Now, about 1 Corinthians…. Did you know …?

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Having recently completed the one of the longest commentaries on 1 Corinthians in history, and being in the midst of a short adult class on the letter at church, I’m thinking about some things that many people don’t know about the letter or its interpretation. For example, did you know …

1 Corinthians has much to say to the modern world. No book in the New Testament, even Paul’s letter to the Romans, does more to explain the grace of God, the lordship of Christ, and the work of the Holy Spirit. The contribution of the letter to the practical knowledge of God is immense. Not only is its ethics searching and rigorous, but its theology, especially of the cross, announces the end of the world as we know it. In addition to supplying concrete answers to many problems which have comparable manifestations today, on subjects as diverse as leadership, preaching, pluralism, sexuality, and worship, 1 Corinthians models how to approach the complexity of Christian living with the resources of the Old Testament and the example and teaching of Jesus. Above all, it shows the importance of asking, How does the gospel of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which envelop the letter in chapters 1 and 15, teach us to live? [Ciampa and Rosner, First Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 1]

Did you know that Paul’s repeated phrase “do you not know” (1 Cor. 6:2-3, 9, 15-16, 19; 9:24) usually communicates an implied rebuke (indicating that they should have already known and not needed Paul’s reminder), unlike my following list of “did you know” questions (which raise issues that I expect many readers may not have already known)? Did you know that the vices listed in 5:11 share an OT background with the quote from Deuteronomy in 5:13? Did you know (re: 1 Cor. 6:19) that in the Roman world sexual immorality only counted as “adultery” if it entailed sex with a married woman (married men engaging in relations with unmarried women were not legally considered adulterers)? Did you know that Paul is not talking about “homosexuals” in 6:19 (that most of same-sex acts would have been done by married men who were having sex with their wives [and perhaps other women as well])? Did you know, regarding the euphemism of “touching” which shows up in 7:1 (translated “marry” by an older version of the NIV and “have sexual relations” by most recent English translations), that men and women didn’t “touch” each other, but that “touching” was a unilateral act – what a man did to the object of his sexual desire (contrast the mutuality repeatedly reinforced in Paul’s teaching in 7:2-5) and that the euphemism was not used of normal sex within marriage, but of various other kinds of sexual relations?

Did you know that the issue discussed in 1 Corinthians 8-10 is not the same as that in Acts 10:11-11:9 (in 1 Corinthians Paul is dealing with food that has been offered to idols [where association with idolatry is the key issue] while Acts 10 discusses the issue of “clean” and “unclean” foods [categories of animals expounded in Leviticus 11 and presupposed in Genesis 7])? Did you know that in 11:2-16, despite an introduction that seems to imply a gender heirarchy, no distinction is made in the passage between the ministries of men and of women (the conclusion is that both men and women will pray and prophesy as long as they are properly attired)? Did you know that Paul considers the gift of prophesy essential to the wellbeing of the church (and that the gift is present and operating even in churches that do not believe in it)? Did you know that the spiritual/natural dichotomy found in 15:44-46 is not the same as a material/immaterial or physical/non-physical dichotomy (the later is a modern conception foreign to Paul’s thought)?

Did you know that Rosner and I argue that 1 Corinthians is “Paul’s attempt to tell the church of God in Corinth that they are part of the fulfillment of the Old Testament expectation of worldwide worship of the God of Israel, and as God’s eschatological temple they must act in a manner appropriate to their pure and holy status by becoming unified, shunning pagan vices, and glorifying God in obedience to the lordship of Jesus Christ” (page 52)? Did you know you could learn more about all these and many other issues in the recently published Pillar New Testament Commentary?

May God lead us, through a growing understanding and assimilation of the message of 1 Corinthians, ever more deeply into the wisdom and power of God in Christ (1:24) that we might flee sexual immorality (6:18) and idolatry (10:14) and glorify God with our bodies (6:20) and in all that we do (10:31), until that day when all things are fully renewed and He is all in all (15:28)!

Layers of Taste

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

I love cooking shows on television. There, I said it. I don’t know why except there is something about a master cook putting just the right amount of butter into a sauté pan, and then adding the precise amount of onion and—can you believe it?—cinnamon and basil leaves together to make a simple glaze in such and such a recipe. ‘Oh, and don’t forget the pinch of sea salt.’ All this effort ends in layers of nuanced taste designed to stimulate a three centimeter flap of real estate we call the tongue.

To be honest, most of the layers of taste are wasted on us hungry souls. Many of us don’t have the capacity, or the patience, to drill down through the layers of taste to appreciate the dishes we eat. It is a little bit like a friend of mine who brings a very clean and experienced pallet to his wine drinking. I don’t know how he does it, but he can smell and sip and observe a vintage and, in a moment, tell the degree of pressure the grape was crushed under during the second week of September of such and such a year, grown on the south side—the sunny side—of certain area of south of France in a specific type of soil. For me, the wine is purple and wet. For him, it is musty and bruised.

Most of our lives are lived in this twilight zone of taste. But, to hear us talk on most days and most subjects, you would think that life and all it has to offer us is painted in big bold strokes of black and white. Perhaps we have been watching too much cable news. We like to make our comments on life large and brash. Perhaps our life of faith takes on this strident sense of self-assurance as well, as if God weighs in on His providential work in our lives always with complete clarity.

But, God rarely pronounces the final word on what he is doing with us before it happens. What if living a life of faith requires more of us than making bold declarations about His whereabouts. Maybe it requires that we live patiently in the midst of the quiet ambiguities of our lives, instilling faith in us that is not so much timid as complex. Now…do you see how the cinnamon mixes ever so nicely with the basil leaf?

What About Christmas Next Year?

What have we Christians done with Christmas? What might we do with it if we seriously wanted to honor the Christ whose birth we celebrate? My family and I just enjoyed a very nice Christmas together, but I confess that I would like my Christmas to be different next year.

Jim Wallis and Scott McKnight have reminded us that “Last year, Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas. Clean water for the whole world, including every poor person on the planet, would cost about $20 billion. Let’s just call that what it is: A material blasphemy of the Christmas season.” A CNN report from just the other day mentioned that they expect $46,000,000,000.00 (it stands out more with the zeros, I think, than to just write 46 billion dollars) worth of gifts to be returned after this year’s Christmas. That is, we will have spent more than twice as much money on unwanted gifts for each other than it would cost to provide clean water for everyone on the planet.

The Christmas we celebrate (and that so many seem concerned to “defend”) is the celebration of God sending his Son so that we might have life. Not so that we might have the most outlandish celebration of materialism possible… The time to start thinking about next Christmas is not next November, but right now. Of course we will buy presents for our children. But what if we decided that next Christmas we would celebrate Christ’s coming for us by giving much more money to those in need around the world, and to projects that would have a lasting impact, than we would give to friends and family who will still be more prosperous than most people around the world even if they receive much less under the tree, but are given the opportunity to join in with us.

The family of one of the couples in our church small group decided that for Christmas this year they would send World Vision enough money to pay for a home for orphaned children ($5,100), and they kindly invited the rest of us to join in with them. World Vision has a whole set of similar gift options that are “too big for a box and a bow,” things that cost between $300 and $39,000. Other organizations provide similar opportunities to make our giving about much more than, as Wallis put it, “a material blasphemy of the Christmas season.” Wouldn’t it be something if within a few years from now Christmas celebrations in American had begun to shift in their emphasis to such a degree that the new orientation was as ubiquitous as the latest Apple product? I realize such a change would have a huge impact on the US economy, but surely we could find a way to deal with that…

Luke 8:8-11 tells us that the first to get the news on that first Christmas morning were some shepherds out in their fields. The news was given to them rather than to Caesar Augustus or to Quirinius, governor of Syria (both of whom are mentioned in the first verse of the chapter) to remind us that the news of this savior is not news just for the top 1%, or even the top 20 or 80 percent, but “good news that will cause great joy for all the people”:

A Public Service Announcement

By Maria Boccia, PhD
Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology
Director of Graduate Programs in Counseling Charlotte campus

It happened again this week. A young couple called me for help. They love each other but are struggling because the wife has lost all interest in sex. They come to me for help with this area of their marriage. It has happened several times this past year. A young couple, faithful Christians, wait until marriage to have sex, and then (usually right on their honeymoon) there are problems.[1] They are confused and embarrassed. They don’t know who to turn to. They keep trying, but over time, the wife loses interest in sex, starts avoiding her husband’s touch, gets to where she actively dislikes sex and wishes they would never have sex again.

They arrive in my office ambivalent: hopeful and fearful, in despair and yet willing to try this as their last resort. He loves her, but he can’t go on like this. We talk about their relationship, how they met, how they fell in love, and how sad they are that they have gotten to this point in their marriage. Often, the final push to seek help comes because they want to have children. No intercourse, no children, unless they take extraordinary measures. At the end of the first session, I give them some papers to fill out and ask them each to make an appointment to talk with me individually about things. They agree. They are hopeful that I can help.

The wife comes to her appointment wary. She feels bad because she can’t meet her husband’s need for sex. She knows that God designed sex for pleasure between husband and wife, but she would rather just never do it again. Except that she feels guilty because he wants it. What can I do to help? We review the forms she’s completed. We get to those questions: Does it hurt. Yes. Where? How much? What kind of pain? Turns out, it has always hurt. She has avoided gynecological exams because they hurt. She can’t use tampons because they hurt. I wonder how she thought sex would be different. I tell her, something is physically wrong. Sex is not supposed to hurt. Let’s get you to a doctor who understands this and can help you.

She goes to the doctor I recommend. She is diagnosed with vulvodynia, vulvar vestibulitis, or vaginismus. The doctor starts a course of treatment. I work with the couple to help support the medical interventions and treat the psychological and relationship damage that has been done.

Then one day they come in, shyly smiling. They had pain-free intercourse! It’s a miracle! We celebrate. We work to repair the damage that the painful intercourse has done over the months, years, or longer. She becomes interested in finding pleasure in sex. Then my work turns to sexual enhancement, and I help them find each other. It is very satisfying work. It feels great to help this young Christian couple find God’s blessings in their sexual relationship.

Let me summarize: sex should not hurt. If intercourse is painful, if that’s a new problem or an old problem, if it’s just intercourse (or tampons and pelvic exams), it should not hurt. Not every gynecologist is prepared to deal with this. Sexual medicine is not in the curriculum of every medical school. If you or someone you love is struggling with painful intercourse, get help. It does not have to be this way. The sexual medicine practice I work with has information about this on its website (www.bestsexualadvice.com). You can also find a listing of doctors who specialize in sexual medicine on the website of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health (http://www.isswsh.org/resources/provider.aspx). Don’t wait and don’t ignore it. When sex is good, it is a small part of satisfaction with one’s marriage. But when sex is bad, it is a huge part of dissatisfaction with one’s marriage. God intended sex for pleasure. It should not hurt.

What Jesus Learned

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

The book of Hebrews is not standard Christmastime reading. But I was struck by the Advent relevance of these verses from Hebrews 5:8-9: “Although he was the son, he learned obedience from what he suffered; and after he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all those who obey him.”

It is easy for us to become functional Docetists, who imagine that Jesus only seemed to become human – after all, he is who God is, so how could he get mixed up with us? We might somewhat grudgingly concede that his incarnation is necessary for him to be a sacrifice for sins (a point Hebrews is also at pains to make in a later chapter), but does it really make a difference in who he is?

The answer of Hebrews is a resounding Yes. This portion of the book focuses on Jesus’ role as high priest. In order to be a faithful high priest, the author reasons, Jesus has to be able to sympathize with the people. He cannot do this if he has not experienced the same things they have experienced. And so he states quite carefully that Jesus learned obedience. This does not mean, of course, that Jesus had to “learn to be obedient” in the way we do – by combatting our inveterate tendency to disobey. But it does mean that he needed to experience suffering and temptation first-hand to qualify as a high priest. How else could he genuinely relate to us as we struggle in this world day by day?

Verse 9 makes the same point in equally expressive language – Jesus’ sufferings “perfected” him. In a sense, Jesus was already perfect – but with respect to being qualified as our high priest, he needed those sufferings to complete him for the job.

It is difficult to know what is more marvelous here: the astounding theological truth that the incarnation is absolutely integral to Jesus’ role as high priest, or the unspeakably powerful comfort it is to know that Jesus really does understand what we are going through even in the darkest times. As we strive to maintain our faith-filled obedience in this world (remember, he is the source of salvation to those who obey him, v.9), it is a blessing to know that he himself has learned obedience through his sufferings, and thus can be trusted to help us stay faithful no matter what the circumstances might be. And because he saw his task through to the end – been “ perfected”-- he can help us as we struggle towards maturity in our lives [the same root lies behind Jesus’ “perfection” in v.9 and the call to Christian maturity in v.14].

The blessings of Christmas, then, certainly do not end in the manger, nor do they even end at the cross. What Jesus learned on earth is a source of continuing comfort, as we bring our troubles day by day to our sympathetic friend and priest.

The Manger Still Provides Food (for Thought)

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

We have just entered into the Advent season but since I am not likely to be posting again before Christmas I can’t resist taking this opportunity to post some thoughts on Luke 2:1-20. It is one of my favorite Christmas passages, one that some of you will be preaching on in the coming days.

I think it is important to pay close attention to the one item that appears in each of the three different scenes in the story – the baby lying in the manger – and how that image communicates something different in each of the scenes. The angel’s announcement about Christ is central, of course, including the fact that the angel attributes to Christ things that Roman propaganda had falsely attributed to Caesar Augustus (that he, rather than Augustus, is the true savior whose birth is good news for all).

