Abstract
Ask regular church goers or pastors for theological highlights in 1 Corinthians and they could easily recall the cross as God’s wisdom but a stumbling block to non-believers, the Lord’s Supper formula, Church as body of Christ, spiritual gifts build up the community, the encomium on love, and the concluding affirmation that the dead in Christ will be raised. Yet much of 1 Corinthians speaks to tangled relationships, morals, and religious issues peculiar to life in first century Corinth. Can a theological commentary dispense with efforts to enter a Virtual Reality simulation of being Christ believers in that world?
Becoming too emmeshed in the minutiae of civic and religious life, or comparison with elite philosophical rhetoric, is a distraction from Paul’s self-understanding. As an apostle he is not a ‘creative genius,’ but tasked with a message which is not simply response to contingencies in Corinth. Just as Paul lives a life of suffering witness that reflects Christ’s atoning death (4:9-13), so the entire letter is framed by the Christological message of cross and resurrection. So, when Bender considers Paul’s words chiding Corinthians for their ‘factions’ as ‘infants’ not ‘spiritual people’ (3:1-3), he does not default to socio-political behavior. Instead he asks how can Paul negotiate between what he acknowledges as true, that the Corinthian believers have received the Spirit and this evident not Spirit-led behavior. Bender does not compare Paul to other orators chiding opponents as ‘infants.’ Instead, he suggests that Paul, ‘calls them spiritual babies who could not handle the depths of divine wisdom in the cross but mistook it for milk and so remained incapable of digesting it—that is understanding its true wisdom,’ (p. 61).
Attentive readers quickly discover that Bender executes the theological mandate in a more expansive direction than developing his own version of Paul’s theology as represented across the corpus of Pauline epistles with assists from Hebrews and Acts. The theological observations are often quotations from Patristic sources, Luther and other reformers, and modern commentators, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. That can make an awkward transition in thought until one runs up against the attribution at the end of the sentence. Since Bender’s task is to read through the text bringing out its enduring significance for Christian theology, and not to orchestrate the distinctive, contending scholarly voices, picking out what he considers illuminating sentences from other scholars does not always reflect that individual’s theological perspective.
Throughout Bender insists that Paul’s epistemological context is formed by Jewish traditions, not Hellenistic philosophical tropes or the formalized dogmatic creeds of later Christendom. Nor should Paul’s insistence on sharing in the body of Christ (11:29) be taken as a benevolent social ethic. Everything about church practice reflects Paul’s theology of the cross (p. 199). Though he refers to Patristic ‘senses of Scripture’ from Cassian, Bender quickly rejects allegorizing for typology in reading 1 Cor 10:1-13. He insists there is nothing allegorical about Israel’s historical experience (p. 168). Bender’s commentary has packed a wealth of theology into a book brief enough to permit the rereading that its method requires.