BIBLE STUDY I CORINTHIANS 12 MISSION RELATIONSHIPS AND PARTNERSHIP: NEW MODELS OF PARTNERSHIP?

Abstract

When looking for a suitable passage for this Bible study, I was very much tempted to choose some obscure passage, preferably an Old Testament one, in connection to which various issues of partnership could be discussed. One of these (not so obscure), I will return to towards the end of this contribution. However, during my search, I gradually began to realize that whatever interesting passages I might have come across, they would never fit the present theme as closely as would some of Paul's passages about the Christian community. The church of Paul's day perhaps was not quite so widespread and multicultural as the church of our days, but it definitely had already transcended significant borders of race, religion and culture. Paul's letters clearly indicate that he had begun to reflect.on how the Christian community was to deal with this growing cultural and ethnic diversity. One of Paul's most extensive writings on the how's and why's of a Christian community appears in his first letter to the Corinthians. In this letter, Paul addresses a whole number of issues that troubled him about the Corinthian community. He had heard about their quarrels over what teachers they followed (1:10ff) and about the very liberal interpretation of being free of the sins of this world. He was aware of a man that apparently had a sexual relationship with his father's wife (5:1) and others who saw no problem in going to prostitutes (6:12ff). Paul had also heard about others in Corinth who used their freedom to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols, without any regard for those in the community who did not share that conviction (8:1ff). He knew about women who understood their freedom as allowing them not only to preach and prophecy (an opinion apparently shared by Paul), but to do that without covering their heads, which in the eyes of Paul and perhaps of other Christians of Jewish background c learly was shameful (11:5ff). Finally, Paul was very concerned about the way in which the Corinthians abused the Lord's supper (11:l7ff). Whatever we think of Paul's argumentation in the individual cases, at least three important principles arise from these discussions that are also of importance for chapter 12 and following: (i) the individual's Christian freedom is restricted by the good of others; (ii) the new life of a Christian is not just a matter of his or her soul or spirit, but also of their bodies -- honour God with your -- the body is a member of (6:15-20); (iii) there is a close connection between the body of Christ being the Christian community and the partaking of the body of Christ during the Lord's supper (11:17ff). In the following chapters (12 to 14), Paul begins to address another important issue: that of the Much can be said about the various gifts that Paul mentions in these chapters, and many attempts have been made to classify them and link them to present-day phenomena, either of the miraculous, extraordinary sort, or of the more institutionalized and orderly kind. That is not a discussion I will go into in this Bible study, apart from saying that although large parts of the church have tried hard to demythologize these gifts and understand them primarily in the realm of the institutionalized gifts, it seems very likely that Paul has the extraordinary in mind: the gifts of prophesying, healing, miracles, speaking in tongues and special kinds of wisdom, that apparently all occurred in churches established by Paul and whose occurrence definitely is not contested in these chapters. (1) What Paul is contesting, however, becomes clear in chapter 14. It is that a far too one-sided stress on the gif t of tongues had apparently become customary in the community of the Corinthians. Rather than allowing the full variety of spiritual gifts to be experienced and used in the community, the gift of tongues had overtaken and pushed aside all other gifts. Rather than allowing for too much diversity (which might have been the case in the earlier issues addressed by Paul), in this matter the Corinthians did not allow for enough differences or diversity. …