Beeson Podcast, Episode 426
Roy Ciampa
January 8, 2019
https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2019/Glorifying-God-First-Corinthians

Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.
Timothy George:	Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Today I have the privilege of having a conversation with my colleague Roy Ciampa. He came to Samford University really recently, last August, to be the Louis and Ann Armstrong Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion on our campus. He brings a wonderful background of biblical scholarship and missionary service to his work with us. He's worked with the Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship at the American Bible Society. He was Professor of New Testament and Chair of the Division of Biblical Studies at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary near Boston. All of that wonderful wealth of experience and background he brings to his work with us here at Samford University. So, welcome Roy to the Beeson podcast.
Roy Ciampa:	Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Timothy George:	Now, I kind of gave a sort of formal introduction of you. Tell us more. Who are you really?
Roy Ciampa:	Okay. I'm someone who grew up in a fairly non-religious family, up in Massachusetts. My parents would take us to church about once a year, mainly to please my grandmother who was a devoted Christian. But frankly, I grew up without really knowing much about Jesus or never having really read the Bible, but when I was middle school and then in high school, a family moved in next door from New Zealand. These people were just the most godly, amazing, wonderful people, the Munks, and they had one son a year older than me, and one son a year younger than me. Robert and Stewart, and they became my best friends. Just the quality of the life of this family and the faith of this family was something that stood out to me, and I was grateful for their friendship. They would bring me to church activities and various things like that, but I never really understood what it was all about until I was in my first year in university study aeronautical studies in Florida.
Roy Ciampa:	My roommate went and he visited the local Baptist church, and then some folks came and visited with us and wanted to know if they could chat with my roommate and me. They shared the gospel with me, and as they shared the gospel, I was convicted that this was true, and at the same time realized that this was the message that had so transformed the lives of my neighbors.
Roy Ciampa:	I trusted in Christ and was baptized, and at that time I was at what I thought of as the ripe old age of 18-years old, and I couldn't imagine how it was that I could reach such a ripe old age and not know anything about the gospel or anything about the Bible. So, I bought my first Bible and started reading it. It devoured me, and I devoured it. I would find myself in the morning reading my Bible and being totally absorbed, and then basically, look up at the clock and realize I had read right into my first class.
Roy Ciampa:	So really, encountering Christ was a radical change for me, and gave me a deep thirst to know more about him and more about the scriptures. That's how I came to know Jesus Christ, but then within a year, I realized God was calling me to the ministry. I stopped studying aeronautical studies, started studying religious studies, end up getting my degree from Gordan College in Biblical and Theological Studies. Then my wonderful wife there, Marcelle, and we discerned before going on the seminar that God was leading us towards the mission field. I assumed I was going to be a dynamic church planter planting thousands of churches, or at least churches with thousands of members, but, in fact, we went to Denver Seminary and while there it became clear that God had gifted me more in the area of academics, more in the area of understanding scripture and explaining it to others. I did well in seminary but also found I had joy and pleasure in God using me in some ways to help even my peers understanding what they were learning.
Roy Ciampa:	So God eventually ended up leading us to the mission field in Portugal where I was appointed by Greater Europe Mission to teach at a little interdenominational evangelical Bible school just outside of Lisbon. God used that experience to continue to give me a heart for peoples in other cultures, in other places, to grow in my understanding of scripture. So this was part of God just leading me on a journey, on an adventure.
Roy Ciampa:	One of the things that happened along the way, I knew before I went to the mission field that I wanted to do a doctorate, but all the time I was in seminary, I could never decide what that doctorate would be in. I love the Old Testament. I love the New Testament. I love theology. I thought maybe I should study theology because it seems if you study theology, anything you read counts: your Old Testament, your New Testament, your history, your philosophy, and everything. But when we got to Portugal and I was appointed primarily to teach Bible, the school I was at had a master's degree program where you needed a PhD to teach in that program. They already had someone with a PhD in Old Testament and Hebrew Bible, and somebody else with a PhD in theology, but shortly after I was there, they asked me if I would consider going on and doing a PhD in New Testament Studies because they didn't have anyone to teach New Testament in their masters degree program.
