1 Corinthians 1:30-31

“But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who, on the part of God, has been made unto us wisdom, as also righteousness and sanctification and redemption; 31. that, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.”

Rückert, with his usual precision, asks whether the thought expressed in these two verses is logically connected with the passage as a whole; he answers in the negative, and sees in those two verses only an appendix. We think, as we have just pointed out, that they are on the contrary the indispensable complement of the passage. 1 Corinthians 1:26-29: “See what your calling is not, and understand why!” 1 Corinthians 1:30-31: “See what it is, and again understand why!” The δέ is therefore adversative to the vain boasting of the things that are wise, etc., henceforth reduced to silence; there is opposed the cry of triumph and praise on the side of the things foolish and weak; for 1 Corinthians 1:31 evidently forms the counterpart of 1 Corinthians 1:29. ᾿Εξ αὐτοῦ, of Him (God), expresses the essential idea of this conclusion: If things that were not have now become something, it is due to God alone; ἐκ therefore indicates the origin of this spiritual creation; comp. Ephesians 2:9. ῾Υμεῖς, ye: the things formerly weak, powerless, despised. This pronoun resumes the address of 1 Corinthians 1:26. Calvin, Rückert, Hofmann see in the word ἐστέ, ye are, a contrast to the preceding expression: things which are not. “It is of God that your transition from nothingness to being proceeds.” The words, in Christ, would thus express, secondarily, the means whereby God has accomplished this miracle. Others strictly connect ἐξ αὐτοῦ with ἐστέ in the sense of the Johannine phrase: to be of God, to be born of God. But these two explanations have the awkwardness of separating the words ἐν Χριστῷ ᾿Ιησοῦ from ἐστέ; whereas we know well how frequently Paul uses the form εἶναι ἐν Χριστῷ. It is better therefore, as it seems to me, to translate thus: “It is of Him that ye are in Christ; ” that is to say: “It is to God alone that you owe the privilege of having been called to the communion of Christ, and of having thereby become the wise and mighty and noble of the new era which is now opening on the world.” The following proposition will explain, by what Christ Himself was, these glorious effects of communion with Him. The phrase εἶναι ἐν, to be in, denotes two moral facts: first, the act of faith whereby man lays hold of Christ; second, the community of life with Him contracted by means of this act of faith. In this relation the believer can appropriate all that Christ was, and thus become what he was not and what he could not become of himself.

In the proposition which follows, the apostle substitutes for ὑμεῖς, ye, the pronoun ἡμῖν, to us; and this because the matter in question now is, what Christ is objectively to men, and not the subjective appropriation of Him by believers.

The aor. Passive, ἐγενήθη, is generally regarded (Meyer, Edwards) as equivalent in meaning to the aor. Middle, ἐγένετο, was, became. It is, indeed, a form springing up from the dialects, and which was only introduced latterly into Attic Greek. But that does not, we think, prevent there being a difference in the use of the two forms. The passive form occurs in the New Testament only some fifty times, compared with about 550 times that the aor. Middle is used; and it is easy in each of those instances to see the meaning of being made, which is naturally that of the Passive. I think, therefore, that we must translate, not, “has been” or “has become,” but, has been made. This is confirmed by the adjunct ἀπὸ θεοῦ, on the part of God. Yet it should be remarked that the apostle has not written ὑπὸ θεοῦ, “ by God.” The ἀπό, on the part of, weakens the passivity contained in the ἐγενήθη, and leaves space for the free action of Christ. In using the words ὃς ἐγενήθη, who has been made (historically), the apostle seems to have in mind the principal phases of Christ's being: wisdom, by His life and teaching; righteousness, by His death and resurrection; sanctification, by His elevation to glory; redemption, by His future return.

The received text places the pronoun ἡμῖν, to us, before σοφία, wisdom. This reading would have the effect of bringing this substantive into proximity with the three following, from which it would only be separated by the adjunct ἀπὸ θεοῦ; and this adjunct again can be made to depend, not on the verb ἐγενήθη, but on the substantive σοφία itself: “wisdom coming from God.” In this case there would be nothing to separate it from the three following substantives. But the authority of the mss. speaks strongly in favour of the position of ἡμῖν after σοφία; and the adjunct ἀπὸ θεοῦ depends more naturally on the verb ἐγενήθη; it serves to bring out the idea of the ἐξ αὐτοῦ at the beginning of the verse. It must thus be held that the apostle's intention was clearly to separate the first substantive from the other three, and this has led him to interpose between σοφία and the other substantives the two adjuncts: ἡμῖν and ἀπὸ θεοῦ.

