To whom it may concern, this is an essay I wrote for a class on 1 Thessalonians/1Corinthians. The task was to explore the verse quoted below as a summary statement of 1 Corinthians, and to discern Paul's approach to remedying the situation.
The good thing about reading books throughout the year that aren't directly relevant to any particular class is that sometimes one of those books provides a fresh angle from which to tackle an assignment. In this case, that book was The Beauty of the Infinite by David Hart. This essay therefore amounts to little more than piecing together bits of Hart's ecclesiology and moral vision that are found in various places throughout his book, and finding natural correspondence between these and the ecclesiology/moral vision of Paul in this letter that I very much fell in love with.
1 Corinthians: The World in the
Church
Introduction
“Brothers and sisters, I could not address you
as spiritual but as worldly…” (1 Cor. 3:1)
The strength of
this statement as a summary of 1 Corinthians lies in its subtle disclosure of
Paul’s ecclesiology: the church as God’s chosen alternative to the world for
the sake of the world. The present essay aims first of all to show – using
three examples – that it is precisely the failure of the Corinthians to be
God’s alternative community (i.e. their worldliness) that occasions the letter
and dominates its content from beginning to end. I will then discuss the roots
of this “spiritual immaturity,” seeking to attain Paul’s diagnosis of the
Corinthian malaise based on the symptoms that are evident. Finally, I will
examine Paul’s understanding of the cure.
Church as World
The Corinthian
failure to be an alternative to the world propels the arguments of the letter.
To be called
into the church
is to be called
out of the world.
In other language, it is to be called out of the flesh and into the Spirit.
The question to
ask of this letter first is, What does it mean to be “of the Spirit” or
“spiritual”? To be “spiritual” was not to excel in a particular facet of life
that we might term “religion.” It was, rather, to practise a set of social,
political and devotional habits
in light of the love of God revealed in Christ and in light of the time of God
that judged this age of the flesh with its powers and rulers as passing away
and the new age of the Spirit as dawning. The spirituality that Paul advocates
is thus not a new way of doing religion but
a
new way of life, leaving no sphere untouched and unredeemed by the gospel.
The Corinthians’
worldliness was their maintenance of the status quo, and we can cite examples
of this in the realm of politics, social practices, and ritual – though no easy
division can be made between the three.
o
Politics
In chapter 6, it
emerges that there are members of the church taking other members to court on
account of defrauding.
While the economic issues cannot be ignored, the worldliness that Paul decries
is the community’s failure to carry out the politics of justice and love that
the church must now be known for. The church in Corinth has left political
matters to the “unjust” system of the present age, which represents a
negligence of their political vocation and witness.
o
Social
Practices
Attendance at
cultic meals was a regular practise in first-century Corinth, and helped to
maintain social standing within the
polis.
The meat served at these occasions was “sacrificed to idols”, which created
tension within the community. Some – perhaps the upper class who would have
received regular invites to such meals
– insisted on their rights to continue this social norm because of their
knowledge that “an idol is nothing at all in the world”.
Paul saw this language of rights as problematic for the community’s welfare and
evidence that the Corinthians didn’t know as much as they thought they did
about what it meant to be the church.
Just as
“worldly” practises such as politics can be conducted in a spiritual manner, so
“spiritual” practises can be conducted in an altogether worldly manner.
At the Lord’s table in Corinth, “one goes hungry, another gets drunk”
- evidence that the Corinthians may well have carried their class division from
wider society into the church, with the upper-class hosts failing to properly
share in the celebration with those from the lower classes. Disorder and
boasting also permeated the elements of communal worship, with giftedness
understood as cause for elitism and division.
In all these
spheres – the political, the social, the ritual – the life of the Corinthian
church looks as if it is still “of the flesh”. To the outsider looking on – an
important person in the letter -- the status quo has merely been given a
Christian flavour by the gospel. This worldliness is unacceptable for a church
which Paul understood to be his “workmanship in the Lord.”
It is the root of this worldliness to which we now turn.
The Root of Worldliness: Knowledge as
Power
“That the power
of the Spirit to communicate [the ancient beauty of creation] anew is infinite
is an article of faith; that human beings resist the Spirit with indefatigable
ingenuity is the lesson of history.”
