Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of spiritual gifts from 1 Corinthians 12.
In the entire range of contemporary Christian theology and personal experience, few topics are currently more important than those associated with what is now commonly called the charismatic movement. The label itself, as we shall see, is in the light of the biblical usage of charisma somewhat misleading. Because it is the common term, I shall continue to use it.
What makes the subject difficult is not so much the label as the substance. The movement embraces not only the traditional Pentecostal denominations, but substantial minorities and most of the denominations of Christendom. In some parts of the world, South America for instance, it is simultaneously the major protestant voice and a successful invader of the Roman Catholic church.
Whatever their theological commitments, young clergy will wrestle with questions raised by the charismatic movement as frequently and in some instances as painfully as anything else that comes their way. As the charismatic movement has grown, so also has it become diversified, thereby rendering any generalizations about it remarkably reductionistic.
It is probably fair to say that both charismatics and noncharismatics, if I may continue to use these terms in a nonbiblical way, often cherish neat stereotypes of each other. Noncharismatics, judge the charismatics, tend to be stodgy traditionalists who don’t really believe the Bible and are not really hungry for the Lord.
They are afraid of profound spiritual experience, too proud to give themselves wholeheartedly to God, more concerned for ritual than for reality, and more in love with propositional truth than with the truth incarnate. They are better at writing theological tomes than at evangelism. They are defeatist in outlook, defensive in stance, dull in worship, and devoid of the Spirit’s power in their personal experience.
The noncharismatics themselves tend to see things a little differently. The charismatics, they think, have succumbed to the modern love of experience, even at the expense of truth. They are profoundly unbiblical, especially when they elevate their experience of tongues to the level of theological and spiritual shibboleth.
If they are growing, no small part of their strength can be ascribed to their raw triumphalism, their populist elitism, their promise of quick shortcuts to holiness and power. They are better at splitting churches and stealing sheep than they are at evangelism, more accomplished in spiritual one-upmanship before other believers than in faithful, humble service.
They are imperialistic in outlook (only they have the “full gospel”), abrasive in stance, uncontrolled in worship and devoid of any real grasp of the Bible that goes beyond mere prooftexting. Of course, both sides can see that the caricatures I have drawn admit notable exceptions. The profound suspicions on both sides make genuine dialogue extremely difficult.
This is especially painful, indeed embarrassing, in the light of the commitment made by most believers on both sides to the Bible’s authority. The stereotyped positions of the two sides are so antithetical, even though both claim to be biblical, that we must conclude one of three things:
One side or other is right in their interpretation of Scripture on these points and the other is correspondingly wrong, both sides are to some degree wrong and some better way of understanding Scripture must be found, or the Bible simply does not speak clearly and judicially to these issues and both sides of the dispute have extrapolated the Bible’s teachings to entrenched positions not themselves defensible in Scripture.
We must, in any case, return to Scripture. That is the rationale for this series of lectures. I have no delusions that what I say is particularly innovative or will prove thoroughly convincing to everyone who has thought about these issues. The narrowness of the primary focus, just after all 3 chapters in all of the New Testament, necessarily circumscribes my conclusions.
Nevertheless, I hope my concluding lecture will integrate enough biblical material from other parts, especially from the book of Acts, that the conclusions will not appear distorted. Moreover, although most of my attention will be devoted to the text of 1 Corinthians 12–14, my concern to make this a theological exposition, as the subtitle of the series stipulates, will force me to interact a little with some other Christian doctrines as well as with the findings of linguists, social anthropologists, historians, and the practical and popular beliefs of the contemporary church, even where such considerations range outside the domain of the student of the New Testament.
For I am persuaded that if the church is to have peace on these issues, we must even-handedly attempt to weigh all the relevant evidence even while we insist that the Scripture itself must prevail. The authority of that Scripture must not be transferred to me. So I shall from time to time indicate the degree of certainty by which I make interpretive judgments so that even if we cannot all come to agreement on all the details, perhaps most of us can come to agreement on the most central matters.
1. Reflections on the background of the argument in 1 Corinthians 12–14
The text here outlines the flow of the argument through the book as a whole and particularly stresses how there is a great deal of over-realized eschatology both in 1 Corinthians and in the modern charismatic movement. It is one of the common ingredients between the two.
