1 Corinthians

Campbell's 1 Corinthians (Belief, 2018) is theologically creative and homiletially stimulating, but it rests on a foundational exegetical decision that propagates problematically through the whole volume: his expansion of the archonton tou aiōnos toutou in 2:6–8 — Paul's "rulers of this age" — into a framework, drawn from Walter Wink, of cosmic-structural-spiritual "Powers" encompassing institutions, systems, and hierarchies. This reading is justified partly by deriving the meaning of archonton from its root archē (the same root underlying monarchy, patriarchy, hierarchy) — a textbook etymological fallacy, since word meaning is determined by contextual usage rather than component parts — and partly by a circular argument in which the Powers framework is introduced as the lens for reading 2:6–8, generates that reading, and is then "confirmed" by it for every subsequent passage in the letter. Fee (NICNT) is categorical that the demonic-powers reading is "totally unwarranted" and "has finally been laid to rest," pointing out that the entire unit of 1:18–2:16 is Paul's ironic counter-attack against the Corinthians' own wisdom-boasting, so that the "rulers of this age" are unmistakably the human intellectual and political elites whose credentials the Corinthians were honouring — the very people Paul is skewering, not a cast of cosmic supernatural agents; Hays (Interpretation) concurs, warning that preaching demonic Powers from this passage "would be moving on a tangent away from the text." This misidentification is not a local misstep: it generates Campbell's sweeping dismissal of substitutionary atonement as "theologically misguided," which is a non-sequitur even on his own terms — "the Powers crucified Jesus" does not entail "God did not act salvifically in the crucifixion," since God's predestining purpose is explicitly affirmed in the immediate context (2:7, proōrisen, "destined before time began") and the ancient creedal formula of 15:3 — "Christ died for our sins" (hyper tōn hamartiōn) — which Campbell soft-pedals, asserts precisely the kind of purposive divine agency in the cross that he dismisses; he also misuses Hays here, converting Hays's careful descriptive observation that 1 Corinthians does not emphasise atonement language into a normative theological verdict — that substitutionary atonement is theologically illegitimate — that Hays himself never draws. The same Powers framework drives the selective "old-age captivity" diagnosis Campbell applies to Paul's arguments about women in 11:2–16: throughout the letter he reads Pauline tension and apparent contradiction as generative apocalyptic liminality — the creative friction of living between the old age and the new creation — but when the outcome is patriarchal he abruptly re-diagnoses the identical formal feature as Pauline failure and cultural captivity, which is special pleading masquerading as hermeneutic; Fee and Hays more patiently show that 11:11–12 ("in the Lord, woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman") does not contradict vv. 3–9 but complicates them, establishing a functional equality that neither explains away the patriarchal logic nor surrenders to it — a subtler and more textually honest account than Campbell's "he got it wrong" verdict. The deepest irony is that Campbell, who celebrates particularity above all and explicitly warns against imposing pre-formed systems on Paul's fragmentary, unsettled theology, consistently delivers the generality of his own closed system — derived from Brown, Martyn, Wink, and Boeve and applied top-down from chapter 1 to 16, with his jazz-improvisation apologetic ("wrong notes played with élan") functioning as pre-emptive special pleading that immunises his readings against substantive exegetical objection — while Fee and Hays, working with more traditional exegetical tools, consistently deliver the particular.