If Chapter 13, the “love chapter,” is one of the greatest texts in the New Testament, Chapter 15, the “resurrection chapter,” is one of the most theologically weighty.
The Gospel
Paul first reminds the Corinthians of the “good news” — the euangelion, the gospel — he proclaimed to them and that they received. Paul says the gospel he passes on is the same one he received. Notice that “the gospel,” verses 3-7, is the story of Christ’s death “for our sins” and of his resurrection, all “according to the scriptures.” “The gospel” is not a theory of the atonement — of how exactly Christ’s death is “for” our sins. Nor is “the gospel” a theory of the mechanics of conversion. Of course, “the gospel” invites contemplation of theories of atonement, and even more, the gospel invites our grateful response of faith. But “the gospel” itself is simply the story of Christ according to the scriptures.
When Paul uses the phrase “according to the scriptures” here he is not referring to the New Testament, which had not yet been compiled, and certainly not to his own letters, which he probably did not think of as “scripture.” He was referring to the Hebrew Scriptures. For Paul, then, the story of Christ was already contained in the Hebrew Scriptures. But the Hebrew Scriptures, read within their own original frame of reference, do not clearly predict the “Christ” Paul describes, at least not when read before Christ Jesus’ advent. Jesus himself, and the church that bore witness to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, saw the narratives and prophetic and wisdom texts of the Hebrew Scriptures with fresh eyes in light of their experience. Jesus Christ is the interpretive principle. Jesus Christ is the gospel.
What Paul received, and what he passes on, is a witness to the event of Jesus Christ. Paul says he “proclaimed” (euēngelisamēn) the gospel (euangelion) and the “word” (logō) (15:1), that the story of Christ’s resurrection is “proclaimed” (kēryssetai) and is a form of “proclamation” (kērygma) (15:12, 14), and that Paul and the other Apostles’ “testify” or bear witness (martureó) (15:15) to the resurrection. This constellation of terms, all collected in one place, demonstrates that the gospel Paul passes along is a well-known, foundational narrative that runs from the first Apostles through Paul to the Corinthians — and to us (15:11).
The Resurrection
Despite the central narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection, it seems some in the Corinthian congregation did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. (15:12.) Perhaps some of these Corinthians were Jewish Christians who believed in a general resurrection of the dead at the end of history, as did the Pharisees and other Second Temple Jewish groups, but questioned why the Christ, the Messiah, would rise first.
It seems, though, that the people Paul addresses here do not think the dead can rise at all. Perhaps, then, some of these Corinthians were gentile skeptics about the possibility of a bodily resurrection, like those Paul encountered in Athens (see Acts 17:32). The Greek philosopher Plato believed in the immortality of the soul (or at least, of parts of the soul), and thought the soul was subsequently reborn in different bodies. Aristotle believed in the soul but it is not clear that he though the soul was immortal. Greek skeptics did not believe in the immortality of the soul at all. None of the Greek philosophers or their Roman heirs believed in the resurrection of the body.
Paul states that Christ is raised from the dead, “the first fruits (aparché) of those who have died.” And the resurrection of Christ is central to the gospel, because “death” (thanatos) is the consequence of sin. (15:21-22). The gospel is good news because it changes the reality of death.
In verses 21-22, Paul draws a parallel between Christ and Adam. Adam, a human being, introduced sin and death; Christ, a human being, introduced resurrection. Adam was the firstfruits of death; Christ is the firstfruits of resurrection. We should not press this metaphor into a theology of “original sin,” which is not really present here or elsewhere in Paul, and we certainly shouldn’t take this is a some kind of modern “scientific” statement about human origins. The point is that humanity, at its root, from its deepest origins as humanity, embraces sin and death. Having been given the gift of our created being, we choose to de-create ourselves. But Christ, the true Adam, re-creates us, through the power of his resurrection, which defeats death.
Notice that “death” here is personified as one of the powers. The resurrection of Christ is an apocalyptic event that inaugurates the end of present age, which culminates when Christ subjugates all of God’s enemies — and “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (15:26.) At the end of history, everything, including the Son Paul says, will be subject to God the Father, “so that God may be all in all.” (As we have discussed before, there are Trinitarian themes in Paul’s thought but he did not have a worked-out theology of the Trinity. This statement about Christ being subject to the Father by later standards would be considered subordinationist.)
In verses 25 and 27 Paul alludes to some of the “scriptures” he mentioned earlier. In verse 25, the reference is to Psalm 10, which says:
The Lord says to my lord:
“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”
The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, saying,
“Rule in the midst of your enemies!”
Your troops will be willing
on your day of battle.
Arrayed in holy splendor,
your young men will come to you
like dew from the morning’s womb.
The Lord has sworn
and will not change his mind:
“You are a priest forever,
in the order of Melchizedek.”
