‘He Will Rescue Us Again’: Affliction and Hope in 2 Corinthians 1:8–11

Dark times can generate crippling despair all too easily. Resources for resistance to despair and for the discovery and articulation of hope are not always readily apparent. This essay considers Paul’s account of his own immersion in such a situation: An ‘affliction’ that left him ‘unbearably crushed’, ‘despairing of life itself’ (2 Cor 1:9), and under a ‘sentence of death’ (2 Cor 1:10). Making a speculative proposal about the nature of Paul’s experience, the essay goes on to argue that Paul identified two fundamental resources for hope. The first is a conviction about an eschatological act that undoes the sentence of death and effects the possibility of rescue or deliverance. The second is a form of human solidarity that generates potential reorientation to the reality of ‘rescue’. While the essay explores these ideas within the terms and framework of Paul’s rhetoric in 2 Corinthians, it will do so with one clear eye on the potential resources that Pauline theology offers those who live in inexplicably dark times today, not least by considering the potential resources for political optimism.

Reconsidering the Coherence of 1 Corinthians 1:10–4:21

1 Corinthians 1:10–4:21 is usually seen as a defense against adherents of an “Apollos party,” who have become enamored with Apollos’ “wisdom” and who denigrate Paul as his inferior. This article argues for a different reading of this unit. Some in the church have espoused some kind of “human” wisdom, but not the wisdom of any particular leader. These people were boasting in themselves, not in their leaders. Paul discusses his relationship with Apollos not because there was a rivalry between them or between parties who claimed them as their leaders, but because the relationship between Paul and Apollos embodied the wisdom of Christ crucified and thus offered an antidote to the church’s divisions.

John Eliot’s pastoral theology of poverty and an “obscure low condition”—including that of being “a worm”—in his Harmony of the Gospels (1678) published two years after Metacom’s War

Roughly two years after Metacom’s War, John Eliot published a Lord’s Supper preparativo titled, The Harmony of the Gospels, in the Holy History of the Humiliation and Sufferings of Jesus Christ from his Incarnation to his Death and Burial (1678). The book’s 130 pages provide a copious survey of various sufferings undergone by Jesus which Eliot parsed out of his reading of Scripture. Eliot posed several parallels between the experiences of Jesus, on one hand, and those of genuine Christians on the other. One of these parallels is the experience of poverty and what Eliot repeatedly called an “obscure low condition” that obtains from poverty. Considering Eliot’s long experience in cross-cultural ministry in a tenuous colonial context, this is one of the most striking features of the book. I believe it resonates with the Native Christian experience more than the white colonial Christian experience. Time and again Eliot makes an authorial movement from Gospel narrative and biblical commentary to contemporary application for Christian readers. I suggest that Eliot intended to voice comfort at times in The Harmony specifically to Native Christians by assuring them their experience of marginalization and suffering did not negate their status as a part of God’s people. What Eliot wrote about the low condition of being “a worm” reflects convictions likely forged in the fires of cross-cultural ministry in colonial context. Eliot’s multifaceted and expectant vision for the praying towns was a casualty of Metcom’s War. He seems to have changed his interpretation of 1 Corinthians 1:26–29. The theological motif of Zechariah’s temple rebuilding mission was replaced by the suffering Messiah’s rejection as the prominent biblical type informing Eliot’s expectations for the development of Native Christianity. In this carefully nuanced pastoral theology of poverty is also a prophetic critique of injustice toward the poor and marginalized.