is neither the man without the woman, nor vice versa; but all things from God. The question is not one of different relation to God; compared with the great distance between God and man the little distance between woman and man is not without importance, not at all, but it is still really small, quite small, in fact nugatory. Nor is the question one of temporal order, as such, but of the divine order manifested in it—and that is twofold. In the time of Paul, Christianity was still too good to surrender itself to the sanctification of such an earthly order. Women are not to let this perturb them, said Calvin in the Geneva Chancellery: The main thing they have and enjoy! “It is a little thing that in this world we have some little superiority: for the whole is only a metaphor. A corruptible splendour!” (Op. xlix. 728). This is undoubtedly Paul’s opinion. But we are dealing with an order, that is what he means here. 11:13–15 will then, with more or less success and penetration, attempt to show how this order is also akin to nature, and 11:16 closes with the statement: in the “Churches of God” this order has so far been valid, and this ought to be known in Corinth. If we have so far rightly interpreted the whole spirit of the Epistle, we may also be permitted to place in the series this piece, this halt, which sounds this time in a very unexpected place and yet proceeds from a direction that is now no longer unknown to us, according to its critical tendency, “from God.”
And likewise, it now also asserts with the second half of the chapter. In 11:17–33, too, we are dealing with a repudiation of a powerfully flourishing type of man in the Corinthian Church, with his tendency to wilful and self-seeking assertion of his influence. It is that which connects the two halves of the chapter. Here, as there, it is, for the rest, in phenomena peculiar to religious life in Corinth that Paul sees this tendency in operation; there, in the breaking down of the barrier between man and woman, here, in the divisions, which, already mentioned and discussed in the first chapter, seem to have broken out directly in divine service, and then, above all, in the profanation, in fact the dissipation, of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Glancing at both, Paul says (11:17): Your coming together, your cultus, serves the worse rather than the better, and is become a direct danger. Into the first point, verses 17–19, Paul does not enter more closely. He foresees that from the divisions and the formation of groups, whatever their aim might be, spring the dissensions, “schisms,” which necessarily arise from party opinions emphasized with individual presumption, and he pronounces this judgment upon the Church! For this is the meaning of 11:19. The δόχιμοι, in this case: those who do not take part in these divisions will then be made manifest; the rest need not be said. The question of the Lord’s Supper comes up for discussion incidentally. Here also, a type of egoism of a simple and probably not of a merely materialistic character, but of a spiritual and intellectual nature, has spread. This meal, which has its meaning and place in the Christian Church only in the paradoxical form of an unconditional communion of all, high and low, has in Corinth developed into something apparently more refined—that is to say, a kind of festal banquet of the prosperous and probably also the educated among themselves, at which the poor must look on from a distance (11:21). Just because of this it is a profanation to make of the Lord’s Supper a Supper of Men (11:20–21), similar to the pagan religious feasts, an affair which the participants, as Paul sarcastically opines, could also settle at home (11:22a). It is despising the Church of God and shaming those that have not, he bursts out angrily in 11:22b, with the whole weight of his authority, placing himself protectively in front of the latter and in sharp antagonism to the prosperous. But then he turns over the leaf: an attack on the meal of the communion is an attack on the institution of the Lord Jesus, which he, Paul, delivered to the pure Church as he received it from the Lord (11:23). Note how the expressions “received” and “delivered” occur here, which we shall again encounter in reversed order in 15:3. The meaning in both cases is: With what has now to be said, we are dealing, not with Pauline theology, nor with information from historical sources of oral or written nature, and thus not with matters about which this or that opinion might be held in the Church of Christ, but as regards the speaker, with the word of Kyrios, the Lord Himself, and consequently for the listener with the severing alternative: for or against the Lord: “I have received it from the Lord. The Lord Himself repeated to him, Paul, what He said as the Founder of the Supper”: “in the night, when the Lord Jesus was betrayed.…” By this categorical assertion, Paul does not mean to guarantee, which would interest us, that these were the authentic words of the so-called historical Jesus. For what we call the historical Jesus, a Jesus pure and simple, who is not the Lord Jesus, but an earthly phenomenon among others to be objectively discovered, detached from His Lordship in the Church of God, apart from the revelation given in the Jesus of the Church and at first to the apostles—this abstraction was for Paul (and not for him alone) an impossible idea. The thought that Jesus should and could be first regarded by himself, in order then to recognize Him as Lord, could at most be for him a painful recollection of his former error. This Jesus, who is not the Lord, who is known after the flesh (2 Cor. 5:16), was in fact the foe whom he persecuted; he no longer knows Him. But Paul is not now reflecting on what this Jesus, who was known after the flesh, might have said on the occasion of the Supper, but upon what Kyrios Jesus, the Lord of the Church, said to him, Paul, when He made him His ambassador. The Lord does not live for him in the oldest, best-attested or most credible tradition—why should it be just the Lord who lives and speaks there?—but in His supreme present revelation to His Church, in concreto, in the herald’s commission which it has become to Paul. He reported direct from the source: The Lord Himself is the tradition. That each of the individual words in which he discharges this commission has its human earthly genesis, history, and limitation, that these words of the Lord in his mouth, received from the Lord Himself, are in his pen influenced by the currents of contemporary trends of thought, he himself would probably have at least disputed. But this again, positively and negatively, had and has the least to do with the genesis, history, and limitation, by virtue of which he, as a man living in the Hellenic age, was an apostle of Jesus Christ. Paul, therefore, does not prove, but he testifies what the will of the Founder is concerning this Supper, as it is actually celebrated in the Church. Almost at the first glance, the things he was chiefly concerned with may be perceived: (11:24–25) “this do in remembrance of Me!” Bread and wine, not in itself but eaten and drunk (where just this bread and the cup (11:26) are enjoyed in the Church), are the visible equivalents of the body and blood of the Lord, “for you,” as the New Testament (11:24–25). Wherefore these equivalents? “In remembrance; (11:26) ye proclaim thereby the death of the Lord until He comes.” Paul’s interest is not, as in a later age, fixed on the relation of element and thing, but on the action as such. Those who take part in it thereby proclaim (upon that which they receive Paul lays no stress) that they know their Lord, that, although outwardly invisible, He is immediately present with them like that which they eat and drink. In fact, they eat the bread and drink the cup of the Lord (11:27), and, indeed, of the crucified Lord, who will come again bringing with Him the end of all things, even the end of all such celebrations. Obviously what Paul means is that, during this celebration, the shadow which Christ casts over the whole of life on this side of the grave cannot be forgotten. Can this action be performed in the Church without shuddering at the great preliminariness with which this, our world, “in the night when the Lord Jesus was betrayed,” was characterized for ever? without fear and trembling before the narrow door which leads to life? Can this Supper ever be anything else than what it was at first, a farewell supper, at which the anxious look of man can only come to rest in the light beyond the grave? Is not hope, the hope of life, which is still inseparably bound up with the remembrance of the Lord who died for us, impossible where the severity of this death is forgotten? And it is just that, this forgetting just where they ought to be remembering, this unworthy eating and drinking, which is not dedicated in a serious religious spirit to the critical severity of the matter, and which is even altogether profane, with which Paul now reproaches the Corinthians. That this is so is decisively shown for him by the manner, described in 11:20 et seq., in which they have destroyed the communio of the alleged feast of love. “They are guilty of the body and blood of the Lord” (11:27). They reel drunkenly (and that not only figuratively 11:21) along the road which the other religious fellowships boldly tread, but which shall be closed to them with