The Lord is at your right hand;
he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.
He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead
and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.
He will drink from a brook along the way,
and so he will lift his head high.
The reference in Psalm 10 to Melchizedek brings forward an obscure figure from Genesis 14, the King of Salem, who blessed Abram (Abraham) after the battle of the Kings and thereby performed a priestly function — although he was not an heir of Abraham and there was as yet no nation of Israel and no Jewish Priesthood.
Melchizedek features in some of the eschatological texts of the Second Temple period. Jesus is compared to Melchizedek in Hebrews 7, also using quotations from Psalm 25. It seems, then, that in the Second Temple period, the notion of Melchizedek, or a Melchizedek-like figure, appearing or reappearing as a priestly figure who recalls the nation to purity, was a known motif, and that this motif was connected to Jesus in early Christianity.
In verse 27 the reference is to Psalm 8, which says:
Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
in the heavens.
Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You made him ruler over the works of your hands;
you put everything under his feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Notice that this Psalm echoes Genesis 1 and 2, in which humans are given charge over caring for creation. There is an echo of a connection here between Adam and Melchizedek, both as mystical figures who perform kingly and priestly functions — one at the beginning of creation and one at the beginning of the Hebrew people. For Paul, then, the resurrection of Christ is the fulfillment of the purposes of humanity and of the mission of Israel, culminating in the restoration of creation itself.
Starting in verse 35, Paul begins to respond to an objection from the skeptics: if the dead are raised, what kind of body do they possess? No one would want to be raised in a rotten corpse. Even more, although ancient people did not understand chemistry or microbiology the way we do, they knew that over time bodies decompose and are consumed by other creatures. If a person’s body is thrown into a river and consumed by fish, does the person become a fish in the resurrection? (A version of this very question was, in fact, answered in the Medieval period by Thomas Aquinas — so it remained a live question!)
Paul says the question is foolish because the present body is like a seed that becomes something greater. In verse 44, Paul says “it is sown a physical [natural] (sōma psychikon) body, it is raised a spiritual (sōma pneumatikon) body.” This leads some interpreters to suggest that Paul does not believe in a material, bodily resurrection, but rather moves the concept of the resurrection entirely to the spiritual realm. But there are several reasons why this is not what Paul is doing.
First, Paul is responding to some of the Corinthians who are skeptical of the resurrection of the body because of their Greek dualism. The skeptics might accept the immortality of the soul, but not the resurrection of the body. If Paul’s response is that the resurrection is spiritual and not bodily, he would be agreeing with the skeptics.
Second, the phrase sōma psychikon translated from the NRSV above as “physical body,” does not really contrast a “physical” body to a “non-physical” one. Paul quotes Genesis 2:7 in verse 45, because Adam is the example of the “physical” or “natural” body. In that text, in the Greek translation (the LXX) quoted by Paul, Adam became a psychēn zōsan — a “living being.” In the Hebrew the word is nephesh, sometimes translated “soul,” but meaning the vital center of life, personhood, passion, desire, and appetite. So Paul is not contrasting the “physical” with the “spiritual.” In both cases — the present sōma psychikon and the future sōma pneumatikon — Paul is referring to a kind of sōma, a body.
Third, Paul’s metaphor of the seed that produces wheat assumes a continuity between the present state and the future state. A wheat germ is not precisely the same thing as a mature wheat stalk, but there is a numerical continuity between the germ and the stalk: this germ, planted in the soil, produced this stalk. Of course, this is only a metaphor, so we shouldn’t press it too far, and Paul didn’t know anything about how a wheat germ becomes a wheat stalk at the molecular or genetic level. But the metaphor does tie into Paul’s overall discussion of how our present bodies relate to our bodies in the resurrection.
At the same time, Paul does say that our bodies in the resurrection will differ significantly from our present bodies. In Paul’s mind, the resurrection is not a zombie-fest of reanimated corpses. He does not attempt to explain how our resurrection bodies will differ, nor does he offer any details about their material constitution. It is something that will happen by God’s power “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” (15:52.)
The result, Paul says, is that Death no longer holds final power over us. In verses 54 and 55, Paul quotes a line from Isaiah 25 and another from Hosea 13. Isaiah 25:6-8 reads as follows:
On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
Is. 25:6-8
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.
And Hosea 13:14 says:
I will deliver this people from the power of the grave;
I will redeem them from death.
Where, O death, are your plagues?
Where, O grave, is your destruction?
By quoting these texts Paul again connects Christ’s resurrection to the eschatological hope of the prophetic literature in the Hebrew scriptures — a hope for a restored nation and a renewed creation.