Roy Ciampa:	So that's really how God led me to that field. As it turns out, that was the need that we had in the field, and I was eager to follow up and serve in that role, so in fact, I applied and end up doing my PhD at University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Because I didn't want to give up the Old Testament for the New, I did my dissertation on the use of the Old Testament in the New, and have always enjoyed making sure that I'm keeping one foot in both Testaments ever since.
Timothy George:	That's a fascinating story. I want to ask you a little bit about your work as a translator. Now, when you moved to Portugal, did you know Portuguese or did you have to learn that there?
Roy Ciampa:	Basically, learned it there. We went to Portugal. I had been working as a prison chaplain, and there was a Portuguese man that was helping me ministering to the Portuguese inmates in the prison in Massachusetts, and he taught us a few things, but when we arrived in Portugal, my wife and I got one of those things wrongs. So initially, we would walk around and we would say to people when they would speak to us, we'd say, "I'm sorry, but you don't speak Portuguese." They would let us know, "No. I speak Portuguese. You don't speak Portuguese." But it made the point perfectly well.
Roy Ciampa:	Our first year there was full-time language school, and then the second year, we continued working with a language helper and did an internship in a church there.
Timothy George:	Now, you have developed a lot of expertise in Bible translation, in particular, working with the Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship, which is part of the American Bible Society. Say a little bit about the Nida Institute and kind of the program, the philosophy of translation that's at work there.
Roy Ciampa:	Well, the Nida Institute is kind of an arm of American Bible Society. It focuses primarily on capacity building. The Nida Institute team is involved in training Bible translators and translation consultants and other leaders in the world or movement of Bible translation around the globe. My role within the Nida Institute was to help organize, staff, and then present at seminars and workshops and conferences focused on training people to be more effective in Bible translation. So I was regularly involved working with Bible translators in Northeastern Indian, in Angola. We had a training session in Italy where we would bring leaders from United Bible Society's consultants in training would come together every year for training there.
Roy Ciampa:	Training was a combination of Biblical studies and translation studies and translation theory in practice. So it was a wonderful experience.
Roy Ciampa:	I should back up and say that my background in translation started when I was in Portugal because, in the last several years before I left Portugal, I was invited by the Bible Society of Portugal to help them in the revision of their contemporary translation of the Bible. In Portugal, they had their equivalent of the Kings James Version and then they had a more contemporary translation, but it was in dire need of revisions, especially the New Testament part. So we worked over a number of years, I want to say about eight or nine years, in revising that Bible translation, which was just a wonderful experience for me, and deepened my understanding of Bible translation and my passion for it, and that really led, eventually, to my work with the Nida Institute in helping others learn more about Bible translation, and become more effective at it.
Timothy George:	You know, some people are surprised to learn that there's still language groups, people groups, who don't have the Scriptures in their own indigenous languages, but that's true, isn't it?
Roy Ciampa:	Oh, yes. Many people. Millions of people don't have it in their own language still. For instance, in the past several years, I would go some places, just one-off, whether it was El Salvador or to some training in Russia or someplace else, but regularly I was in Northeastern India working with 21 Bible translators from Nagaland, in the northeastern part of India, all of them working on 21 different translations of the Bible into their tribal language, which did not yet have the Scriptures in that language.
Roy Ciampa:	I was also involved in Angola with another 21 Bible translators, but they're there working in teams of three, so they're working on seven different translations in various languages of Angola which still didn't have the Scriptures in their language. That's just a fraction, of course, that's hardly a drop of all the languages that still don't have the Scriptures.
Timothy George:	There's been controversy, particularly within the evangelical world, about a philosophy of translation, Bible translation, between the formal equivalence and the dynamic equivalence. It's maybe something in between. Could you just say a word about that debate and how you process it?
Roy Ciampa:	That's the sort of thing I could give, as my training would prepare me to do, give whole day lectures on those sorts of things. Of course, the overly simple way of putting it would be to say that dynamic equivalence really focuses on trying to be as faithful as possible to the linguistic structures and patterns of the receptor language, of the language you're translating the Bible into. How would you say this thing that's written in Greek or Hebrew in the most natural way in the language you're translating it into? Formal equivalence tends to put a little bit more pressure on keeping as close as possible to the structure of the Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic text and just making whatever adaptations are minimally necessary in order to make a translation.
