Quote:
Originally Posted by awareness
Cuz when you bring in the context of 15:45 you bring in our experience. Paul is not speaking theology. He's speaking of the guarantee of our inheritance. He's speaking of experiences.
So the truth is, if/when we get down to the bottom of the theology of 15:45, without experience as the conclusion, our theology will be hollow and empty of content.
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And therein lies the problem with 1 Cor 15:45 as experience. This is the middle of a discussion about something that none of the participants to the conversation had experienced. Not Paul. Not the Corinthian believers. Not anyone who has read the dialog since. That verse is an attempt to focus the minds of a bunch of believers who were speculating about something that had never been discussed previously, and that none of them could experience and talk to others about. And even if Paul was not entirely correct on the ultimate similarity of the coming body in resurrection, he only had one example to provide — Jesus after his resurrection — and it was not really talked about other than by inference from the accounts of his actions during those few days before his ascension.
If anything, I believe that Paul's goal was not to school the Corinthians on what was to be, but to give them a narrower range of imagination so they would drop it and move on to what mattered — living now. And from what I can see, no matter how high and lofty and spiritual the other things Paul taught, it was all tied in with their practical living as a community of faith and as individuals representing that community in the larger community of life.