Schnelle on Building up the Church…
This is an excerpt from Udo Schnelle’s Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology, translated by M. Eugene Boring (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), page 221:
The Goal: Building Up the Church. The Spirit that proceeds from God and is effective in Christ is manifest in a variety of ways, but it is “one and the same Spirit†(1 Cor. 12:4). It leads into a wealth of diversity but not into the poverty of division. It belongs to its essence to establish unity, because it is itself “one Spirit”. The Spirit’s unifying work is seen especially in the fact that it generates what benefits the church (12:7, “the common good”) and what serves its “edification” (building up; cf. 1 Cor. 14). All charismatic gifts must be measured by this fundamental principle: “Let all things be done for building up” (14:26).