Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Victor Paul Furnish on 1 Corinthians 16:14

"'Let everything you do be done in love' .... One can imagine contexts in which this very general appeal would amount to little more than an encouragement to be kind to others. But here it is invested with the full weight of Paul's gospel as that comes to expression in 1 Corinthians. The love he has in view is the agape that is proper to God's own being, which both graces and claims the whole of creation and has been revealed in the saving power of the cross. In their belonging to the resurrected-crucified Christ, believers are formed into a community that lives from the cross and are called to be agents of God's love, both individually and corporately, within the particularities of their own time and place." - Victor Paul Furnish, The Theology of the First Letter to the Corinthians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 121.