Abstract
The commentary thus more than meets the goal of the series to which it belongs, namely, to address the gap between theological and biblical scholarship by inviting contemporary theologians, in the spirit of earlier commentators like Karl Barth, to “wrestle deeply with particular texts of Scripture” and thereby to “provide new theological resources for the church” (p. xiii). Indeed, the volume reflects Campbell’s own long commitment to this goal over decades as a preacher, theologian, teacher, and author deeply informed by the Bible and particularly well-acquainted with the Apostle Paul. Here he offers the reader a seasoned and pastorally sensitive conversation with Paul, the Corinthians, and the contemporary church. The reader can expect a fresh, sometimes provocative, always intelligent, and deeply fruitful immersion in a letter whose value he more than confirms as a vital theological resource, indeed a saving intervention, for the church in this divisive and restless hour.
Paul’s epistolary engagement “at the site of the wound” of division in Corinth reveals a theological pattern Campbell describes as “practical, apocalyptic, hermeneutical, and fragmentary,” defining adjectives that serve to draw the innovations and incongruities of Paul’s threshold discourse throughout the letter into a new kind of “theo-logic” (p. 3). It is “practical” in that Paul addresses actual congregants facing real problems, “apocalyptic” in that he sees the gospel Paul preaches as definitively interrupting the old age with its enslaving powers, and “hermeneutical” in that the Apostle, himself seized by the gospel apocalypse, inhabits liminal space between worlds where he must use innovative exegesis, poetic figure, humor, parody, even insult and flattery to bring his fractious, fragile audience to perceive the dawning new reality. Finally, and crucially for Campbell’s project, this epistolary theo-logic is and must remain “fragmentary,” resisting settled program or rule book prescription. Because it is grounded in the saving incongruities of crucifixion and resurrection, “the very character of the theology in 1 Corinthians” is liminal and open, in that it “refuses system” (p. 14).
Three prominent and recurring tropes that Campbell identifies in the letter—interruptive divine action, liminal existence, and fragmentary, non-systematic interpretation—provide hermeneutical coherence across its topically diverse sixteen chapters. Each trope works within what Campbell sees as Paul’s overarching apocalyptic framework to reveal Paul’s pastoral negotiation with persons and communities whose struggles to maintain identity boundaries have collapsed personhood into status, community into conflict, and truth into dogma. That Paul, himself still partially subject to the old world, “collides” occasionally with the new world he announces should come as no surprise, Campbell notes (p. 100). Paul is also, after all, in liminal space and sometimes “struggles with his own captivity to the powers of this age” (p. 182). In one of several helpful analogies drawn from music, Campbell compares Paul to a jazz musician who knows the “vital chords, scales and themes,” but is also always improvising, occasionally striking a “wrong note” precisely because he is engaged in a “new and daring theological improvisation” (pp. 17,172).
Principal and vital theological “chords” of the letter, Campbell shows, are its opening and closing discourses, both expressing “apocalyptic interruptions” that fragment the dominating systems of the status quo at the genesis of new creation: the first is the cross as the definitive, scandalous act of divine “folly” (1 Corinthians 1) in which the parodic action of the Roman authorities to kill the messiah actually reveals his royal identity; and the last is the resurrection of the dead as God’s signal and decisive blow against death and its toxic agents (1 Corinthians 15). These are the foundational chords for Paul’s improvisational ethics. In Campbell’s reading, because the vital chords themselves point to radically incongruous, disruptive events, the resulting theology is improvisational and fragmentary. Against the stultifying world logic of death, then, Paul proclaims what Campbell calls, following Hans Frei, “ascriptive logic,” by which he means the logic that arises not from prior “generally acknowledged understandings or categories” applied to Christ, but rather from the singular, particular events of his cross and resurrection (p. 29). Ascriptive logic begins with the proclamation of incommensurable realities—crucified messiah and resurrected corpse—and therefore the preached Word that is in touch with reality “interrupts everything and counters the Corinthians’ assumptions” (p. 247). The very frame of the letter reinforces this disruptive logic and also sets the agenda for apocalyptic preaching: Paul begins by recalling his initial “foolish” preaching about the cross in Corinth (1 Cor 1:17–18) and ends with the preaching of bodily resurrection (1 Corinthians 15). Indeed, “preaching is the starting point from which everything else follows” (p. 248).
The promise of Campbell’s work as “commentary” lies, of course, in its grappling theologically with particular texts and particular problems that Paul discovers and addresses in Corinth. Here, again and again, the figures of liminal space and the in-breaking disjunctive of “open seriousness” helpfully illuminate the dilemmas and theological tensions of Paul’s discourse. With respect to sexuality and marriage in 1 Corinthians 7, for example, Campbell admits that Paul’s theology is “deeply shaped by patriarchal assumptions” (p. 130). And yet, as the commentary shows, these assumptions are subject to repeated “interruptions” as when Paul commends mutuality in sexual relations (p. 131) or interrupts even the command of Christ against divorce to allow a woman who separates from her husband to have a faithful and valued life outside of marriage (7:11). In such instances, Campbell says, we get glimpses into the age to come already breaking in, an age in which women will “no longer simply belong to or be defined by men” (p. 133). Or again, as he addresses the vexed issue of head coverings in 11:2–16, Paul’s struggle at the intersection of new age mutuality and old age hierarchical order is palpable. At first, drawn by conventional values to manage female heads—Paul seemingly allows patriarchal order to prevail. But suddenly, in vv. 11–12, “an interruption occurs . . . Paul fractures his own arguments almost as if he is presenting the counter-argument: ‘Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman. For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God’” (p. 181). While one might quibble that mutual dependence is more a breaking away from the argument entirely than its “counter-argument,” i.e., females managing male heads—without doubt, the fracture occurs!
Fracture of this kind reflects more than clever rhetorical strategy; it is witness to the dynamic of spiritual discernment that is “not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit” (2:13). The fracture breaks in and, like laughter that disarms power, breaks open the space for the infusion of love, “the primary characteristic of life in the Spirit” (p. 136). Indeed, very often the fracture, the contortion, the blurring of edges, comes when Paul’s own conventional wisdom is interrupted by an in-breaking perception of neighbor love. This is the evidence on which Campbell builds his case for authentic Pauline practical theology as fragmentary, provisional, humble, open to risk, informed and guided above all by “the central eschatological claim of the Church,” that of all the spiritual gifts we now glimpse partially as through a dark glass, love alone “never ends” (13:8).