This is a lesson taught from the beginning of Christian history, with the
church in Corinth as an unwitting
typos.
The argument of
this essay is that the root of the problem for the church in Corinth has to do
with knowledge.
We must be careful in what way we understand the word “knowledge” and its
cognates, however. Paul was against a form of knowledge that prolonged class
division, economic disparity and ethical complacency. We can describe this as
“knowledge as power”.
For Paul, however, to know – that is, to know
as the people of God ought to know – was a virtue. It was a way of
being in the world grounded in God’s way of being in the world and in communion
with God’s way of being in the world. In this way of being, to know is to love
and to love is to know. To live in this way is to have “the mind of Christ”.
This is the argument of 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:16, an argument that calls for an
“epistemological revolution.”
As Healy writes
of the Old Testament’s concept of knowledge –and by extension, Paul’s concept
of knowledge -- “To know the Lord, or to be known by him, involves both
understanding his will and acting accordingly.”
In the world created by the gospel, then, knowledge was not the potential
pathway to obedience. Knowledge was obedience - the obedience of faith carried
out by the Spirit-people.
The Corinthians’ failure to obey, therefore, is not their failure to apply the
knowledge they had. Their failure was that they did not know as they ought to
know. It was, in short, a
failure to love;
a failure to root their communal life – that is, their social, religious,
economic, intellectual and political habits and practises -- in the love of God
revealed by Christ in his death and resurrection.
It is therefore
a subtle misconception to think of the letter to the Corinthians as Paul’s
application of the gospel, with “ethics” understood as distinguishable from the
good news of Christ. David Bentley Hart spells this out in no uncertain terms:
“There is no autonomous sphere of ‘ethics’ in Christian thought, no simple
index of duties to be discharged.”
Application or ethics of this sort too often appeals to our desire to fit the
gospel into our pre-existing lives; to tag on “ethics” to a form of life that
is essentially “of the flesh”, built on a foundation other than the gospel.
Per contra, the gospel is not a
disembodied message extracted from a sea of ethereal knowledge to be applied in
the real world, but a new creation, a new form of life constituted by practices
that are deeply countercultural yet in perfect accord with the kingdom of God
that is displacing the kingdoms of this world.
Hart writes: “The
church cannot conceive of itself as an institution within a larger society, as
a pillar of society, culture, and civic order, or as a spiritual association
that commands an allegiance simply in addition to the allegiance its members
owe the powers of the wider world.”
This was precisely how the Corinthians
perceived themselves, and it is this perception that Paul aimed to re-imagine.
The Cure: Knowledge and Power as Love
For Paul,
Christian theology contains
within it an irreducible revolutionary possibility that ruptures with the
predetermined co-ordinates of the world and offers an entirely new kind of
political subject altogether….[T]heology provides a critical stance against the
basic assumptions and ruling ideologies of this world.
This critical
stance, this new kind of political subject brought into being by the word
concerning a crucified and resurrected king of the Jews was to be
characterised by love, worked out not in
the privacy of inner “spiritual” feeling but in a public and political
spirituality that took seriously the church’s call to be a holy people
who exemplified the justice and wisdom of God in the world that the world could
not know because of the offense of the cross – either as stumbling block or as
foolishness.
As we look
briefly at the political, social, and ritual issues above, we can take
snapshots of how Paul set about fostering this society of the Spirit:
o
Politics
Paul’s
argumentum a fortiori in chapter 6 is
rooted in the identity and vocation of the church – an identity and vocation
that, ironically, the Corinthians did “not know” (6:2 and 6:3). They are “the
Lord’s people” – and therefore an eschatological people -- who are destined to
judge the world.
The present is not a time to sit around and wait for that destiny; it is a time
for the people of God to practise their alternative politics in front of a
watching world. This is
the politics of
love, in which it is better to be wronged than to retaliate. In fact,
Paul’s searching question, “Why not rather be wronged?” (6:7) anticipates his
description of love in chapter 13 – “it is not easily angered, it keeps no
record of wrongs.”
o
Social
Practices
For Paul, social
practises were no longer a matter of rights but a matter of what is good for
the society known as “church”. In light of the “weakness of God”,
the weak in the community have a status that the world cannot recognise but
which the church
must recognise. Each
member of the church body must be seen as a “brother or sister for whom Christ
died”.