Moreover, the text also examines how there are divisions in the church and how therefore it is part of Paul’s strategy to address one party and then another party and often to say, “Yes, yes, I agree with you but … Yes, yes, I agree with you but …” That becomes almost a method of argumentation with him.
It is important to understand that when we come to certain crucial passages such as, “Yes, yes, I speak in tongues more than you all, but …” Unless you understand the nature of his argumentation, I think it is very easy to absolutize statements that must be understood within the dynamics of the polemics at Corinth. All of those kinds of things I will leave to the background here and turn now immediately to the text.
2. The bearing of Christianity’s central confession on this subject (12:1-3)
You will want to follow in the Scriptures. The principal turning points in these verses are the following.
A) Paul’s use of the term charisma.
In the New Testament, the term is found 16 times in Paul’s writings and once in Peter. It is clearly cognate with charis, grace. At its simplest, it refers to something grace has bestowed, a grace gift, if you will. It is not that Paul coined the term. That is most likely going too far, although admittedly our pre-Pauline occurrences are textually uncertain.
For the apostle who so delights to discuss grace, it is eminently appropriate that he should devote attention to the things of grace, to the concretizations of grace, to grace gifts. Of more importance is what the word refers to. Outside 1 Corinthians 12–14, Paul uses it to refer to the spiritual gift he wishes to impart to the Romans when he sees them.
He refers to the gift that generates life over against the trespass of Adam that generated death (Romans 5). He refers to the gift of God, eternal life itself in Christ Jesus that alone can offset the wages of sin, which is death (Romans 6). It refers to the election of Israel since God’s gifts and call are irrevocable (Romans 11).
To the list of gifts presented in Romans 12 … prophesying, serving, teaching, encouraging, contributing to the needs of others, leadership, showing mercy. That accounts for the uses in Romans. In 2 Corinthians 1:11, charisma refers to the gracious favor or gift granted to Paul in response to the prayers of many, presumably deliverance from some unspecified deadly peril.
There are two occurrences in the Pastoral Epistles. In 1 Timothy 4:14, Timothy is told not to neglect the gift that was given him through a prophetic message when the body of elders laid their hands on him, but the gift itself is not further specified. Similarly in 2 Timothy 1:6, he is told to fan into flame the gift of God that is in him through the laying on of Paul’s hands.
Perhaps we may deduce from these two contexts that the gift was the ministry to which he was called, in danger of being curtailed by timidity and insufficient self-discipline. Usage in 1 Peter 1:10 tightly ties grace gift to grace. Each believer is to use whatever gift, charisma, he has received to serve others, thereby administering God’s grace, his charis, in its various forms. We have now scanned every instance of the word in the New Testament except those in 1 Corinthians.
In this epistle, in the first chapter, Paul assures his readers that they do not lack any spiritual gift, any of the charismata, as they wait for the Lord’s return. Although one wonders if the reference to the Lord’s return is a not-too-subtle hint that even such spiritual wealth is nothing compared with the glory that is to come.
In one of the most intriguing occurrences in 1 Corinthians 7:7, Paul tells his readers that each person has a particular gift from God, one this and another that, in the context where this and that refer to marriage and celibacy, respectively. Marriage is a gift. Celibacy is a gift. Presumably, one cannot enjoy both of these charismata simultaneously.
The remaining five instances are all found in 1 Corinthians 12. The word stands behind the different kinds of gifts in 12:4, its first occurrence here, and behind the word gifts in 12:31a. Finally, it is found three times in the plural expression the gifts of healings, as it literally is, in chapter 12, verses 9, 28, and 30. The word charisma does not stand behind what the NIV calls spiritual gifts in 12:1. Another word is used there that we’ll look at in a moment. So much for the raw data. What shall we make of them?
Dealing first with the superficial, it is very clear that the term is not a technical one for Paul that refers only to a select list of supranormal gifts like healing and tongues. Not only can it embrace gifts like encouraging and generous giving, but it can be used repeatedly for the gift of salvation itself, not to mention the gift of celibacy and the gift of marriage. In that sense, therefore, every Christian is a charismatic. Moreover, if the term can extend to celibacy and marriage, every person, Christian or not, is a charismatic.
Every person has received gracious gifts from God. It is for this reason that I do not much like to talk about the charismatic movement unless I am given space to define terms. It seems like a terrible reduction of the manifold grace of God. Having clarified what Paul’s range of reference is under this term, however, I shall bow to popular coinage and speak of the charismatic movement.
