Contrast e.g. Fee 1987:604-6, who takes Paul’s
mention of being ‘baptized into a single body’ and being ‘given a single pneuma
to drink’ to refer to one and the same experience (which turns out to be that
of conversion) and argues that since the latter clause has a ‘clearly metaphorical
sense’, one should also opt for ‘a metaphorical rather than literal, meaning
for “baptism” in the first clause’ (605, Fee’s italics). (Cf. his comment: ‘There
is, after all, no experience called “drinking the Spirit”!’, 605 n. 29.)
Schrage 1999:218 ends more or less in the same place. He has a better grasp of ‘Christ’
in 12:12 as actually being short for ‘the body of Christ’ (210-13). But then
again the ‘body of Christ’ comes out as swimming around between having a
literal and a metaphorical meaning (even through Schrage in principle denies
the latter): ‘Auch wenn man über das Nebenoder vom Leib als lebendiger
Wirklinchkeit des Christusleibes der Gemeinde nicht zu abstrahieren’ (211).
What do the words I have italicized actually mean? How much easier it is to
take Paul to be referring to an actual body constituted by the penuma (and to
be speaking of both baptism and the Lord’s supper!) (Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology
and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010], 247 n. 2)
Further Reading
Robert S. Boylan, "Born of Water and of the Spirit": The Biblical Evidence for Baptismal Regeneration (2021)
(for those who want a free PDF of these books, drop me an email at ScripturalMormonismATgmailDOTcom)
