1 Corinthians 15:19

“If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.”

Rückert makes the adverb only apply to the regimen in Christ: “If we have rested all our hopes here below on Christ only...” But in order that this conditional proposition might form a ground for the following inference, Paul would have required to add the idea: and this one hope ended in deceiving us. The position of μόνον, only, in the Greek clause, shows, besides, that this adverb bears on the clause as a whole, verb and subordinate clauses included: “If we are men who have only our hope in Christ during the course of this life...” The opposite, they are men whose hope in Christ is eternally realized above. We must not translate ἐν, in, in the sense of εἰς, for, which would lead to a slightly different idea.

The word ζωή is used here in the sense of βίος, as in Luke 1:75; Luke 16:25, etc.

The position of the words ἐν Χριστῷ, in Christ, after ταυτῇ, is certainly the true one.

The apostle has been charged, on the ground of the last words of the verse, with taking up a very inferior moral standpoint, because he seems to say that the practice of virtue has no value in itself, but acquires it only by the reward which crowns it. Stoicism, with its maxim: “Virtue is its own best reward,” is, it is alleged, far superior to the apostle's standpoint. But it is forgotten that it is not the fulfilment of the simple moral law which is here in question; no natural duty imposes on man a life of labours, privations, and sufferings of all kinds, such as that which the apostle accepted, and which should be accepted by Christians in general in the service of Christ. The free choice of such a life can only be justified by the hope of the most excellent blessings, and these blessings consist by no means of certain external pleasures granted by way of reward, but in the satisfaction of the noblest and most elevated wants of human nature, of the aspiration after holiness and life eternal. To see these blessings escape you, when all inferior ones have been sacrificed to gain them, to have renounced earth for heaven, and instead of heaven to find hell, like other sinners, for it is salvation that is in question here, would not this be a still sadder condition than that of worldly men who at least allowed themselves on the earth a comfortable life and the lawful pleasures which were within their reach? To the sufferings accumulated during this life there would come to be added the most cruel deception after this life. Is there not here enough to justify the apostle's exclamation in the view of sound sense?

Thus, the resurrection of the dead falling, everything falls: (1) the resurrection of Christ Himself, 1 Corinthians 15:12-13; (2) the veracity of the apostolic testimony and the reality of the great object of Christian faith, 1 Corinthians 15:14-15; (3) salvation itself, with its eternal blessings, 1 Corinthians 15:16-19.

And now let us replace the foundation, which by supposition we had for a moment removed: the whole majestic edifice of the Christian salvation rises again before us even to its sublime consummation! Such are the contents of the following description, 1 Corinthians 15:20-28. The resurrection of the dead, closely bound up with the resurrection of Christ, appears as the fundamental fact on which rests the Christian hope to its furthest limit.