Main news for 14 August 2020

King James Version (en)

King James Version (en)

1 Corinthians, Chapter 1, verse 17

¹² and reproveth their dissensions

¹⁷For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect.

Read more:1 Corinthians, Chapter 1

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1:17 For God did not send me to baptize - That was not my chief errand: those of inferior rank and abilities could do it: though all the apostles were sent to baptize also, Mat 28:19. But to preach the gospel - So the apostle slides into hisgeneral proposition: but not with wisdom of speech - With the artificial ornaments of discourse, invented by human wisdom.Lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect - The whole effect of St. Paul's preaching was owing to the power of God accompanying the plain declaration of that great truth, "Christ bore our sins upon the cross." But this effect mighthave been imputed to another cause, had he come with that wisdom of speech which they admired.

NOTES

Describing his witness, Paul says that Christ sent him not to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel. Paul is an apostle, a witness bearing the good news of the Messiah who has come into the world and of the Kingdom which, according to the Messiah's word, "has drawn near"...

Describing his witness, Paul says that Christ sent him not to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel. Paul is an apostle, a witness bearing the good news of the Messiah who has come into the world and of the Kingdom which, according to the Messiah's word, "has drawn near." Apostleship is always witness. An apostle is not a teacher, not a mentor, not the presider of a church assembly, not a catechist. His task is more definite: he is a witness who must tell about what he has seen and experienced. He must tell it in such a way that those who listen see and experience everything, as far as possible, as clearly and distinctly as the witness himself.

If the matter is the Kingdom, then the listeners must experience being joined to the life of the Kingdom just as the witness who carries out apostolic ministry has experienced it. Of course, every Christian activity is to some degree, or at least should be, apostolic: after all, a Christian is a citizen of the Kingdom, and if that is so, then communion with him must necessarily open the Kingdom to those who share in it. But apostolic ministry is witness exclusively, or at least primarily; the apostle devotes his whole life to it.

For the Church such witness is of the greatest importance: it is a matter of the Kingdom being manifested to the world by concrete people who live by that Kingdom. Authentic Christianity, Christianity not as a new religion or a new teaching but as new life, can spread through the world only in this way. But in individual churches, in every age, there has been a tendency to turn Christianity from the experience of new life into a new religion or some new spiritual teaching. This is what happened in the Corinthian church as well.

There, judging by the apostle's words, certain groups had appeared, apparently formed around teachers or preachers known in the community, and their members identified themselves precisely with their own group. The reaction to the appearance of such groups may have been the appearance of certain "pure Christians" or "just Christians," who said of themselves that they were "Christ's," in contrast to supporters of various teachers and preachers. But whatever all these people said about themselves and about one another, all of them had already ceased to be simply Christians.

They had already linked their Christianity not only and not so much with Christ and His Kingdom as with certain people. And Christianity itself had become for them a new teaching rather than a new life. This is the essential transformation against which Paul warns the Corinthian Christians: it shifts their attention from Christ and the Kingdom to something that may even be interesting and in some respect true, but has no direct relation to the Kingdom. And therefore it has no direct relation to Christianity as such.

Moving from the conversation about the Kingdom and salvation to the concrete problems...

Moving from the conversation about the Kingdom and salvation to the concrete problems of the Corinthian church, Paul reproaches the Corinthian Christians for the divisions that had arisen among them (vv. 10-12). Of course, the issue could hardly have been the deification of Paul himself or of anyone else whom the apostle mentions in his letter. But parties of supporters and followers could certainly have formed in the Corinthian church, much as groups of supporters and followers of one or another philosophical school sometimes arose in Greek cities. And in opposition to the supporters of all the groups that existed among the Corinthian Christians, a party, so to speak, of "pure Christians" inevitably had to appear, people who criticized all the others for deviating from the truth and proudly said of themselves: but we belong to Christ!

Of course, this state of affairs did nothing to help normal spiritual life. And the issue was not only that constant disputes inevitably distracted the Corinthian Christians from the main thing for which they gathered in church. The main problem was that such disputes, as can be seen, often divided those arguing so deeply that they did not even want to communicate with one another, and thus destroyed the Church as a spiritual space. For when Jesus departed, He did not leave in the world a religious brotherhood or a theological school. He left here a community of people living in the Kingdom, through whom it could abide in the world, transforming it. This, and only this, is the Church's chief task. Everything else, preaching, religious instruction, theological research, and even works of mercy, matters only as witness to the Kingdom. Of course, the development of theology is impossible without theological disputes.

But if disputes end with the community falling apart into groups opposed to one another, such theologizing must be recognized as a complete spiritual failure. And the issue is not only counter-witness, but also that the people taking part in such disputes are ultimately not brought into communion with the Kingdom by them, but separated from it. For the Kingdom requires not unity of views, but normal relationships with one's neighbor, and if those are absent, one will have to forget about abiding in the Kingdom. Even those whose arguments turn out to be impeccable from a theological point of view.

In the early Christian Church there were different ministries to which God called different people. One of these ministries was the ministry of an apostle, or messenger, which existed not only in the Church but also in other...

In the early Christian Church there were different ministries to which God called different people. One of these ministries was the ministry of an apostle, or messenger, which existed not only in the Church but also in other Jewish religious brotherhoods of the Gospel era, on whose model the early Christian Church was formed.

For religious brotherhoods the ministry of messengers always had special importance, since these were communities without a rigid structure, more like communal movements than centralized organizations. Messengers played an important connecting role in such movements: they could testify to members of other communities about important events, both communal and spiritual, that were happening in their own community. In this way the brotherhoods exchanged spiritual and life experience, without which the brotherhood could not exist as a single whole.

In the Church, however, the role of the apostle-messenger had special importance, because the Church was held together first of all by the good news and by testimony. The Church was not a religious organization bound, as usually happens in religious organizations, by a single ritual or a single doctrine. Of course, most members of the early Christian Church were connected with the Synagogue, but the Synagogue was not unified in this respect either, all the more since the Church included not only Jews but also recent pagans who were interested in Judaism without fully accepting it, and for them Jewish ritual was not as close and organic as it was for the Jews themselves.

The early Christian Church was united only by faith in Jesus as the Messiah promised by God, whom God had raised from the dead, and in the Kingdom that this risen Messiah brought into the world and to which everyone who believes the risen Jesus and entrusts his life to Him can be joined. Here testimony about the Risen One and about the Kingdom He brought into the world came to the forefront, and apostolic ministry became central.

Paul is therefore glad that it was precisely apostolic ministry that was entrusted to him by God. Of course, Paul did not have a church that he could call his own in the sense in which those who headed specific church communities called different churches their own. But this state of affairs did not upset him at all, for he understood what ministry had been entrusted to him by God.

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