Hill of the Lord Blog

Of all that was done in the past, you eat the fruit, either rotten or ripe.
And the Church must be forever building, and always decaying, and always being restored.

-T.S. Eliot, Choruses From “The Rock”

Enough time has past prior to and since the time when Eliot wrote these lines for there to remain little doubt of their wisdom.  Even though his was the High (pseudo-Catholic) Anglican church, we in the 21st century evangelical church could utter the same things with equal fervor.  Ours is a Christendom that is a veritable orchard of good and bad fruit, both a product of bygone saints and men who only styled themselves as such.  Their fruit might be good doctrines proclaiming salvation by grace alone, or bad ones such as papal bulls asking for indulgences and pastel covered self-help theology books within which Christ is conspicuously absent.  Whatever the quality of the fruit, good or bad, it is what remains before us.  Ignoring it does little good and despairing over it fails to remember the promise of Jesus Christ that, “the gates of Hades will not overpower it,” (Mt 16:18).  The only question we are left with when we feel the cool, crisp flesh of good fruit– or wade amongst the rotting compost of the bad, is how will we sow?  How will we build in the church?  The task laid before our forefathers is the same that lay before us.  Will we seek the Lord, or will we exhaust ourselves in bad sowing, neglecting Divine intercession?

In Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth, we see Eliot’s theme embodied.  I Corinthians 3:9-17 comes on the heels of a rebuke to the Corinthians regarding their maturity in Christ.  Paul chastises them for failing to recognize that they are the work of Christ, not of men, and that men (such as Apollos and himself) are mere servants and not to be regarded as anything compared to Christ.  One would expect Paul to follow such a chastisement by downplaying the role of man in the work of God, but here Paul does something unexpected.  Instead of minimizing the role of man, he expands on it, developing a typology in which the disciple of Christ is the builder, Christ the pre-laid foundation, and the building under construction the temple of God.  This is important in that it does not dispense with God or man (as we are sometimes prone to do in our conception of salvation), but it defines the role of both parties without minimizing either.  Instead of relegating the work of the kingdom to Christ alone, Paul puts us into a vocation of creativity in which we take an active role in building the temple.

Let us be clear that the Temple under construction is not you or me as an individual.  There is a profound sense in which the English does not convey what Paul is actually saying here.  We often interpret this passage to be speaking about our individual bodies (esp. vv 16-17) suggesting that Paul is telling us as individuals to avoid bad things in order that our own soul might not be corrupted.  When we look at the Greek, however, the passage takes on a different scope.  Instead of reading,

“Do you not know that you are a temple of God…”

It actually reads,

“Do you all [second-person plural) not know that you all are a temple [singular] of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you all?

The first reading leaves us with a sense that the holiness of our brother or sister is ultimately irrelevant to our own spiritual well-being.  In the second, our brother’s well-being is immensely important because the integrity of the whole temple rests on him as much as it rests on us.  Because of Christ’s blood, which is also our blood, we are inextricably linked.  If I am unholy, there is a sense in which the rest of the temple bears the consequence.  You do not comprise a temple; you and I together comprise the Temple (not just another one).  One brick rests on another brick.  The weakness of one affects the other.

Paul’s admonition is of particular importance in our church because our church exists in a culture in which the predominant trajectory is away from community.  Whereas the entire Biblical narrative could be said to be about reconciling community–– with God, then with our neighbor–– we have the cultural ethos of Thorough’s Walden in which our neighbor is more or less an obstacle to our personal peace.  If the communal context is left out of our theology there exists no imperative to live at peace with anyone.  Christianity becomes little more than ascetic behavior modification.  Righteousness would be easy if it had nothing to do with our neighbor, not to mention God.

What, then, does it mean to build well?  What could Paul possibly mean by saying that there are some who use gold and silver, and others who use straw and wood?  What is the fire by which we will be tested?  What are the implications of this passage for evangelism and life in the church?  Over the next couple weeks I hope to explore this in depth and pursue two things; first, to understand what Paul is communicating to the Corinthian believers, and second, what he would communicate to us as apart of the church in Columbia.  My prayer is that by doing this we as a church would better understand how we truly are knitted together as one body in Christ Jesus.

Filled under: Blog | by jonfurst |