The Therapy of the Christian Body

A Theological Exposition of Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, Volume 2

Brian Brock, Bernd Wannenwetsch

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781498233538
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The troubles and ills of the church today can only be understood and healed when Christians begin to face up to their hidden alliances with the Corinthians of the first century and embrace both the Apostle's diagnosis and therapy offered in the epistle.This is the challenge of The Malady and Therapy of the Christian Body, a two-volume commentary by two leading theologians that presents the fruits of a reading strategy that deliberately reflects ecclesial commitment by "reading the Apostle over against ourselves."Sharing their discoveries about the way Paul deals with questions of factionalism, sexuality, legal conflict, idolatry, dress codes, and eating habits, Brock and Wannenwetsch demonstrate how neither the malady nor the therapy that Paul describes conforms to dominant analyses of the malaise of the contemporary church, which tend to be as "organ centered" as modern medicine. The authors describe the way the Apostle engages in "feeling-into" the organic whole of the body in order to detect blockages to the healthy flow of powers by redirecting their vision to how God is working among them toward the "building up" of the Christian body.The book breaks new ground in crossing the traditional disciplinary boundaries between biblical studies, systematic theology, and theological ethics.

1 Corinthians 10

Resuming the discussion of idol food Paul opened in chapter 8, he now proceeds to offer an alternative answer addressed to those in particular who might have assumed that the issue had been laid to rest in that chapter. A superficial reading of chapter 8 might easily discern a straightforward argumentative sequence along those lines: “Look what Israel did, and how God punished them accordingly. The Israelites provide a moral lesson for the church, that it ought to avoid any type of behavior prone to defile those who are expected to partake of the Lord’s Supper ‘with clean sheets.’” It is a reading, however, that quickly unravels upon closer inspection. If Paul’s primary concern was with exhorting Christians to prophylactically attend to their moral purity before the Lord’s Table: Why should his treatment of Israel’s sins contain such an obvious network of references to the Christian sacraments overlaid on the events of the exodus in 10:2 and 4? And what is the purpose of his extending his discouragement of certain types of behavior by opening up the much broader issue of Christians “desiring evil things” (10:6)? As we will discover, with this typological connection of Israel and the church Paul is doing no less than remaking the categories of Christian ethical discernment.

Types in the Old Testament

1 I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, 2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3 and all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. 5 Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.

As we have previously noted (>4:14–21), it is tempting but misguided to read Paul as operating primarily within a pedagogical rationale in which his role as teacher/parent is collapsed into the role of the pedagogue. While the overarching theological rationale for his approach in this chapter does include educative aspects, these differ significantly from a strictly pedagogical approach. Already the opening address, I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, signals this difference. This opening is immediately followed by an unfolding of an entire narrative cosmos for his readers by deploying a number of immediately recognizable images: under the cloud (Exod 13:21), passed through the sea (Exod 14:22), Moses ate the spiritual food (Exod 16:4–35), and drank from the . . . rock (Exod 17:1–7; Num 20:2–13). This approach of the Apostle presents an antithesis to what we could imagine a mystagogue would open his address by stressing: “I can tell you that there is some knowledge that I possess that you do not yet know but will need to in order to progress.” The way Paul instead offers this mini-biblical narrative makes it clear that what he will be discussing is integrally connected to the whole sweep of salvation history, including its culmination in Christ. He opens by making transparent his fundamental theological presumption that what the faithful need to know in order not to go astray is nothing less than the whole story.

This re-minding of the Corinthians of the historic experiences of Israel is a locus classicus in contemporary debates about analogical exegesis, figurative interpretation, and typological reading.1 As interesting as these contemporary academic debates are, we will neither enter them here nor will we deploy any one of them to explain Paul. Our interest is in coming to terms with the specific manner in which Paul is reading the Old Testament with the Corinthians, though we hope that what we discover might, in another setting, shed some light on the value of these various hermeneutical debates and theories. Given the parameters of the modern debates it may be somewhat provocative to note that the “comparison” that Paul sets up in 10:1–4 blatantly cuts short rather than stimulating the analogical or speculative imagination of his readers. As he points to the recognizable symbols of the pillar of cloud and the passage through the Red Sea, Paul leaves no time or space for his readers to engage in imaginative thought regarding what these symbols stand for in the context of their own time and circumstances. Instead, he almost rushes to settle such questions by immediately indicating that they point to baptism, describing the Israelites as baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. The same move is then repeated with regard to the narrative of the rock from which Israel drank, whose referent is again immediately identified: and the rock was Christ.