Roy Ciampa:	In most places, I would say probably most translators, I can't say anything about most translators, but many translators would say that a language really does well if it has access to both, that each kind of translation has certain strengths and certain weaknesses and is better for certain kinds of study than another kind of translation. Probably, every translation, no translation is purely formal equivalent or purely functionally equivalent. All of them are somewhere in a range, and I would say the dynamic or functional equivalent approach is probably, it has been the primary approach for the first translation into another language, although more and more, more formal equivalent approaches are sometimes, now, being used as the first approach for a translation into a language. It's really a mixture.
Timothy George:	Yeah.
Timothy George:	Well, you know, I'm sometimes asked to endorse Bibles or Bible translations. I think I've endorsed every one I've been asked about. I'm Biblically promiscuous in my endorsement of Bible translations. I recognize just what you said, there's strengths and weaknesses and maybe certain contexts where one is preferable to the other, but it's the Word of God and the Lord can use it and does use it to change people's lives and give light where light is needed. So let a thousand Bibles flourish.
Timothy George:	I'm sure there are limits to where, you know, you can mangle a Bible translation to such an extent that it really isn't the Word of God. I suppose that could happen, but I'm in favor of more rather than less.
Roy Ciampa:	Yes. I think most Bible translators are as well. In the world of Bible translation, they don't spend a whole lot of time arguing over exactly what has to be the first kind of Bible translation. It would seem sort of like somebody coming up to a starving person and saying, "Do we give this person, this person hasn't had any meat for a long time. Should the first piece of meat by filet mignon or should it be a hamburger?" And we're going to have a fight about that while the person is there starving for not having food. Let's get them a translation. Let's get them God's Word so that they can understand it, and they can be transformed by it.
Timothy George:	And if you have a slab of bacon, you could throw that in there too. They need nourishment. Right?
Roy Ciampa:	That's right.
Timothy George:	The Word of God is to give us nourishment, spiritual nourishment for our life.
Timothy George:	Well, I want to shift our conversation just a little bit to talk about one of your major academic writings, actually. It's a commentary on First Corinthians, which you did in tandem with your friend and former teacher, Dr. Brian Rosner. It's a huge commentary. I'm holding it in my hands. You listeners can't see me, but I wish you could because it's almost a thousand pages in length. These are not light pages. It's deep, and yet, working through it a little bit, it's also very readable. You did a great job of taking a lot of dense material and communicated it in such a way as it comes across credible and clear.
Timothy George:	Tell us about this project, how you got involved in it, and why First Corinthians?
Roy Ciampa:	Sure. Well, actually, I got involved with the project because my friend Brian Rosner was involved in it first. He was originally invited to write the Pillar Commentary, but his professional life and personal life was complicated enough. He realized that there really was no way he was going to get the project done in any reasonable time by himself. We had become great friends. He had been my doctoral supervisor, but he's my age. I won't say which one of us is older or younger. That wouldn't be fair to one or the other of us, but we became very fast friends and have collaborated on a few different things. And so, when he was thinking about his predicament, he contacted D.A. Carson, Don Carson, and Eerdmans to find out if it'd be okay to invite me to part of this as well, and he invited me to be part of the project, which was a real baptism for me. I had done my doctoral studies in Pauline Studies, but especially on the Letter of Galatians. So I had to immerse myself in the literature and work on First Corinthians, but it was just a wonderful experience.
Roy Ciampa:	I have to say Brian was a wonderful person to work with. Not too protective of his own ideas, very easy to collaborate with, to share, and we could [inaudible 00:16:00]-
Timothy George:	And he's in Australia now, right?
Roy Ciampa:	He is in Australia. That's right. In Melbourne, Australia, where he's at Ridley Theological College in Melbourne.
Timothy George:	Yeah. Well, why First Corinthians? I mean, obviously, you have a project going and you've made a great contribution to it, but if you look at the Pauline corpus, what important distinctive about First Corinthians?
Roy Ciampa:	Well, First Corinthians has been well served by a number of commentaries. I won't name all the other fine commentaries, but I think in our view, the view of what's going on in Corinthians continued to evolve and has been shaped in new ways in the past several decades. One of the challenges of interpreting the First Letter to the Corinthians is the extent to which background knowledge of what's going on in Corinth is essential to understanding what Paul is saying to the Corinthians. And so, there's a need both to understand what's going on in Corinthian and Greco-Roman culture at the time, and how do all these things that Paul's talking about, food sacrificed to idols and different kinds of sexual immorality and other things that are deeply rooted in the cultural issues of that time, how do they relate to what Paul is saying about it?
