13 Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into [fn2] the name of Paul? 14 I am thankful that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15 so no one can say that you were baptized into my name. 16 (Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don't remember if I baptized anyone else.) 17 For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel-not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written:
"I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate."20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.
We begin with this observation: the gospel is something Paul preaches and it is not something Paul "does" (as with baptism).
Paul goes on: Paul's gospeling is not rooted in his eloquence or the mastery of techniques but in the subject itself. What is the subject?
The subject of gospeling is the cross of Christ (I would want to clarify this "cross" as an "empty" cross -- that is the Christ who was crucified and raised).
The gospel is foolishness to those who reject the message and delightful to those who believe that message. This could be too easily dismissed as a tautology; no, what Paul is getting at is that the gospel assaults the human ego's inherent selfishness.
Gospel preaching invades the interior reaches of each person to make manifest selfishness and summons the person away from the clutches of selfishness into an identity shaped by God, in Christ, through the Spirit.
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In a later installment in this series will you be discussing why it is that we can assert that Paul's cross is an "empty" cross, the cross of Christ crucified and raised, given that so much of Paul's writing has been interpreted into the doctrine of penal substitution, which quite clearly has its emphasis on a "full" cross, the cross of Christ being sacrificed?
Paul uses the phrase "the cross of Christ", as well as "the Christ who was crucified (and raised)" in this passage, even somewhat interchangibly. How strong is the argument that "the cross"--that event--is the thing that Paul is proclaiming as gospel? Is he proclaiming that event, or "the Christ" whose crowning achievement is that event? Where is the emphasis here in Corinthians and elsewhere? The difference seems as significant as the difference between proclaiming a transaction and proclaiming a person (whose story climaxed at an event), or to use your previous post, between the pastor's gospel and the professor's. The latter includes the former, but not the other way around, as the pastor made clear.
Am I nitpicking? Is this a meaningless distinction to note in this text or in general?
Ugh! 3 is me.
T,
I think your point is well made. So often what is declared as "the gospel" is actually the change that the good news effects.
RJS,
we know that Paul used other "shorthands", so why not this too?
I appreciate all the work Scot is doing with this study. "What is the good news?" is is an extremely important question, esp. for evangelicals.
Dana
,
I think your point is well made. So often what is declared as "the gospel" is actually the change that the good news effects.
RJS,
we know that Paul used other "shorthands", so why not this too?
I appreciate all the work Scot is doing with this study. "What is the good news?" is is an extremely important question, esp. for evangelicals.
Dana
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