Why does the Apostle apparently resist letting the analogical imagination of his readers even begin to do the work it is supposed to do, when it is precisely the task of analogical imagination to help the readers discover their own lives within the strange new world of scripture? Why short-circuit the imaginative engagement of self-convicting discovery that moral-development theorists have found so useful to employ with biblical narrative materials? Within the orbit of contemporary theories of analogical interpretation and moral development Paul’s interpretative practice appears as having fallen rather short of the mark. Like the conversationalist who kills a joke by explaining it, Paul is apparently robbing himself of rich opportunities by taking his readers directly to the conclusion of the journey.

The sensation that Paul’s approach is deficient according to the standards of contemporary hermeneutic and moral theories might alert us, though, to the possibility that the Apostle is actually pursuing a strategy so different from what we expect that it is simply not detectable within the parameters of these theories. We are forced back onto the basic question of any good reader: What is really going on in Paul’s trotting out this string of images only immediately to distill what they “mean”? Our contention is that the noticeable terseness with which Paul presents these images indicates that they are not meant to function as symbols to be deciphered. Were this his approach we would have expected him to name at least some of the typical features that would invite the readers’ imagination to discover aspects that they can “throw together” (symballein2) with their own experience of the world, as does Augustine as he reads this verse: “the rock was Christ because of its firmness, is not the manna also Christ since it is the living bread which came down from heaven . . . And the pillar also because it is straight and firm and supports our infirmity? The sea is red, and likewise our baptism.”3

Yet with his staccato evocations of Old Testament images, Paul effectively discourages such a symbolic reading. We are hence forced to pay closer attention to how he himself uses the language of τύποι (typoi, examples [10:6]) or τυπικός (typikos—the adjectival form [10:11]) as he deploys these images. Paul, we suggest, is confining himself to concise hints because he expects these typoi to evoke in his readers the whole Old Testament narrative in which these types feature prominently as recurring characters. The function of brevity in Paul’s references here, then, is not to rev up imaginative speculation to fill out the details of the picture, but to set out these elements as complete and comprehensive types. To take one example: When Moses functions as a type, it is not any of his individual traits that are of interest, such as characteristic types of behavior that might be held up for our emulation, but his character as a whole, which can only be grasped by evoking the rich narrative context in which that character is developed. “Moses,” as he is being referred to in this way, is therefore not to be understood as an exemplar to be emulated but as a character who has played a specific and irreducible role in the story God has with humanity.

To use types in this manner only works if characters are thought of as whole and complete units, and this depends in turn on the viewpoint of a narrator who can speak in the third person. In distinction from first-person perspectives, third-person narratives not only make bold to tell us the intentions of an agent, but describe the main character’s intentional acts as engagements with actions and judgments that originate from other, separate, centers of agency. The obvious literary fact that biblical narratives are never framed as first-person perspectives reflects the assumption that a character can only fully be described as a coalescence of human agency with what the human agent receives from other agents, most importantly from divine action, whether judgment or blessing.4

When biblical figures are characterized in this way they are presented as existing within a complex interwovenness of human and divine agencies that goes far beyond all depictions of humans as passive victims buffeted by fate. David, for example, is a biblical typos not as the stereotypical courageous man that medieval kings, for instance, praised for his skill in governing and military prowess; as a biblical typos David is rather the one whose courage showed precisely in his willingness to repent before God instead of killing the prophet who confronted him with his transgression (2 Sam 12:13).5 In the context of our chapter Paul seems to even go one step further in this direction in that the typoi that he offers to the Corinthians out of the tradition of the Old Testament narratives are not even human agents or persons, but things that occurred as examples (10:6) or things that happened to them to serve as an example (10:11). This insight i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• 1 Corinthians 10
• 1 Corinthians 11
• 1 Corinthians 12
• 1 Corinthians 13
• 1 Corinthians 14
• 1 Corinthians 15
• 1 Corinthians 16
• Bibliography