based not on ourselves but on God who has equipped us by his Spirit to dispense the new covenant which leads to life (v 6) in the same Spirit. The carefully arranged structure of the passage may now be seen, following Provence, “Who Is Sufficient?” 57, 58. The stage is set by 2:15, 16 with its parallelism: Paul’s ministry and preaching have a “double effect” (Bultmann, 70) and he is called on—by the exigencies of the situation at Corinth—to clarify why this is so. The chiastic schema looks like this: