First Letter to the Corinthians Chapter 12
One person may have the gift of preaching with wisdom given him by the Spirit; another may have the gift of preaching instruction given him by the same Spirit; and another the gift of faith given by the same Spirit; another again the gift of healing, through this one Spirit; one, the power of miracles; another, prophecy; another the gift of recognizing spirits; another the gift of tongues and another the ability to interpret them. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit
In the Gathering, God has given the first place to apostles, the second to prophets, the third to teachers; after them, miracles, and after them the gift of healing; helpers, good leaders, those with many languages. Are all of them apostles, or all of them prophets, or all of them teachers? Do they. all have the gift of miracles, or all have the gift of healing? Do all speak strange languages, and all interpret them?
Comments
This passage from a letter Paul wrote to a community of Jesus-followers that he had founded in the Greek city of Corinth is important because:
1) It shows that “Spirit-possession” in Paul’s communities was understood in a very concrete sense. A person possessed by the Spirit is someone emotionally carried away out of her ordinary everyday self. One manifestation of the Spirit is a kind of incoherent ecstatic speech thought of as “speaking in tongues” i.e. a kind of “foreign language” that is unintelligible to most bystandanders, but which might be interpreted by someone also Spirit-possessed. The association of Spirit with intense feeling is important for understanding Paul’s statements about Spirit elsewhere, such as when he says in the Letter to the Romans: “the love of God has been poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us,” and “If anyone does not have Spirit of Christ that person does not belong to him.” One puzzle this gives rise to is: Why would Paul’s message (summarized in the Letter to the Romans) stir such powerful feeling as to give rise to these ecstatic experiences?
2) This passage also shows that miracle-working was assumed to be a rather common occurrence at gatherings of Jesus-followers in Paul’s communities. This is contrary to the impression of some modern Christians, that the purpose of the miracle stories in the Gospels is to prove that Jesus was God, because only God works miracles. (Both spirit-possession and miracle working were known in non-Christian circles in the Mediterranean world at this time, and are found in other religions as well.)
Chapter 14.
You must want love more than anything else; but still hope for the spiritual gifts as well, especially prophecy. Anybody with the gift of tongues speaks to God, but not to other people; because nobody understands him when be talks in the spirit about mysterious things. On the other hand, the man who prophesies does talk to other people, to their improvement, their encouragement and their consolation. The one with the gift of tongues talks for his own benefit, but the man who prophesies does so for the benefit of the community. While I should like you all to have the gift of tongues, I would much rather you could prophesy, since the man who prophesies is of greater importance than the man with the gift of tongues, unless of course the latter offers an interpretation so that the church may get some benefit.
Now suppose, my dear brothers, I am someone with the gift of tongues, and I come to visit you, what use shall I be if all my talking reveals nothing new, tells you nothing, and neither inspires you nor instructs you? Think of a musical instrument, a flute or a harp: if one note on it cannot be distinguished from another, how can you tell what tune is being played? Or if no one can be sure which call the trumpet has sounded, who will be ready for the attack? It is the same with you: if your tongue does not produce intelligible speech, how can anyone know what you are saying? You will be talking to the air. There are any number of different languages in the world, and not one of them is meaningless, but if I am ignorant of what the sounds mean, I am a savage to the man who is speaking, and he is a savage to me. It is the same in your own case: since you aspire to spiritual gifts, concentrate on those which will grow to benefit the community.
That is why anybody who has the gift of tongues must pray for the power of interpreting them. For if I use this gift in my prayers, my spirit may be praying but my mind is left barren. What is the answer to that? Surely I should pray not only with the spirit but with the mind as well? And sing praises not only with the spirit but with the mind as well? Any uninitiated person will never be able to say Amen to your thanksgiving, if you only bless God with the Spirit. I have the gift of tongues equal to all of you, but when I am in the presence of the community I would rather say five words that mean something than ten thousand words in a tongue.
Any uninitiated people or unbelievers, coming into a meeting of the whole church where everybody was speaking in tongues, would say you were all mad; but if you were all prophesying and an unbeliever or uninitiated person came in, he would find himself analyzed and challenged by everyone speaking; he would find the secrets of his heart laid bare… and then fall on his face and worship God, declaring that God is among you indeed.
So, my dear brothers, what conclusion is to be drawn? At all your meetings, let everyone be ready with a psalm or a sermon or a revelation, or ready to use his gift of tongues or to give an interpretation; but it must always be for the common good. If there are people present with the gift of tongues, let only two or three, at the most, be allowed to use it, and only one at a time, and there must be someone to interpret. If there is no interpreter present, they must keep quiet in church and speak only to themselves and to God. As for prophets, let two or three of them speak, and the others attend to them. If one of the listeners receives a revelation, then the man who is already speaking should stop. For you can all prophesy in turn, so that everybody will learn something and everybody will be encouraged. Prophets can always control their prophetic spirits, since God is not a God of disorder but of peace.
