The following is some notes my friend Norm sent me. They provide an excellent vision of what we are to strive for in gospel based communities which are to form the church of Christ.
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Alan Knox was asked to give a lecture on 1 Cor. 12-13 at SEBTS, apart from his own class lectures.
The Assembled Church
I. Introduction and Background
Andrew Chester – “The Pauline Communities” – A Vision for the Church: Studies in Early Christian Ecclesiology (ed. Markus Bockmuehl and Michael B. Thompson; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997):
Paul’s vision for the communities that he wrote to can be summed up quite succinctly. He sees them as being a new creation in Christ, filled with the Spirit, possessing gifts of the Spirit and overflowing with the fruit of the Spirit, controlled above all by love; they are communities that should be pure and holy, mutually supportive and interdependent, completely united, transcending the oppositions and tensions between different groups within the community, and with every kind of barrier that would divide them in normal society broken down.
This brief summary may seem over-idealized; it may indeed seem somewhat grandiose and abstract, especially in the light of the occasional letter that Paul wrote to quite different communities, often on very specific and mundane issues… It is also to be said that theory and practice in any case often fail to coincide, and the way that a particular community lives can be very far removed from Paul’s vision of what it should be. Paul himself is made painfully aware of this. Indeed, it is probably true to say that we have a semblance of Paul’s vision for his communities, to a large extent, because of the problems that have arisen in a number of those communities and that Paul feels the need to counter. That is, Paul finds himself faced with what he considers false practice, or even a complete negation of his ideal of the Christian community, and hence has to urge those in these communities that he has founded to become what they know they should be, and not remain as they are. (105)
As Chester points out, we have Paul’s vision for the church because the churches that Paul wrote to were not living according to that vision.
The church in Corinth is a good example of a church that failed to live according to that vision.
Margaret Mitchell (Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation) suggests that Paul’s purpose in writing to the church in Corinth was to reconcile the many factions that had formed. Why? Because division and factions were contrary to what he taught in all the churches.
