1 Corinthians 3:15 - Exposition

He shall suffer loss. He shall not receive the full reward to which he might otherwise look ( 2 John 1:8 ). He himself shall be saved . It is an inexpressible source of comfort to us, amid the weakness and ignorance of our lives, to know that if we have only erred through human frailty and feebleness, while yet we desired to be sincere and faithful, the work will be burnt, yet the workman will be saved. Some of the Fathers gave to this beautiful verse the shockingly perverted meaning that "the workman would be preserved alive for endless torments," "salted with fire" in order to endure interminable agonies. The meaning is impossible, for it reverses the sense of the word "saved;" and makes it equivalent to "damned;" but the interpretation is an awful proof of the distortions to which a merciless human rigorism and a hard, self styled orthodoxy have sometimes subjected the Word of God. Yet so as by fire; rather, through or by means of fire ( διὰ πυρός ). We may be, as it were, "snatched as a brand from the burning" ( Zechariah 3:2 ; Amos 4:11 ; Jud 1:23), and "scarcely" saved ( 1 Peter 4:18 ). Similarly it is said in 1 Peter 3:20 that Noah was saved "through water" ( δι ὗδατος ). The ship is lost, the sailor saved; the workman is saved, the work is burned.