But that, Paul implies, is what the Corinthians are still doing. He is still appealing to them to see the world with the new eyes of the gospel, instead of expecting everything, particularly his own style of apostleship, to conform to the fashions and customs of the world they were used to. The old world was a ‘merely human’ world. Paul uses one of his favourite phrases for this, which literally means ‘according to the flesh’; but he doesn’t mean ‘flesh’ as in ‘physical body’. He means ‘flesh’ as