I’ll skip a little bit more about how others use the term. What is clear so far is that the particular spiritual gifts Paul wishes to discuss in these chapters are gifts of God’s grace. To say more than that, we must extend the discussion first to another word for spiritual gift and then to the relationship between the two, which brings me then to the second point.
B) The meaning of the word pneumatikon (12:1)
When Paul opens the chapter with the words, “Now about spiritual gifts, brothers …” he is setting the agenda of the ensuing three chapters. Clearly then the word rendered spiritual gifts is important. In fact, it hides a difficult ambiguity.
In Pauline usage, this word could be taken as masculine, referring to spiritual people, as three other times in this epistle, or as neuter, to spiritual things or spiritual gifts, as three other times in this epistle. Which is the meaning here? Both interpretations have been strongly defended, and the fact that these chapters close with the personal use in 14:37, spiritual people, might be taken as a point in favor of the masculine.
In that case, Paul is dealing less with the nature of spiritual gifts than with the nature of spiritual people. Obviously, the two are in some way related. There would also be an immediate effect on the way the first three verses are interpreted. Nevertheless, the word is probably to be taken as a neuter.
After all, if it occurs in 14:37 as a reference to spiritual people, it also occurs in 14:1 as a reference to spiritual gifts. The parallels, in other words, don’t determine the matter. More important, the word is conceptually parallel in certain respects to charismata, the word we just looked at, the other word for spiritual gifts. This latter word never refers to persons.
The crucial point to recognize is that in 12:1, Paul is bringing up a point in the Corinthians letter. That’s quite clear from the formula that is used from chapter 7, verse 1 on, (this is part of the introduction that I skipped). He’s dealing successively with matters that have been brought up by a letter to him. “Now concerning the matters you wrote to me about,” he says.
First this, and then this, and then another. Now he’s bringing up this matter. They have brought up the matter to him. What question then were they posing to him to generate so ambiguous a response? For reasons that will become clear in a moment, I suggest that at least one of the questions being put to him ran something like this. “Is it really true that spiritual manifestations (pneumatika, the neuter) constitute unfailing evidence of spiritual people (pneumatikoi, masculine)?”
The question, I suggest, had opposing barbs depending on which part of the Corinthian church you sat in. As phrased by the Corinthian “pneumatics,” the ancient version of the charismatics, it was shaped like this: Is it not true that those of us who have the pneumatika are spiritual people? Shaped by the other side, they were saying, “Surely it is not true that those who have the pneumatika are the spiritual people. What about us?”
Paul then responds with a reference to their discussion of the question of spirituals. It’s ambiguous, peri de ton pneumatikon. “Concerning the question of spirituals that you raised, brothers …” knowing that his readers will recognize thereby the subject he is about to broach.
C) The relationship between the words charisma and pneumatikon.
It is widely recognized that the introductory formula of 12:1 means that Paul is introducing the subject in the term preferred by his Corinthian readers, pneumatikon. At least through chapter 12, he then proceeds to use the term he himself prefers, charisma. What then does he intend to achieve by this change?
An easy guess and almost certainly right in itself is that Paul wants to remind his readers that whatever might truly be considered spiritual, pneumatikon, is better thought of as a gracious gift of God. Their quest for an individualizing and self-centered form of spirituality was in danger of denying the source of all true spiritual gifts, the unbounded grace of God.
This does not mean that Paul depreciates the term pneumatikon, for elsewhere in this epistle with only one possible exception, Paul always uses the term with positive overtones of spiritual maturity. The apostle who so persistently insists that God’s pneuma, his Spirit, is the down payment of the age to come is in no position to despise any pneumatikon, a spiritual thing, something that pneuma gives.
Still in this context the switch to charisma serves to lay emphasis on grace. But are there sharper lines to be drawn between these two words? One way of proceeding has become especially popular. Some have argued that pneumatikon, the word in 12:1, should be restricted to prophesy or to prophecy and tongues.
This interpretation is usually tied in with an attempt to make prophecy at Corinth ecstatic. Paul’s aim in effect is to replace the emphasis on the ecstatic by the broader category of gracious gift that results in service. Outside these three chapters, the word certainly does not have that meaning. If then someone argues that what is important here is what the Corinthians meant by the word, not Paul since he quoting their correspondence, we still face two difficulties.