If it is so, it is impossible to maintain the relation which Meyer establishes between the four substantives, according to which they express three co-ordinate notions: 1, that of knowledge of the Divine plan revealed in Christ (wisdom); 2, that of salvation, regarded on the positive side, of the blessings which it brings (righteousness and holiness); 3, that of salvation from the negative view-point, deliverance from condemnation and sin (redemption). Meyer rests his view on the fact that the particle τε καί binds the second and third terms closely together, isolating them at the same time from the first and fourth. But regard to philological exactness may have misled this excellent critic here, as in so many instances. Why, in that case, interpose the two adjuncts between the first term and the second? And is it not obvious at a glance that the three last terms are in the closest relation to one another, so that it is impossible to separate them into two distinct groups, co-ordinate with the first? This is what has led a large number of commentators (Rückert, Neander, Heinrici, Edwards, etc.) to see in the three last terms the explanation and development of the first: Christ has become our wisdom, and that inasmuch as He has brought us the most necessary of blessings, salvation, consisting of righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. It is easy in this case to understand why the first term, which states the general notion, has been separated from the other three which are subordinate to it. Only this explanation is not in harmony with the special sense of religious knowledge, in which the word wisdom is taken in the passage. Wisdom, as a plan of salvation, is contrasted, 1 Corinthians 1:24, with salvation itself as a Divine act (δύναμις, power). How does it come to be identified here with salvation itself? The word, therefore, cannot denote anything else here than the understanding of the Divine plan communicated to man by Jesus Christ. The parallel 1 Corinthians 1:24 leads us, I think, to the true explanation which Osiander has developed. According to him, the last three terms are the unfolding of the notion of δύναμις, power, as the counterpart to that of wisdom. In Christ there has been given first the knowledge of the Divine plan, whereby the believer is rendered wise; then to the revelation there has been added the carrying out of this salvation, by the acquisition of which we become strong. This effective salvation includes the three gifts: righteousness, holiness, redemption. The only objection to this view is that the τε καί would require to be placed so as to connect together σοφία on the one hand, and the following three terms on the other, whereas by its position this copula rather connects δικαιοσύνη and ἁγιασμός (righteousness and holiness), as the second καί connects the third substantive with the fourth. But the omission of a copula fitted to connect the first substantive with the other three may have been occasioned by two circumstances: 1, the two adjuncts which separate the word wisdom from the following three; 2, the difficulty of adding to the copula τε καί, which joins the word righteousness with the following, a new copula intended to connect it with the preceding (see Osiander). Then, if it is remembered that the salvation described in the last three substantives is only the realization of the Divine plan designated by the first (wisdom), it will be seen that these may be placed there as a sort of grammatical apposition to the first.

The idea of δικαιοσύνη, righteousness, is that developed by Paul in the first part of the Epistle to the Romans, chaps. 1-5. It is the act of grace whereby God removes the condemnation pronounced on the sinner, and places him relatively to Himself, as a believer, in the position of a righteous man. The possibility of such a Divine act is due to the death and resurrection of Christ.

The term ἁγιασμός, holiness or sanctification, is the Divine act which succeeds the preceding, and whereby there is created in the believer a state in harmony with his position as righteous. It is the destruction of sin by the gift of a will which the Holy Spirit has consecrated to God. This act is that described by the apostle in the succeeding passage of the Epistle to the Romans, Romans 6:1 to Romans 8:17. I have sought to show in my Commentary on that Epistle, at Romans 6:19, that the term ἁγιασμός denotes sanctification, not in the sense in which we usually take the word, as a progressive human work, but as the state of holiness divinely wrought in believers. Justification is generally regarded as a gift of God; but sanctification as the work by which man ought to respond to the gift of righteousness. St. Paul, on the contrary, sees in holiness a Divine work no less than in righteousness: Christ Himself is the holiness of the believer as well as his righteousness. This new work is due to His exaltation to glory, whence He sends the Holy Spirit; and by Him He communicates His own life to the justified believer (John 7:39; John 16:14). If, then, our righteousness is Christ for us, our sanctification is Christ in us, Christ is our holiness as well as our righteousness. He is finally our redemption, our complete and final deliverance. Such is the meaning of the word ἀπολύτρωσις. The development of this third idea is found, Romans 8:18-30. This deliverance, which consists of entrance into glory, is the consummation of the two preceding acts of grace. It is by His glorious advent that Jesus will thus emancipate justified and sanctified believers from all the miseries of their present state, and give them an external condition corresponding to their spiritual state. Meyer asserts that this meaning of ἀπολύτρωσις would demand the complement τοῦ σώματος, of the body, as in Romans 8:23. But the term redemption embraces much more than the simple fact of the resurrection of the body. It has the wide sense in which we find it, Luke 21:28; Ephesians 1:14; Ephesians 4:30; Hebrews 11:35. As to the view of Meyer, who sees in this word only the negative side of moral redemption, deliverance from guilt and sin, it is certainly too weak, and besides this blessing was already implied in the two foregoing terms.

If we so obviously find in the Epistle to the Romans the development of the three last terms, in which the notion of salvation is summed up, we cannot forget that the development of the first, σοφία, occurs immediately afterwards in the same Epistle, in chaps. 9-11, which so admirably expound the whole plan of God.

Calvin rightly observes that it would be hard to find in the whole of Scripture a saying which more clearly expresses the different phases of Christ's work.