“Love”, after all, “is not self-seeking,”
and so the church must become a community whose practices demonstrate
mutuality, care and humility. Paul holds himself up as an example of one who
triumphs the love of freedom with the freedom of love.
This triumph is what it means to know and share in the gospel, which is nothing
less than a “resocialization” based on the community’s commitment to radical,
concrete love.
o
Ritual
It is no
coincidence that chapter 13 occurs during the discussion of the Corinthians’
ritual life of communal worship. The love described is the way in which the
hymns, prophecy etc. must be practised if they are to be worthy of this called-out-community.
Indeed, without love the elements of worship were utterly worthless in Paul’s
eyes. This love is a matter of “discerning the body of Christ”. It involves
each member of the body opening their eyes and seeing one another as those to
whom they have been joined in Christ.
In all of these
spheres of life Paul is attempting to convert the imaginations of the
Corinthians to a revolutionary ecclesiological and eschatological
vision: a vision of the church as “no less than a politics, a society, another
country, a new pattern of communal being meant not so much to complement the
civic constitution of secular society as to displace it.”
Paul’s approach
to addressing the Corinthian worldliness can thus be summed up by the signpost
to the letter’s most resplendent terrain: “Now I will show you a more excellent
way”.
The way knowledge of God is known – and, specifically, the way Paul knew it –
is indivisible from the content of that knowledge. Like is known by like.
Christ can only be known by those who share in his form of life. Paul shared in
that form by the power of the Spirit, and sharing in that form is thus what it
means to be “spiritual.” Paul’s showing the church a more excellent way is therefore
not exhausted by the beautiful poetry of 1 Corinthians 13. Coupled with these
words, Paul has offered the Corinthians a life that they can imitate – that
life is his own. Twice he urges them to imitate himself as he imitates Christ.
This is a bold exhortation, but such is Paul’s confidence in the power of the
Spirit to transform the believer into the image of the crucified and
resurrected Messiah, who – despite the world’s verdict on where power lies and
what power looks like -- is the very power of God.
As such, Paul
himself stands as an educator of vision,
an example to behold and see not as “scum of the earth” as the world sees,
but as beauty, as spiritual. Yet above Paul stands Jesus, the perfect form of
God’s glory,
the last Adam through whom we see the true shape of creation.
For the Corinthians to see rightly Paul could do no more than live faithfully,
write truthfully, and entrust his workmanship to the power of the Spirit, who
alone could cause their eyes to be opened so that they might see as Paul sees.
1 Corinthians thus represents Paul’s “seeing as”, his apostolic vision of the
world now illuminated by the light of the crucified and resurrected Christ.
This vision was
the vision of God’s love as “the gift given”.
“What do you have that you did not receive?” is Paul’s crucial rhetorical
question in chapter 4. Paul desires for the Corinthians to re-imagine their
world as gift: their knowledge, their charismata, their rituals, their
political and social life together – all these have been
received. And received not only for the enjoyment of individual
members, but for the welfare of the community. The gift of God made the
community possible. It can only be sustained when the gifts that have been
given by God are given again, one to another, in the S/spirit of faith, hope,
and love.
Conclusion
In discerning
the roots of Christian immaturity and the appropriate remedies we must take
seriously Paul’s mistrust of any knowledge or wisdom or power divorced from the
virtue of love; indeed, of any knowledge, wisdom, or power that is not a virtue
itself. We must take seriously the apostle’s conviction that even our best
knowledge is partial,
and that it is God’s knowledge rather than ours that saves.
We must not circumvent the primacy of love, for love alone is the way through
which all Christian truth is grasped; indeed love is the very form and content
of this truth.
It is the
sin qua non of the church,
and must always be exemplified, nurtured, and witnessed to by those whom God
has called out of the world in order to imitate the form of Christ by the power
of the Spirit.
Christ’s pattern has
been handed over and entrusted to the church as a project; he does not hover
above history as an eschatological tension, a withdrawn possibility, an
absence, or only a memory, but enters into history precisely in the degree that
the church makes his story the essence of its practices.
