For the Good of the Body

Much ink has been spilled discussing the gifts of the Spirit. To look at only one small aspect of this complex topic, we will recall that gifts are given to an individual for benefit of the community. The bestowal of a spiritual gift is not about the individual upon whom it is bestowed, but rather about the community's need for that gift. This can be seen in the case of Moses, as Walther Eichrodt describes:

This organizer who enjoyed no proper political power, this national leader who boasted no prowess in war, this man who directed the worship of God without every having received the status of priest, who established and mediated a new understanding of God without any of the credentials of prophetic powers of prediction, this wonder-worker who was yet far above the domain of mere magic, confronts us from the very outset with one ineluctable fact: Israelite religion is not the product of scrupulously guarded tradition, swollen with the accretions of history, nor does it rest on any sort of organization, however cleverly or successfully devised, but is a creation of that spirit which blows where it is inclined to do so, and which in mockery of our neat arrangements unites in the richness of marvelously equipped personalities things patently incompatible, in order that it may forward its own mighty and life-giving work. At the very beginning of Israelite religion we find the charisma, the special individual endowment of a person; and to such an extent is the whole structure based on it, that without it it would be inconceivable.

God planned the building and expansion of His kingdom, including the manifestation of spiritual gifts (I Cor 12:7). In discussing these gifts, the focus must be on the community, not the individual. Within dogmatics, some topics have an individual emphasis, and others a corporate emphasis; spiritual gifts must fall into the latter category. Attempts to analyze these gifts under the former category have caused significant confusions.

Both Testaments

Pious believers have, for centuries, stressed and experienced the necessity of studying both the Old Testament and the New Testament - and of the devotional reading of both, as well - to hear ever more clearly the voice of God, and to see His grace. There is absolutely nothing new in this: it began in the teaching of Jesus, in which He stated clearly His continuity with the Hebrew Scriptures. Walther Eichrodt put it well, writing that we are most confronted with the urgency of experiencing the text of the Old Testament

when we enter the unique spiritual realm of the New Testament. For in the encounter with the Christ of the Gospels there is the assertion of a mighty living reality as inseparably bound up with the Old Testament past as pointing forward into the future. That which binds together indivisibly the two realms of the Old and New Testaments - different in externals though they may be - is the irruption of the Kingship of God into this world and its establishment here. This is the unitive fact because it rests on the action of the one and the same God in each case; that God who in promise and performance, in Gospel and Law, pursues one and the selfsame purpose, the building of his Kingdom. This is why the central message of the New Testament leads us back to the testimony of God in the old covenant.

Eichrodt's powerful formulation here might be improved only in the understanding that, as Jesus said, the kingdom is "not of this world" - meaning not only that the kingdom includes the metaphysical beyond the physical, but meaning also that God's concept of kingship, as the ultimate concept of kingship, has been elevated to the extent that it includes, and more than includes - it operates with the foundational axioms of those notions - mercy, grace, love, agape, forgiveness - which are understood be the core of the Gospel.

Correctly Eichrodt writes about the building of the kingdom: it is built as God's Spirit pours out the gift of faith. The irruption of God's Kingship is the emergence of God's unearned love, His unmerited grace and mercy toward humans. The building of God's kingdom is, then, the deconstruction of power structures, meritocracies, as humanly understood.

Just as God called people to be His people - Abraham did not in any way earn God's favor, nor was he righteous or obedient prior to God's call - in the Old Testament, so in the New Testament it is "not because of our righteous deeds" (as Paul writes to Titus), but rather because of a unilateral giving impulse on God's part that His Kingdom is built.