In light of the reflections of religious persecution last week, I had a rich discussion today about our confidence in the power of the proclamation of the Gospel. This confidence in preaching also came to mind because today is 793rd anniversary of the death of the famous Franciscan preacher, Anthony of Padua (or Lisbon). Moreover, the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians came up at a church service and while reading the work of a fascinating theologian of the Catholic Tübingen school, Johannes Kuhn (1806-1887). This passage (vv. 18-31) is always a challenge for those of us engaged in studying philosophy (v. 25: “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom”), but it is also a challenge to Christian engagements with power:

We preach Christ crucified … to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For … the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. … God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are. (vv. 23-28)

Paul says earlier in the chapter,

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. (vv. 17-18)

Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on these passages states clearly that “the chief element in the doctrines of the Catholic faith is salvation effected by the cross of Christ” (#45). The thing that is most “foolish” to “worldly wisdom” is “that God should die or that Omnipotence should suffer at the hands of violent men” (#47); he continues, “because of their lack of wisdom they supposed that it is impossible for God to become man and suffer death in His human nature” (#50). So, the appearance of powerlessness or weakness in the Son of God is part of the reason why the Gospel is rejected (cf. #58). Of course, God proves this “worldly wisdom” to be in itself foolishness through God’s power to raise Jesus from the dead — what this supposed wisdom “considered impossible” (#54). For Aquinas, Christ’s appearance of weakness may have been a stumbling block, but it is indeed the power of God “by which devils are overcome, sins forgiven and men saved” (#60). In sum, Aquinas says, “the weakness of God is stronger than men, because something in God is not called weak on account of a lack of strength but because it exceeds human power” (#62).

For Aquinas, Paul’s statements about God’s calling the weak and the powerless are clear in the case of the fisherman among the Twelve Apostles as well as the “peasants” and “plebeians” that took up ministry of preaching in the early days of the Church (##65-66). This was a fulfillment of the words of Isaiah 2:17: “The haughtiness of man shall be humbled, and the pride of men shall be brought low.”

How do we confront the fact that signs of nobility and power and learning became so characteristic of the Church in future centuries? Aquinas does note that Paul himself was noble in a way – “born in a Roman city” (#64, cf. Acts 22:25). But he deals with this issue in a broader historical framework in his commentary on Boethius’s De trinitate, where one finds some of the richest discussions of faith and reason in the Thomistic corpus. In q. 2, a. 3, the first objection brings up a number of passages from 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 to argue the following: “It seems that in regard to those truths that are of faith it is not right to employ the rational arguments of the natural philosophers.” In reply, Aquinas says that philosophy cannot be “used as if it had the first place.” As in his commentary on 1 Corinthians, Aquinas makes the revelation of God in the cross of Christ foundational. Like the commentary on 1 Corinthians, Aquinas emphasizes that the first preachers came “in infirmity and simplicity” so that “all that is of faith might be attributed not to human power or wisdom but to God.”

But Aquinas acknowledges here that something has changed since those early days. He speaks of the “later advent of power and secular wisdom” (postea potentia et saecularis sapientia superveniens – here). In the later centuries of the Church, God “manifested by the victory of the faith that the world is subject to God as much by wisdom as by power” (all emphasis is mine, of course).

God makes use of simplicity and weakness in the days of the primitive church and, in later centuries, God also uses wisdom and power. Of course, I’m very happy that Christianity was decriminalized in the fourth century and that institutions like churches, hospitals, and eventually universities could become public. We’ve spent a lot of time here at TRF dealing with Christian appropriations of pagan learning across the confessions (here, here, here, etc.), even the interpretation of Paul’s statements about wisdom, foolishness, and philosophy in these learned Christian traditions. But is there a way to affirm many of these developments while also acknowledging that political power can bring genuine losses as we proclaim the Gospel to the oppressed? As Christ read in Isaiah 61 at a key moment in his ministry:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. (Luke 4:18-19)

I think that I’ve been too quick in the past to dismiss some of these concerns about these later developments in Church history as rooted in a (broadly) Anabaptist rejection of the Christianization of the Roman Empire after Constantine’s conversion and especially during the reign of Theodosius. We will be reflecting on different interpretations of these events in the future. But I’ll leave things here with a passage from the beginning of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s remarkable book on 1 Corinthians, Paul Struggles with His Congregation: The Pastoral Message of the Letters to the Corinthians (first published in 1988, the year of Balthasar’s death, and translated by Brigitte L. Bojarska). Here he deals with the form of the church and its teaching in light of the opening chapter of the First Epistle discussed above (italics are original, and bolded emphasis is added):

Paul presents his doctrine to the congregation with power and absolute clarity — against their inclinations. Its central theme is Cross and Resurrection, found in the First Letter’s opening and second-to-last chapters. This “gospel is veiled” (2 Cor 4:3) and is “an aroma from death to death” (2 Cor 2:16) only to one who has been “blinded” by “the god of this world” (2 Cor 4:4). But for those claiming to be “spiritual” (1 Cor 2:13), whether they want to hear it or not, “the word of the Cross” (the principle of the Cross, 1 Cor 1:18), contains the basis for all that follows, including the solution to all the congregation’s problems. With full force he impresses on them that God’s seeming foolishness in allowing his Son to be crucified and in the “absurdity of the preaching of the gospel” (1 Cor 1:18; 1:21ff) flies in the face of all human wisdom; “the rulers of this age” (Caiaphas and Pilate) could not understand it (1 Cor 2:8ff).

One has to see Paul’s message of the Cross in its fullness. … Through the bloody sacrifice of the Cross and the form it takes in the Church as baptism and Eucharist (“sharing in the blood of Christ” [1 Cor 10:16]) we are actually incorporated into the holiness of Christ. The entire doctrine of the Body of Christ, of which we are “individually members” (1 Cor 12:27), issues directly from the event of the Cross. Undoubtedly, it stands at the center of world history; everything that came before served as “examples” (1 Cor 10:6), all that follows is proclamation and unfolding. But the whole structure of the Church is also determined by the Cross. Its function … is to participate in God’s work in the world. Since God “has committed to us the word of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:19), (a result of the Cross), this ministry is nothing other than “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18), and therefore it has its special share in what took place at the Cross. But so does the congregation as a whole and each individual member of it: as they behold the Lord, all of them are to be more and more transformed into his likeness.

Jesus’ Cross would remain meaningless without the Resurrection. … Christ’s Resurrection is the point of the whole gospel: without it our entire faith is “worthless (1 Cor 15:17), our dead have “perished” (1 Cor 15:18), and — demonstrating the unbreakable connection between Cross and Resurrection — “you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). … It is extremely significant for Paul that there is a resurrection of the body, not at all because, based on the Old Testament, he can conceive of man only as a spirit within a body, but because Christ’s truly human and crucified body is decisively important for his whole doctrine of salvation. That the resurrected body is and will be a spiritual one, spiritually “life-giving” (1 Cor 15:45) … does not preclude God’s already having given “us the Spirit in our hearts as a pledge” (2 Cor 1:22), as those incorporated in the risen Christ. …

The death and Resurrection of Christ are the source of all the dogmatic truth that still needs to be proclaimed.

As Balthasar interprets Paul, the history of the Church does not move from simplicity and weakness to wisdom and power. It moves – it should move – more fully into the unfolding and proclamation of the event of the Cross. This proclamation demands an account of the resurrection — by a Church that is “life-giving.”