Brian Rosner opened the 2010 Moore School of Theology by presenting his (and his co-author Roy Ciampa's) thesis that 1 Corinthians is a unified and coherent letter - flying in the face of many recent views. Murphy-O'Connor for example writes:
The salient feature of 1 Corinthians is the absence of any detectable logic in the arrangement of its contents.
Scholars commonly see the ethics and theology of the letter as being completely disconnected.
Brian showed in response how, for example, the theme of love is not merely confined to a single chapter in the letter but flows out of the whole thesis.
Rosner and Ciampa assert:
In 1 Corinthians Paul tells the church of God in Corinth that they are part of the fulfillment of the OT expectation of world-wide worship of the God of Israel. Therefore, as God's end-time temple, they must act in a manner appropriate to their pure and holy status by becoming unified, shunning pagan vices and glorifying God as they reflect the lordship of Jesus Christ.
Brian also presented the view of fellow present Matthew Malcolm, a student of Anthony Thistleton:
1 Corinthians is a unified composition that exhibits kerygmatic rhetoric. The Jewish motif of dual reversal, whereby boastful rulers are destined for destruction while righteous sufferers are destined for vindication, serves as an influential conceptual motif in the formulation of Christian kerygma and may be seen as an interpretative framework and rhetorical available to Paul and Sosthenes...
Either way, the methodological assumption to test is that the letter is a whole - and that themes introduced in one part of the letter are connected to the other themes and motifs.
2 comments:
I like Paul's Chew's (maybe at Moore at the same time as you before your PHD) one line summary of 1 Cor:
The reality of Jesus applied to the church.
(Makes sense of the three main sections: foundational, relational and collective.)
[edit: sp]
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