First, if Paul knows the Corinthians used the word in a special sense, it is surprising to find him using it three times earlier in this epistle in his normal way and then switching here without warning to their meaning, and secondly, specialized meaning in 14:1 such as “concerning persons whom you designate spiritually gifted” makes a poor heading to a chapter where Paul is repeatedly concerned to show that all Christians are spiritually gifted unless he makes explicit pains to point out their faulty category and not just their distorted theology.
These first three points have not drawn us into the flow of the passage, but they had to be discussed for the results come back to bless us or haunt us in what ensues. My main point so far is simply that quite a number of studies have over-specified what can be learned from a few individual words. We turn then to the flow of the argument in 12:1–3.
The words, “Brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant” or its near equivalent is a Pauline expression by which the apostle assures his readers that what he is passing on is part of the heritage of central Christian truth. Sometimes it introduces content that cannot be more than a reminder of material previously taught.
In the dominant interpretation of 12:1–3, it is presupposed that the truth of which the apostle does not wish the Corinthians to remain ignorant is found in verses 2 and 3. This has the effect of tying those two verses tightly together, reinforced by the strong therefore, dio, at the beginning of verse 3.
In other words, “Because you were lead away to serve dumb idols when you were pagans (verse 2); therefore (verse 3), I am telling you that no one who speaks by the Spirit of God can say, ‘Jesus is anathema’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” By forging so tight a link between verse 2 and verse 3, this interpretation has two important consequences.
First, it entices the interpreter to look for clues in verse 2 that suggest the Corinthians have been heavily involved in ecstatic frenzies connected with their pagan worship before they became Christians in order to provide some kind of foil where people might say, “Jesus is anathema.” This pagan worship offered perhaps instances in which Jesus might well have been cursed.
Secondly, the pagan ecstatic frenzy presupposed under this interpretation of verse 2 is in certain respects then compared with the word of the Spirit in verse 3. The conclusion is drawn that the proper test or criterion for appropriate inspiration is the acknowledgement of Christ as Lord. So, for example, Professor Bruce, whom I quote,
“In classical literature, Apollo was particularly renowned as the source of ecstatic utterances as on the lips of Cassander of Troy, the priestess of Delphi or the Sibyl of Cumae (whose frenzy as she prophesied under the god’s control is vividly described by Virgil); at a humbler level, the fortune-telling slave-girl of Acts 16:16 was dominated by the same kind of ‘pythonic’ spirit.
Paul does not suggest that any prophesy or glossolalia at Corinth proceeded from such a source; he simply reminds his readers that there are ‘inspired’ utterances [that are not from] the Spirit of God.” But this line of reasoning is not very compelling.
First, there is nothing in verse 2 itself that testifies to a background in pagan ecstasy. For instance, the verbs themselves, what NIV has influenced and lead astray, despite many statements to the contrary, do not conjure up visions of demonic force.
Secondly, quite apart from such questions as whether the Pythia used unintelligible language truly parallel to the Corinthian glossolalia, it seems very difficult to imagine of Paul, who could forbid any fellowship with demons in 10:21 now drawing an ambiguous comparison between pagan inspiration and Christian inspiration with the sole difference being the resulting confession.
In fact, some have pointed to a better way to understand the flow of the argument. It is better, for example, de Broglie argues, to take verse 2 with verse 1 as an expansion on the theme of the Corinthians’ ignorance. After all, elsewhere when Paul uses the formula, “I do not want you to be ignorant,” he can insert some kind of explanatory or parenthetical aside before he turns to the content he wishes to convey. For instance, in 1 Thessalonians 4:13; 1 Corinthians 8; 1 Corinthians 15; and elsewhere.
Then he always introduces the content with a certain word, hoti, or that. But no hoti is found at the beginning of verse 2. For that we turn to verse 3, where Paul resumes with a “I make known to you,” a resumptive “I make known.” In other words, the connective therefore in verse 3 connects verse 3 not with verse 2, but with verse 1.
In short, the flow runs like this; “I do not want you to be ignorant of certain central truths.” Verse 1. “You know of course that when you were pagans your ignorance on such matters was profound.” Verse 2. “Now since I do not want you to be ignorant in these matters …” Verse 1. “… therefore, I am making them known to you that …” and then the content in verse 3.