Roy Ciampa:	And also, Brian Rosner and I are very interested in understanding where does Paul get this stuff from? I'm frequently known for saying to my class and teaching anything on the New Testament, and Paul, and the Old Testament as well, that they're not making this stuff up. Of course, I believe it's inspired by God, but in terms of the human mind, where does this come from? Usually, the answer is through engagement with scripture. In Paul's case, that would be what we call the Old Testament scripture. And so understanding both, not only what is Paul saying, but why is he saying it, where does he find this material, and then how does it speak to the particular issues going on Corinth in the 1st century? Those are the things that we wrestled with here.
Roy Ciampa:	One of the things that's tended to happen in the past, I would say that the Corinthians have been treated in what we might call an exoticizing way. The Corinthians have been portrayed as being either very early Gnostics, or a very common approach recently has been the understanding that they have over-realized eschatology that kind of warps their understanding of everything. For instance, the idea that they thought that because they could speak in tongues they had become like the angels, and that's why they didn't believe in the resurrection of the dead. It was though they had already been resurrected from the dead. And that, like angels, they shouldn't be engaged in marital relations. They should remain celibate as angels are not involved in sexual relations. There's much of value in this background, but it also kind of paints the Corinthians as very exotic beats in the 1st-century world.
Roy Ciampa:	The tendency more recently has been to recognize, in fact, the problem in Corinth is the Corinthians are simply still overly influenced by the values and perspectives of their Greco-Roman world. And so, one of the things that we find important is to put Paul's letter into that context of what really was going on at that time. What were the dominant views that were overly influencing the Corinthians that Paul had to confront?
Timothy George:	Could you comment on the role of the Holy Spirit in First Corinthians? I'm thinking in particular, of course, about the chapters that deal with worship. You've mentioned glossolalia, but also other manifestations of the Spirit that were there. Even back in First Corinthians 6, I think it is, that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. So what is the role of the Holy Spirit in this community of faith that was the church at Corinth?
Roy Ciampa:	Well, the Holy Spirit is centrally important. We argue that, in fact, a key theme of the letter is for the Corinthians to understand precisely this idea, this concept that they are the eschatological temple of God. Of course, when you think about temples in the Old Testament, it was understood the Holy Spirit would come and dwell in that temple, and the presence of God, and the glory of God in that temple were crucial themes in the Old Testament. Then we come to the Letter of the Corinthians, not only do we find out that does Paul say they are the temple of God, but tied to that is this idea that God dwells in them, the temple, by His Spirit, and that also ends up tying into the theme of the glory of God, as the presence of God manifests the glory of God, and that glory should be reflected in the lives of those who go and worship in or through that temple.
Roy Ciampa:	So one of the themes that we find in First Corinthians, for instance, is the importance of this theme of glorifying God, fleeing from sexual immorality, and glorifying God with our bodies, or fleeing from idolatry, and glorifying God in everything we do whether we eat or drink or anything we do, as Paul says. Later on that God would be all in all, in First Corinthians 15, that God's glory would be central.
Roy Ciampa:	In the heart of the book, of course, in chapters, well 12 through 14, the emphasis on spiritual gifts and the role of the Holy Spirit in those spiritual gifts, and we understand those spiritual gifts to be various ways, a great diversity of ways that God gives people capacity to edify the church, that each member of the church is given a gift from God that other members of the church need in order that that church might be healthy and might flourish and might grow more and more in love with Christ, in fellowship with Christ, and reflect His character.
Roy Ciampa:	By the way, that whole idea of gifting, which is related to the idea of the Holy Spirit as well, also relates, we think. To the 1st century idea of the whole patron-client relationship. Within the Roman world, people would have patrons, people that they would depend on to help them and who would give them gifts from whom they would receive benefactions, and they could use those gifts, and sometimes they would pass those on to others further down in the food chain from themselves, or they would share it with their family and friends.
