Booksnip (1)

I've been reading Gordon Fee's commentary on 1 Corinthians and enjoying it a great deal. On page 87 Fee is commenting on 1 Corinthians 1:26-31, wherein Paul is writing about God calling the foolish, weak, and worthless things (in the the world's estimation) to shame the wise, powerful and affluent of the world, for the purpose of bringing everyone to the point of "boastlessness" (my word . . . sorry).

Fee writes:

The conclusion of the paragraph, "no human boasting" but rather "boasting in Christ" through whom God has effected salvation for us, continues (rightly) to play a signifcant role in the church. All of this is quite in keeping with the great cadences of Romans and Galatians, with which the Protestant tradition is so familiar. Unfortunately the means (the cross as the divine scandal) and the evidence for this conlcusion do not always get the same hearing. It is not that god cannot, or will not, save the affluent. But for Paul the glory of the Gospel does not lie there; rather, it lies in his mercy toward the very people whom most of the affluent tend to write off--the foolish, the weak, the despised. Such people do not fit well into the "suburban captivity of the church." This paragraph must serve as a continual warning against our remaking into our own more comfortable images God's distinctly revealed priorities of mercy for the helpless--as part of the evidence that his ways are not ours.