This means we no longer have to interpret verse 3 in the light of verse 2 and vice versa. That link broken, we shall be less inclined to detect pagan ecstasy behind the words of verse 2. We are freer to explore how verse 3 ties in with the rest of the chapter, and especially verses 4 and following. These latter verses insist on the diversity of the gifts but the oneness of the source.
This suggests that Paul’s correspondents were at least partly made of up charismatics (in the modern sense of the term) who wanted to elevate their gifts to the place where they could serve as an exclusive authentication for spiritual life and wanted Paul to approve this judgment. They were partly made of up noncharismatics who were profoundly skeptical of the claims of the charismatics and wanted Paul to correct them.
Their skepticism, it may be, arose from their own pagan backgrounds, for nothing I have said denies that the majority of Corinthian believers emerged from paganism, just as the pagan backgrounds of certain people in 1 Corinthians 8 made them uneasy about eating meat offered to idols. To both parties, Paul offers a telling rebuttal.
“Your horizons,” he says, “are too narrow. For participation in the things of the Holy Spirit is attested by all who truly confess Jesus as Lord.” Both parties must expand their horizons. The charismatics should not feel they have some exclusive claim on the Spirit, and the noncharismatics should not be writing them off.
This interpretation, I suggest, makes much better sense than those who see in “Jesus as Lord” a sufficient criterion for distinguishing the true from the false in prophetic utterances. After all, taken as such a criterion it is disturbingly broad and undiscriminating. For instance, it is quite helpless in the face of the false spirits confronting John in his epistle, 1 John 4:1 and following.
There the problem lay with those who denied Jesus was the Christ. But if 1 Corinthians 12:3 offers the criterion not to establish true and false ecstatic utterance but to establish whether or not any particular spiritual manifestation may be used to authenticate the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit, then Paul’s answer is in line with the entire New Testament.
To be able to confess that the Jesus of the incarnation, cross, and resurrection is truly the Lord, especially in the face of a society that has wars aplenty, already attests to the powerful transforming work of the Holy Spirit. To put the matter another way, “If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.” (Romans 8:9)
Both to those who want to exalt spiritual manifestations as the infallible criterion of the Holy Spirit’s powerful presence and to those who want to question the genuineness of the spirituality attested by such manifestations, Paul provides a profoundly Christological focus, as Schweizer puts it, perhaps too simply, “The Holy Spirit makes us receptive of Jesus.”
In short, the purpose of 12:1–3 is not to provide a confessional test to enable Christians to distinguish true from false spirits, but to provide a sufficient test to establish who has the Holy Spirit at all. Moreover, this interpretation then offers a smooth transition to 12:4–6, for here Paul’s point has nothing to do with the way true and false spiritual manifestations may be detected but with the diversity of spiritual manifestations from the triune God.
Before turning our attention there, I must say something about another point, the significance of the blasphemy, “Jesus is cursed.” What shall we make of this foul curse? As long as verses 2 and 3 are understood to provide a criterion to distinguish true spiritual manifestations from false, we are forced to scramble around to find some situation in which this might actually be said in a Corinthian assembly. Otherwise, what’s the point of providing the criterion?
Again, I’m going to skip over quite a lot of suggestions, because here there are pages of suggestions about what kind of circumstance might have generated this kind of utterance in the Corinthian church. Gnosticism, Jews who came in there who thought Jesus might’ve been cursed because he hung on a tree, and whatever.
I’m going to skip them all. I don’t find any of them particularly believable because Paul is dealing here with what Christians would say in the church. If however we now free ourselves from the presupposition that Paul is using this test to distinguish between true and false spiritual gifts and that Paul’s interests now we see lies rather in establishing who truly has the Holy Spirit, then the pressure to identify a precise and believable background is reduced.
There is no need to see that this was ever uttered in the church at all. If Paul is not wielding the curse language of verse 3a as a test for detecting false prophets in the church, then the objections raised against several of the backgrounds that I’ve just skipped over disappear. It is not even necessary to hold that “Jesus is cursed” was actually ever uttered in a Corinthian church meeting.