Excursus on Universalism
What precisely is the scope of Paul’s eschatological vision of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15? The mainstream of Christian eschatology envisions a dual outcome: some, maybe only a few, go to Heaven, and some, maybe many, go to Hell. There are important scriptural reasons for this view, including a number of sayings of Jesus in the Gospels and the vision of judgment at the conclusion of the book of Revelation. But there have always been voices in the Christian tradition who imagined an outcome in which every person is eventually saved, a view called apokatastasis. Some, such as the great Third Century theologian Origen of Alexandria, were later censured by the institutional Church at least in part for these views, while others, such as the Church Father Gregory of Nyssa, were always held in high esteem.
Today, both in academic theology (evidenced, for example, in the work of Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart (That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale Univ. Press 2019)) and in popular writing (evidenced by Rob Bell’s Love Wins (HarperOne 2012)), there is a renewed interest, and often fierce argument, over the possibility of apokatastasis. Two verses in 1 Corinthians 15 are important to that debate. These are verse 22: “for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ”; and verse 28, which states that, in the end, God will be “all in all.”
There is no ambiguity about the words Paul uses in these verses: “all,” panta, literally means “all.” Here and elsewhere in Paul’s writings, there is a universal logic and universal language in his eschatological statements. At the same time, however, Paul repeatedly warns that not everyone will inherit the kingdom of God. (E.g., 1 Cor. 6:9-10.) And even in 1 Corinthians 15, there is a hint that some of the unrighteous dead need some help, in the cryptic reference to baptisms for the dead (15:29).
In his interesting and challenging book Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Eerdmans 2020), Duke Divinity School Professor Douglas Campbell suggests that, like many Second Temple period Jews, Paul probably believed in a resurrection only of the righteous. At the “Day of the Lord,” the last day, the righteous dead would be raised and the righteous living would be transformed. The unrighteous dead would be left dead, and the unrighteous living would be annihilated. Some Second Temple apocalyptic literature included a dual resurrection and a judgment of annihilation or exclusion (“Hell”) for the unrighteous living and dead, but Paul seems uninterested in that concept. There is no suggestion in Paul’s writing of an eternal dual outcome: what is left after the end is only God and God’s people.
At the same time, Campbell notes, the universalistic logic of of texts like 1 Corinthians 15 seems to stand in tension with Paul’s apparent assumption that only the righteous will be raised or transformed in the last day. The parallel between people “in Adam” and “in Christ” seems particularly powerful here. There can be no sense, in Paul’s logic, in which any human being is not naturally “in Adam,” and it appears likewise that there should be no sense in which any of humanity is not ultimately “in Christ.”
In my view, we press texts like 1 Corinthians 15 too far if we suggest they are dogmatic statements about apokatastasis. Paul is not writing systematic theology. When his focus is on Christ and the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection, his language is universal. When his focus is on the realities of human sin, his language warns of exclusion.
We do best to take the full Biblical narrative, in all its diversity, together. Sin is judged. We are warned of the possibility of exclusion from God’s kingdom — even by Jesus himself. These warnings for us must remain live. They must spur us to repentance and faith, and to prophetic and faithful witness in a world that seems to oppose God’s peaceable reign. And yet, while we see only through a glass darkly, we know Jesus himself is the interpretive principle. The logic and goal of creation is the resurrection of Jesus. Death is not the last word; death is destroyed. Love bears, believes, endures, and hopes all things. In the end, love remains, and God is all in all. Even God’s judgment, whatever it will be, is a judgment born of love.
Some Questions on this Section
- What do you understand as some of the implications of “the gospel” Paul describes at the start of this chapter?
- What does it mean to you that Jesus’ resurrection defeats “death” as a power or enemy?
- What is your eschatological vision — your hope for the future?
Concluding Remarks
In chapter 16, Paul offers some concluding personal remarks to the Corinthians. He returns to the theme of the collection he is taking for the church in Jerusalem. He promises a future visit, identifies Timothy as his emissary, and offers gratitude for a visit from Stephanas, Fortunatus and Achaicus, Greek converts who apparently were working among the various congregations in Greece. (Based on their names, Fortunatus and Achaicus — “Lucky” and “From Achaias” — were probably present or former slaves of Stephanas.) He also makes a kind of off-handed (passive aggressive?) reference to Apollos.
At the very end of the letter Paul appends his own hand-written greeting. Paul would have dictated the body of the letter to an amanuensis, a kind of professional scribe. This personal greeting in Paul’s own hand was akin to a personal note someone today might add to a typed official letter. We see in that short note the same parts of Paul’s personality we saw throughout the letter: a word of exclusion (anathema) on anyone who does not love the Lord, a common early Christian exclamation in Aramaic– maran atha — and a concluding word of grace and love.
Final Question:
- What thoughts, impressions, or feelings does our study of 1 Corinthians leave you with?