Thursday, November 4, 2021

Troels Engberg-Pedersen on 1 Corinthians 12:13

  

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) 

Idem, "Do This in Memory of Me": A Biblical and Historical Analysis of Roman Catholic Dogmatic Teachings Concerning the Eucharist and Sacrifice of the Mass (2021)

(for those who want a free PDF of these books, drop me an email at ScripturalMormonismATgmailDOTcom)

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