Paul’s point is to draw a sharp contrast between what those who have the Holy Spirit, that is Christians, say about Jesus and what those who do not have the Holy Spirit say about Jesus. The latter group might include Jews and Gentiles, whether within cultic contexts or not. Paul’s concern is quit simply to establish an essentially Christological focus to the question of who is spiritual, who has the Holy Spirit. We come then in the next place to …
3. The bountiful diversity of the grace gifts (12:4–11)
As in Ephesians 4:1–16, so here. Paul first sets a foundation in unity, in the one confession prompted by the Holy Spirit that we’ve just looked at. Then he introduces the diversity. The connecting de, or but, is probably adversative at the beginning of verse 4.
The argument runs, “I want you to know that all who truly confess Jesus as Lord do so by the Holy Spirit and thus the test is presence in their lives, but that does not mean there are no distinctions to be made among them.” Paul’s concern now is not so much with unity as with diversity.
The triune God loves diversity. So much so, as someone has remarked, that when he sends a snowstorm he makes each flake different. We manufacture ice cubes. Doubtless the church is in some sense like a mighty army. That does not mean we should think of ourselves as undifferentiated khaki. We should be more like an orchestra, each part making its own unique contribution to the symphonic harmony.
Dictators of the right and the left seek to establish their brand of harmony by forcefully imposing monotonous sameness, by seeking to limit differentiation. God establishes his brand of harmony by a lavish grant of highly diverse gifts, each contributing to the body as a whole. The word rendered different kinds in the NIV, judging from its LXX usage, as the word does not occur outside this chapter in the New Testament, might mean either varieties, that is different kinds, or distributions.
Because the cognate verb is used in verse 11 to distribute and this unambiguously bears the latter sense, probably the noun should be taken in the same way. There are distributions of gifts. That implies variety, but it does more. As in Ephesians 4:7 and following, we are reminded that God himself is the one who apportions grace.
The diversity of gifts is grounded in his distribution of gifts. The parallelism of verses 4–6 is remarkable. Paul tells us, “There are different distributions of gifts, but the same Spirit. Of service, but the same Lord. [Lord Jesus] Of working, but the same God.” You have Spirit, Lord Jesus, God. Gifts, service, working.
There are some who cannot detect here or elsewhere in the New Testament any Trinitarian thought, but this appears to me to owe more to a doctrinaire reconstruction of early historical theology than to exegesis. I am not even sure that it is entirely adequate to say with one commentator that the Trinitarian consciousness in these verses is “the more impressive because it seems to be artless and unconscious.” As if Paul didn’t know what he was saying.
The understanding of the New Testament writers seems to be a necessary presupposition when, for instance, with only one exception Holy Spirit is anarthrous, without the article, in passages that stress power and articular in context where “the Holy Spirit” is treated as personality. Be that as it may, there are two errors to be avoided in attempting to understand the relationship between on the one hand gifts, service and working, and on the other Spirit, Lord, and God.
It would be wrong to think that the connections are exclusive, as if the Spirit gives only distributions of gifts and the Lord Jesus gives only distributions of service, and so forth. Verses 4–6 do not so much suggest that the Spirit gives gifts and the Lord gives forms of service and God gives workings as that diversity of distributions of these gifts, for want of a more generic term, goes hand in glove with one Spirit, one Lord, and one God.
In the ensuing verses in this chapter, everything is ascribed to the Spirit. Chapter 12, verse 11. Though still not so much the giver of the gifts as the one who distributes them, who energizes them. We are inevitably reminded of the Farewell Discourse, John 14–16, where Jesus promises that the coming of the paraklētos, the Holy Spirit will make his abode in Christ’s disciples. That is what the paraklētos, the Holy Spirit will do.
Then Jesus goes on to say that both he himself and his Father will make their home in the believer, apparently through the agency of the Holy Spirit. In other words, there was a purposeful confusion and overlapping of what the Spirit does and what the other persons of the triune God do. So similarly here.
Yet it would be equally wrong to think of the parallelism in 1 Corinthians 12:4–6 as nothing but arbitrary rhetoric. Because the word charismata, gifts, here as we have seen is largely parallel to pneumatika, spiritual gifts, it is not surprising that gifts then should be associated with pneuma. Pneumatika, pneuma. Service goes well with Lord. You serve a Lord.
Workings nicely fits God, as the last clause of verse 6 shows. This God is the one who works all things in all men. What is clear from this sequence is that Paul is not concerned to define spiritual gift too narrowly. We have already noted the considerable range of charismata. The two parallel terms are, if anything, even broader.