It is important, I think, to notice the differences between the three scenes. Most Christmas cards blend together items from very different scenes so that we see Joseph and Mary bending over the manger with a bright star or some other indication of God’s glory shining all around. But the passage has no glory shining by the manger. In vv. 1-7 we find no mention of God or angels or glory or anything of the sort. Just a couple who have to make an onerous trip because of a decree given by the Roman emperor. It is in the second scene that we find angelic announcements and glory, but that takes place in the hills outside of town, and is not something experienced by Joseph and Mary by the manger but by shepherds who will tell the story to them in the third and final scene (vv. 16-20).

In some ways Joseph and Mary’s experience in Luke 2:1-20 is similar to much of our experience as we wait between the first and second advents of Christ. We have been told of Christ’s glory and of what God is doing in the world through him, and we have heard the rumors of angels, and we have heard what they have announced and promised about Christ, but we do not get to live our lives out in the presence of observable glory. We know God is at work and will bring the story of redemption to its completion, but much of our lives is lived in contexts where those realities are no more apparent to us than they would have been to Joseph and Mary as they wrapped up their newborn baby and placed him in that manger. But now that manger serves as one more sign from God to us that he is in fact the Messiah, Christ the Lord, whose birth is good news of great joy for all the people.

In verses 1-7 Joseph, Mary and Jesus seemed to be the least important people in all of Judea. Caesar and Quirinius seemed to be the people who mattered – the real movers and shakers of the world. But by the time we finish the passage we know (along with Joseph, Mary and the shepherds) that things are not as they seem, that although God was not manifestly present his angels were able to describe the opening scene down to its smallest and most unlikely detail(s), and that little “insignificant” baby in the manger is in fact the key to redemption and renewal of the world. The placing of a baby in a manger may have been an almost pitiful image in the first scene, but it is a wonderful sign of God’s redeeming presence and key to Christ’s identity in the second scene and then a confirmation to Joseph and Mary (as well as the shepherds) of God’s faithfulness to them and to his promises to send a savior when in the final scene the people from the second scene (the shepherds) share their experience with those from the first scene (Joseph and Mary). The birth of Christ and all that it means continues to amaze us, to be pondered in our hearts, and to lead us to praise and glorify God for all he has done in sending his Son to be our Savior and Lord (vv. 18-20).

The Great Reversal

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

What a strange, perplexing moment it was. It was that moment a few years ago, before both my parents passed away, when I realized that my brothers and I were taking on a parental role for our mom and dad. Wordsworth and Coleridge called the phenomenon “return to childhood.” Caught by the inevitable vulnerabilities of their own mortality, my parents needed the almost identical care and control that they gave us in the first years of our lives, all the way down to those uncomfortable moments when we had to take away their keys from driving, and help them with their basic bodily care and functions, and when we took over the management of the basic decisions in their living.

It doesn’t take much to find these dramatic changes everywhere we look. We find it in the natural world every day at dusk and dawn, when the moon takes over the mastery of the sky from the sun, and visa versa. Or, how about on a socio-political level: Parse what must have been some uncomfortable moments in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries when we, as Americans, and our native motherland, England, had to gradually adjust our thinking about our mutual roles in the world. Who is the world power now? The great reversals in life!

Several of us, I think, saw the beginnings of yet another “great reversal” a couple of weeks ago at Cape Town. I had the privilege, along with several others from Gordon-Conwell, to participate at the Lausanne Congress: About 5,000 individuals coming from 198 nations from the world, all in one great room; what an amazing experience! One of the conversations on the second day involved a panel of African Anglican bishops and the newly created Anglican archbishop of the United States. In great humility, Archbishop Duncan, from Pittsburgh, thanked the African Anglican bishops for taking the lead in formulating the new Anglican structures for the West. What an amazing thing to behold these past years, as Christians from the West have come under the authority and direction of the Majority World church.

My sense is that what has been happening in the Anglican church in the past ten or so years is at the forefront of what we will see throughout the global missions movement in the future. Unreached people group?: We are used to talking about nations and indigenous tribes in Africa and parts of Asia in these terms. But, what about Denmark and Germany and France and parts of the United States even as being identified as unreached peoples groups? Already we see the equilibrium of the global missions movement shifting as we find missionaries from the Church in China and Korea and parts of Africa at our very doorsteps, spreading the Gospel to us Westerners. Thanks be to God; the Great Reversal has begun!