“Prophesy” in the above passage refers to intensely emotional, moving and inspiring preaching (from Greek pro-phemi, literally “for-speak,” understood as speaking-for a spirit). This is why a person hearing such prophesying might feel “the secrets of his heart laid bare… and then fall on his face and worship God, declaring that God is among you indeed.”
The problem Paul is addressing is that people in this community are focusing their attention on the spectacular nature of ecstatic speech and miracle working, at the expense of what Paul regards as the true moral substance of the Christian message. Emotionally powerful “prophesying” speech is also a manifestation of the Sprit, but Paul thinks it is the most important of the Spirit-gifts, way ahead of miracle-working and tongue-speaking which comes in last on his list.
Using my terminology, Paul is trying to move spirit-religion in a moral direction by associating it with intensely felt “moral passion.” The spirit moving a person should only be regarded as a “Holy Spirit,” the “Spirit of Jesus” if it is associated with an intense passion for rightness that will raise the lives of people to a higher moral level.
“He would find the secrets of his heart laid bare.” I.e. charismatic preaching (“prophesying”) is most powerful when it awakens and articulates feelings in the audience that have hitherto been only half-conscious. This sentence is important in the present interpretation because it helps give a psychological explanation of the effects of spirit-preaching, which in the ideal case has a very emotional and transformative effect on the audience, which they interpret in terms of Spirit-possession, a divine presence felt in the community meetings.
From Chapters 1-4.
As for me, brothers, when I came to you, it was not with any show of oratory or philosophy… During my stay with you, the only knowledge I claimed to have was about Jesus, and only about him as the crucified Christ. Far from relying on any power of my own, I came among you in great “fear and trembling” and in my speeches and the sermons that I gave, there were none of the arguments that belong to philosophy; only a demonstration of the power of the Spirit. And I did this so that your faith should not depend on human philosophy but on the power of God…
In this first part of the letter, Paul associates his own preaching with Spirit-possession, contrasted here with rational argumentation and polished rhetoric. He wants to claim that the intense emotion aroused by his preaching is due to the fact that this preaching is really due to a divine Spirit speaking through him.
Christ [sent me] to preach the Good News, and not to preach that in the terms of philosophy in which the crucifixion of Christ cannot be expressed. The language of the cross may be illogical to those who are perishing, but for those who believe it has the power to save. As scripture says: I shall destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing all the learning of the learned. Where are the philosophers now? Where are the scribes? Where are any of our thinkers today? Do you see now how God has shown up the foolishness of human wisdom? If it was God’s wisdom that human wisdom should not know God, it was because God wanted to save those who have faith through the foolishness of the message that we preach. And so, while the Jews demand miracles and the Greeks look for wisdom, here are we preaching a crucified Christ; to the Jews an obstacle that they cannot get over, to the pagans madness, but to those who have been called, whether they are Jews or Greeks, a Christ who is the power and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
The central topic of Paul’s Spirit speech is the crucifixion of Jesus. Some message conveyed by this image of the crucified Jesus somehow aroused intense emotion among Paul’s listeners. It had an emotional power far beyond the ability of reason to explain. Note that this “irrational” character of the message has nothing to do with unmotivated “blind faith,” unmotivated intellectual acceptance of the authority of Christian doctrines. It is irrational in the same sense that many things that move people most are also most difficult to explain.
Take yourselves for instance, brothers, at the time when you were called: how many of you were wise in the ordinary sense of the word, how many were influential people, or came from noble families? No, it was to shame the wise that God chose what is foolish by human reckoning, and to shame what is strong that he chose what is weak by human reckoning; those whom the world thinks common and contemptible are the ones that God has chosen, those who are nothing at all, to show up those who are everything. The human race has nothing to boast about to God, but God has made you members of Christ Jesus and by God’s doing he has become our wisdom, and our virtue, and our holiness, and our freedom. As scripture says: if anyone wants to boast, let him boast about the Lord.
Paul associates the message of the crucifixion with the fact that the community of Jesus-followers at Corinth is made up mainly of uneducated lower-class people.
But still we have a wisdom to offer…: not a philosophy of our age, it is true, still less of the rulers of our age, which are coming to their end. The hidden wisdom of God which we teach… These are the very things that God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit reaches the depths of everything, even the depths of God. After all, the depths of a man can only be known by his own spirit, not by any other man, and in the same way the depths of God can only be known by the Spirit of God. Now instead of the spirit of the world, we have received the Spirit that comes from God to teach us to understand the gifts that he has given us.
