Paul vs. the Super-Apostles

Today's Reading

Read 2 Corinthians 11:1-15, where Paul introduces the figures he sarcastically names the "super-apostles" (Greek: hyperlian apostolōn, "super-extra apostles"). They have come to Corinth, dazzled the church, and are quietly displacing Paul. Paul's confrontation is one of the strangest, most personal passages in his letters.

Read 2 Corinthians 11:21-30 — Paul's "boast." When forced to defend his apostleship against men with more impressive credentials, Paul does not list his successes. He lists his sufferings: imprisonments, beatings, a shipwreck, days adrift in the open sea, hunger, cold, exposure, and "the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches." He boasts of his weakness.

Read 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 — the thorn in the flesh, the prayer three times for it to be removed, and the answer: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Paul concludes: "When I am weak, then I am strong."

Finally, 2 Corinthians 13:5-6: "Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves." The same Paul who has just spent three chapters telling the Corinthians to test their teachers tells them, last, to test themselves.

Reflection

The Corinthian church had a problem more familiar than we like to admit.

A group of itinerant teachers had arrived from somewhere — probably Jerusalem, probably bearing impressive credentials, almost certainly Jewish-Christian. They preached "another Jesus," "a different spirit," "a different gospel" (2 Corinthians 11:4). They were polished. They were impressive. They had letters of recommendation. They commanded a stage. They charged for their ministry, which was viewed in the ancient world as a sign of professionalism, while Paul refused payment, which was viewed as a sign that he was, perhaps, an amateur. They had the look of success.

And the Corinthian church, which prized eloquence, prized signs, prized power, prized status, was being slowly captured.

Paul's letter is his fight to recover them. It is also one of Scripture's most direct treatments of how counterfeit Christian ministry actually operates.

Notice the first thing Paul says about the super-apostles. He does not say they are pagans or open heretics. He says they are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ (11:13). They use Christian language. They preach a Jesus, a Spirit, a gospel. The danger is not that they are wearing the wrong uniform. The danger is precisely that they are wearing the right one. As N. T. Wright has observed of this passage, the super-apostles were not selling a different religion — they were selling a more impressive version of the same religion, the same words filled quietly with different content.

This is what Paul means when he says, in one of the most sobering sentences in the New Testament: Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness (11:14-15). The image is precise. The light is real light. The disguise is convincing. Satan does not show up at the church door in horns. He shows up as the most spiritually impressive person in the room.

Calvin saw this clearly: "Satan's most successful work is not in opposing the gospel but in counterfeiting it. He raises up apostles who use the language of Christ to commend a different Christ." The most dangerous ministers in church history have rarely been those who reject the gospel openly. They have been those who keep the gospel's vocabulary and substitute its content.

What did the super-apostles offer? We can reconstruct it from the contrast Paul draws.

They offered triumph. Paul offers a thorn in the flesh that does not get removed.

They offered visions and ecstasies as the proof of authority. Paul, when forced to mention a vision he received, mentions it reluctantly, in the third person, and refuses to dwell on it (12:1-7).

They offered charisma and rhetorical power. Paul says of himself, perhaps quoting their criticism, "His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account" (10:10).

They offered Christian celebrity culture. Paul preached at his own expense and refused to monetize the Corinthians.

They offered signs and wonders as the seal of true apostleship. Paul, while not denying he had performed signs (12:12), pointedly defines his apostleship by suffering rather than success.

In the climactic chapter, when Paul finally yields to "boasting" because he has to, he turns the whole exercise inside out. The super-apostles boasted in their power; Paul boasts in his weakness. He lists imprisonments, beatings ("forty lashes less one" — five times), three shipwrecks, a day and a night adrift, danger from rivers, robbers, false brothers, the wilderness, the sea, hunger, thirst, sleeplessness, and at the end, almost as the climax of the list, "the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches." That is what an apostle's resume looks like, says Paul. The marks of true apostleship are not platform metrics. They are scars and sleepless nights.

Tim Keller has put this with great clarity: "The gospel works in weakness because the cross is weakness. A ministry that has lost touch with the cross will inevitably lose touch with the gospel." The super-apostles had a Christianity in which Christ was risen but never quite crucified. Their gospel skipped Friday. And so, inevitably, their lives skipped Friday — which means they could not actually be apostles of the crucified Jesus, no matter what words they used.

This is the deepest test 2 Corinthians offers us. It is more searching than the fruit test of Matthew 7. It asks: does this minister, this ministry, this movement, look like the cross? Does it know how to suffer? Does it know how to be weak? Does it know how to refuse success when success would compromise the gospel? Does its leader bear scars that the world cannot see, or only platforms the world can applaud?

The application is uncomfortable. Many of the most prominent Christian ministries of the last two generations look more like the super-apostles than like Paul. They are dazzling. They have credentials. They have crowds, mailing lists, conferences, books on bestseller charts, viral testimonies. They have signs and wonders. They are not, by their own accounting, weak. And the New Testament's deepest warning is precisely that this kind of ministry can preach Jesus by name and not actually be of Jesus.

Paul's last word in the letter is the right one. After three chapters of telling the Corinthians how to test the super-apostles, he turns the same searchlight on his readers: Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Discernment is never only directed outward. The same instinct that cuts through a counterfeit minister cuts through our own counterfeit instincts — our love of platform, our love of success, our easy impatience with weak Christians and weak churches, our tendency to follow the polished voice rather than the cruciform one.

The super-apostles were beating Paul in every metric the Corinthian church had learned to value. The Corinthian church was about to lose Paul to keep them. Paul's letter is his attempt to recover the church before the trade was complete. The letter survived. We do not know whether the Corinthians did.

The same trade is offered in every generation. We have been told.

Going Deeper

Take one Christian ministry — your church, a ministry you support, a teacher you follow — and ask the 2 Corinthians question of it. Where are its scars? Where does it choose weakness? Where does its leader, in the long arc of his or her life, look more like the cross than like the platform? If you cannot answer, that is data. The cross-shaped ministry is not always the largest or the most exciting. Paul lost Corinth, for a while, to ministries that were both. The cross-shaped one is the one Christ actually sends.