The Therapy of the Christian Body: A Theological Exposition of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Volume 2 by Wannenwetsch Bernd & Brock Brian

Author:Wannenwetsch, Bernd & Brock, Brian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2018-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

The One Who Loves

4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

In 13:4–7 Paul begins to describe the positive features of love, even if some formulations are still formally negative. Before looking directly at that positive account it is important to ask what it means to “describe” love? Is it really sufficient simply to list its features as Paul appears to be doing here? Can we know we have love if we see in our acting features that we typically associate with this concept? Were we to ask a variety of people to come up with a list of the features that define love, we could expect a good deal of diversity in the descriptions. And were we to undertake a comparison of Paul’s list with features we might reasonably expect to find on other such lists, the features enlisted by the Apostle would appear just as selective as any other list, irrespective of the overlaps we would likely find. The critical aspect to note here is that Paul’s list is “selective” for a reason peculiar to his vocation as Apostle. It reflects the story he shares with the Corinthian community as testified throughout his letters to them. It might well appear to us that one or another aspect of love is underrepresented in this enumeration. But what matters here is not the balance between the descriptors of love being offered nor their completeness, but rather how well this list offers the Corinthians an account of the love they need.

To emphasize the particularity of Paul’s concern in this way is not a suggestion that he is eschewing any universalizing language in relation to love. Indeed: love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. This Pauline version of agapeic maximalism is often fingered as a potential threat to personal or communal integrity. What else do these qualifications suggest, some ask, if not a strangely “soft” account of love that cannot but result in a watering down of any clear boundaries—including those set by faith, such as the distinction between orthodox belief and heresy? Could Paul really be commending heresy (believes all things), naive optimism (hopes all things), political quietism (bears all things) or even a masochistic sense of self-sacrifice (endures all things)? We take it as a sign of having caught an important drift of Paul’s proclamation that Christians have taken this agapeic maximalism with full seriousness as attested in traditions like the Eastern Orthodox holy fool tradition,144 or in comments like the following from Luther among Western theologians.

Love is a simple-minded thing. She believes and trusts everyone and . . . allows herself to be deceived and aped and fooled . . . She measures everyone according to their heart and is happy to be wrong in this.

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