Therefore we teach, not in the way in which philosophy is taught, but in the way that the Spirit teaches us: we teach spiritual things spiritually. A Fleshly person is one who does not accept anything of the Spirit of God: he sees it all as nonsense; it is beyond his understanding because it can only be understood by means of the Spirit. A Spirit-ual man, on the other hand, is able to judge the value of everything, and his own value is not to be judged by other men. As scripture says: Who shall know the mind of God?
Make no mistake about it: if any one of you thinks of himself as wise, in the ordinary sense of the word, then he must learn to be a fool before he really can be wise ‘Why? Because the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. As scripture says: The Lord knows wise men’s thoughts: he knows how useless they area: or again: God is not convinced by the arguments of the wise. So there is nothing to boast about in anything Fleshly.
Note the connotations of “Flesh” (Greek: sarx) here. It has nothing to do with sensuality. It stands for human capacities, like philosophical reasoning, that are completely within a person’s conscious control. In Paul’s language, “Spirit” and “Spirit-ual,” the opposite of Flesh, should not be understood in Plato’s sense of something ethereal and abstract. Spirit-tual refers to something so deeply moving that it is beyond normal powers of understanding.
More Comments:
Paul’s statements about the Spirit in the above passages, or his statement in the Letter to the Romans that “The love of God has been poured forth into our hearts by the Spirit that has been given to us” might be understood literally by some readers, as an attempt to explain the actual causes of early Christian experience of spirit-possession: A person-like entity, “God,” looks down from heaven, sees some particular persons that he loves, and sends to them another force or entity called “the Spirit” causing them to feel and act in unusual ways.
For present purposes, the main problem with this kind of interpretation comes when it is made a basis for critical rational interpretation, interpretation focused on the problem about what is valid about the Paul’s message. In this context, literal interpretation leads readers to ask the question: What evidence is there for the existence of such a Divine Holy Spirit? On the assumption that Paul’s “life in the Spirit” can be shown to be a valid way of life if and only if one can prove that such a Spirit actually exists as one more entity or force in the world, existing alongside trees and rocks and rivers and heat and gravity. Since objective rational evidence for the existence of such a Spirit is hard to come by, this makes it seem that rational inquiry into the basis for Paul’s way of life can only have a negative result. This of course is a very common opinion, both among believers and non-believers. It confirms non-believers in their view that Christian faith is totally irrational and that believers are just gullible and weak-minded people who will believe whatever authorities tell them to believe. It confirms believers in their opinion that “You can’t reason about faith” — there is no place for critical rationality in the interpretation of Christian beliefs, because any attempt to reason about faith ends up undermining faith.
In these essays, I ask both believers and non-believers among readers, to use critical reasoning, but to redirect critical reasoning so it has a different focus. In the case of Paul’s talk about the Holy Spirit: Do not focus on the theoretical question, “Does such a Spirit exist?”. Focus instead on the practical question: “In the ideal case, what would it mean in practice to try to lead a life guided by the Holy Spirit?”
In other words, let us take for granted that Paul and his audience believed that a Holy Spirit existed as part of their world. Imaginatively entering into such a world requires entering a world in which the Holy Spirit plays a central role. But practically speaking, those who believe that an entity called the “Holy Spirit” exists need some way of telling how to let their lives be guided by such a Spirit. As Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians itself points out, one can believe in the existence of the Holy Spirit and associate this belief with the wrong kind of practice, a practice that is not very admirable (e.g. using “gifts of the Spirit” for egotistic purposes instead of for community service).
Paul speaks of the importance of “discerning the spirits,” i.e. distinguishing a “holy spirit” from a spirit not so holy. He himself seems to do this discerning on an intuitive basis. In this course we will try to use some elements of Socratic/Platonic thought to do more rationally and methodically what Paul does more intuitively. From this perspective a “good interpretation” of “life in the Spirit” is an interpretation which leads to what we can recognize as an admirable way of being. In other words, look on “life in the Spirit” as a kind of extreme, perfect, and transcendent “Platonic Form” of a kind of goodness we can recognize “analogously” in more everyday forms, and can also “participate in” in more moderate and imperfect ways. Interpretations of “life in the Spirit” which result in ways of being that are obviously not admirable should be regarded as “bad interpretations,” — they are “counterexamples” to be remedied by reformulating and refining one’s concept of what life in the Spirit ought to mean in practice.
My proposal is that, in practice, in the best case, the best analogy in ordinary human existence to “leading a life guided by the Holy Spirit” is listening to the voice of pure and selfless moral passion. This analogy is exemplified in Dag Hammarskjold’s desire to be an instrument for “that which, even though it is in me, is beyond and above me.”
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