-35. Mary J. Luti, Teresa of Avila’s Way: The Way of Christian Mystics 13, Noel Dermot O’Dionoghue, ed. (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press. 1991), 82. Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, trans. (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2nd ed., 1987), 168, 172-174, 212-223). Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, vol. 2 of The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, trans. (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1980), 285, see 319. “It was Paul’s greatness that he understood the message of Jesus as no other New Testament writer did. He was the faithful interpreter of Jesus.” So concluded Joachim Jeremias in his The Central Message of the New Testament (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1965), 70. O’Donohue, Anam Cara, 60, 62. Dottie Rambo. Sung by Keith Beresford July 4, 2010 at SDFC.
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Frank G. Carver