Roy Ciampa:	But it's striking that in First Corinthians, Paul makes the point that every single member of the church has received a gift or gifts directly from God. They are not just part of this other Roman hierarchy, but everyone, whether they're a slave, or whether they're a paterfamilias, whether they're the head of a household or somebody else, everyone has received a gift directly from God, and everyone else in the church needs to experience that gift for that church to flourish, and so that means even a slave has something that other people in the church will need because the Holy Spirit has been the channel through which God has given them this gift.
Timothy George:	One of my interests in First Corinthians is another theme in the book, it's a fractious community. Divisions kind of right, left, and in the middle. But there is throughout the book a call to unity, starting right in chapter one. "Let there be no divisions among you," and say the same thing, and so forth. To the very end, where Paul announces the gospel as the most important thing, that we are to give preeminence to the gospel by which we are saved and called.
Timothy George:	Maybe First Corinthians has a special relevance to a church, like ours today in the world, that is beset without, but also within with all kinds of tensions and even schisms.
Roy Ciampa:	I think it certainly does have special relevance for today.
Roy Ciampa:	We actually argue that some have argued that unity is the main and unifying theme of the letter. Brian Rosner and I argue that unity and the unifying role of the gospel is a key theme, but not the central theme, and would emphasize that Paul's not interested in unity for unity's sake, but that actually unity has something to do, in this case, with the question of one of the ways in which God is not being honored, the divisions are creating problems, and other ways in which God is not being glorified.
Roy Ciampa:	So our argument is actually that when we work our way through the letter, we can find a pattern that relates to issues relating to sexual immorality and morality to idolatry and the proper worship of the one true God, and before that, the issue of wisdom. It's actually interesting. You find the same pattern in Romans 1:21-28, where Paul says to the Romans that people they thought they were wise, but they became fools, and because of that they got caught up in idolatry and sexual immorality. It's interesting when you look at First Corinthians, we see the first four chapters are focused on false wisdom and true wisdom, and then the next set of chapters are focused on sexual immorality followed by proper marriage in First Corinthians 7, and then it goes from there to idolatry in terms of food offered to idols, and then the proper worship of the one true God in chapters 11 through 14, and finally, the focus on the resurrection.
Roy Ciampa:	But coming back to the question, one of the things that we see in First Corinthians is problems relating or arising out of some Corinthians' desire to simply be assimilated into their culture. They were a minority in a way that Christians aren't today, but in many ways, they were tempted to find how can I get ahead in this society? So for instance, going to a temple and fellowshipping in a temple where idol food be offered and where idol worship would be going on would be a great temptation because that would be one of the key places where someone could network, make relationships, and have a chance to get ahead. In fact, it could be difficult to survive in that culture or gain any kind of social acceptability or power if you excluded yourself from places where idol food was being offered and idolatry was being practiced.
Roy Ciampa:	I think the book, among other things, has much to say to the church today, not only about the unifying power of the gospel around the centrality of the themes of the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the glory of God, but also the need to understand that we've been bought with a price, with the precious blood of Christ, and that we are not our own. When we think about how we relate to the culture around us, we can still, today, be tempted by behaviors and associations that are really about gaining power and about securing our place of social acceptability, or just social power for ourselves when, in fact, the Gospel might call us to be more focused on the glory of God, the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and how we need to be distinct from our society as opposed to being assimilated to some of its values and behaviors.
Timothy George:	Maybe a good way to end this conversation on First Corinthians is to refer to First Corinthians 13, this great chapter on love to which we are called, which we see exemplified in Jesus Christ, and which is one of the three virtues mentioned there that will last forever into eternity.
Timothy George:	So, this is a wonderful commentary. If you're looking for a good commentary of First Corinthians, I recommend the First Letter to the Corinthians. It's a part of the Pillar New Testament Commentary series from Eerdmans by my colleague Roy E. Ciampa, whom I've been talking today, and Brian Rosner, a distinguished Biblical scholar in Australia.
Timothy George:	Let me say what a joy it is to have you with us, here, at this campus, at Samford University. The Chair of the Religion Department. Thank you for your collegiality, your friendship, for your commitment to the Scriptures, the Word of God, making it come alive in our generation today. I look forward to our working together more as we move forward into the future.
Roy Ciampa:	Me too. Thank you so much for having me.
Timothy George:	God bless you.
Roy Ciampa:	You, too.
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