The “service” of verse 5, diakonia, from which we get the word deaconate is a general term used in secular Greek for all kinds of work. Waiting on tables, the civil service, collection for the poor and so forth. Precisely because of its range, Josephus can occasionally use it of priestly service, although this is a clerical notion that is rather rare. It’s not intrinsic to the term.
In this context, the New Testament deaconate as a technical thing is not in view. The point is that even everyday acts of service must be included under the grace gifts, the service, that the triune God energizes. Similarly, energēma, the workings. Energēma simply hints at energeō, that is, at the energy or power of God that is operating. Workings are merely ways in which God’s power is applied. It is almost coextensive with charismata, but it gives prominence now to the idea of power rather than to the idea of endowment.
The parallelism does not make the words strictly synonymous any more than Spirit, Lord, and God are strictly synonymous, but because none of the three terms can be associated with only certain spiritual gifts and not with others, it is clear that Paul uses the three terms to describe the full range of what we might call spiritual-gift phenomena. One conclusion is unavoidable. Paul tends to flatten distinctions between what we call charismatic gifts and noncharismatic gifts in the modern sense of those terms.
Verse 7 then is transitional. It glances back to the preceding verses by embracing gifts, service, and working alike under the one expression, the manifestation of the Spirit. All of these manifest the Spirit, they show the Spirit, if the genitive is objective, and I think it is. But the verse makes two new points.
A) Each believer is given some manifestation of the Spirit.
At least in this text, there is no warrant for saying that one gift manifests his presence more than another, even if some manifestations are more spectacular or more useful than others. To take the each one as reference to each specially endowed charismatic, as some do, not only misunderstands the flow of the argument so far in which Paul’s principal aim has been to display the whole breadth of the Christian, Holy Spirit-endued communion but also flies in the face of verses 12–30, which we’ll turn to in a moment.
B) These gifts are not for personal aggrandizement but for the common good.
The peculiar expression that is used might literally be rendered, with a view to profiting, not in itself making it clear whether the profit is for the individual or the group. The broader context makes it clear that the latter is in view, that is for the common good, especially chapter 14.
Even so, this clearly stated purpose of spiritual gifts, if I may continue to use that term for the full range of the manifestations of the Spirit that Paul envisages, must not be brought to bear on the broader discussion in a heavy-handed way. As we shall see, some noncharismatics wish to rule out the legitimacy of any private use of tongues on the basis of this and similar texts. “What possible benefit for the entire community is there,” they ask, “in private tongue-speaking? Gifts are for the common good,” they say.
Clearly, there is no direct benefit in such private usage. No one but God is hearing what is being said, but Paul was granted extraordinary visions and revelations that were designed only for his immediate benefit. See 2 Corinthians 12:1–10. Yet surely the church received indirect profit insofar as those visions and revelations, not to mention the ensuing thorn in his flesh, better equipped him for proclamation and ministry.
In the same way, it is hard to see how verse 7 of this chapter renders illegitimate the private use of tongues if the result is a better person, a more spiritually-minded person. The church may thereby receive indirect benefits. The verse rules out using any charisma for personal aggrandizement or merely for personal self-satisfaction.
It does not rule out all benefit for the individual, just as the charisma of marriage has some benefit for the individual, even though it is also for the larger body, provided the resulting matrix is for the common good. The context demands no more. These two new points from verse 7 then are then further expanded, the first point in verses 8–11 and the second point in verses 12–30.
The first of the gift lists is found here in 12:8–11; the second in chapter 12, verse 28; the third in Romans 12:6–8; the fourth in Ephesians 4:11, and there is one more in 1 Peter 4:10–11.) One might also add the list of rhetorical questions at the end of chapter 12 here, verses 29 and 30, but I’ll omit it. If you compare those five lists, certain things spring out immediately. We turn now to the first, verses 8–11.
First, no list, including the one immediately before us in 1 Corinthians 12:8–11, is meant to be exhaustive because the lists include things that other lists don’t have. This should already have been expected from Paul’s discussion in verses 4–6, which suggests that not even the addition of all 20 or 21 entries when you add them all together from the five lists should be taken as exhaustive.
Secondly, the order of the gifts varies considerably. It cannot be assumed the entries are in order of importance or decreasing importance when prophecy is sixth in the first list, second in the second list, and first in the third. The second list enumerates the first three entries: first, second, and third. First the apostles, then prophets, and then teachers and uses personal categories.
NIV New International Version
