The Message of Galatians (Mutiny 2)

To follow the chain back, see the previous entry of this chapter, The Setting of Galatians.

We continue with part 2 of chapter 8: "The Message of Galatians." Last night after long consideration, I finally conceded to myself that I need to give up the northern Galatia hypothesis. In any case, I can continue the chapter...
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So the situation Galatians addresses is a primarily Gentile audience being urged to convert fully to Judaism by undergoing circumcision. Those who are trying to convince them are most likely Christian Jews, perhaps one key person in particular, who has come to Galatia from elsewhere, quite possibly from somewhere in Palestine like Antioch. It is important to recognize that their detractors claim to be Christians, not non-believing Jews. They are like the Christian Pharisees of Acts 15:5. Paul would probably consider them "false brothers" (e.g., Gal. 2:4), but they think of themselves as believers in Christ and the Jerusalem church likely would as well.

The central issue at debate is circumcision. If the meeting we call the Jerusalem Council was widely known, it is a little strange that we would find missionaries of a sort who are teaching that the Gentiles should get circumcised. [1] But we remember that Galatians 2:3 says Titus "was not compelled" to become circumcised, meaning it was still likely James and Peter's preference. It would thus be understandable if some were telling the Galatians they should fully commit and go the whole way.

One of the more peculiar features of the situation was the fact that these missionaries were apparently claiming that Paul himself agreed with them or at least had submitted to the authority of Jerusalem. They were apparently telling the Galatians that Paul himself thought it preferable for them to become circumcised (Gal. 5:11). How they made such an argument is puzzling to us, since we so strongly associate Paul with the opposite position. Perhaps he and Barnabas were still somewhat tentative on the subject when they came through the area on the first missionary journey. After all, it was after the first journey that Paul made the visit of Galatians 2 to Jerusalem. And Acts tells us that Paul circumcised Timothy at Lystra on his second journey (Acts 16:3), which certainly could have given the impression that circumcision was the optimal scenario.

Whatever they specifically argued, the undermining of his mission clearly infuriated him. This situation was personal, and no doubt reminded him of losing the argument at Antioch. Now they were tampering with his churches in his territory. One of the noticeable features of Galatians is the fact that Paul does not have a thanksgiving section at its opening, like his other letters. Instead, he launches into the Galatians in astonishment that they are beginning to act as if God's gracious acceptance of them is somehow not enough. They are beginning to observe aspects of the Jewish calendar (Gal. 4:10) and even to consider circumcision (5:2).

Paul's counterargument is not only that no amount of such "works of Law" could make one right with God. He is arguing that such Jewish particulars have no impact on one's status with God at all, particularly if one is a Gentile. To the Gentiles, God was offering a remarkable gift. Through the faithful death of Jesus the Messiah, he was offering both Jew and Gentile the possibility of being right with God regardless of how much wrongdoing a person had previously done. To try then to earn God's favor by keeping the particulars of the Jewish Law was a slap in God's face, tantamount to a rejection of His grace.

We have fallen off the log perhaps with the majority in thinking that Paul might be at Ephesus on his third missionary journey as he writes Galatians, perhaps not too long after he wrote 1 Corinthians. While many argue Paul's theology of getting right with God may have been intact very early on in his ministry, it does not really show itself in 1 Thessalonians and hardly in 1 Corinthians. [2] But just after our placement of Galatians in our reconstruction, we hear verses like Philippians 3:9 and then 2 Corinthians 5:21, culminating in Romans. Indeed, Philippians 3 and 2 Corinthians 10-13 address similar issues that Galatians does. We have from Galatians on a deeper exploration of what it might mean to be incorporated in Christ. [3] We even hear of "new creation" in Galatians (6:15) and 2 Corinthians (5:17).

Acts tells us that Paul rented out one Hall of Tyrannus while he was at Ephesus (19:9). Is it possible that Paul ran something like a school of interpretation while he was there? Is it possible that some of the arguments in Galatians are a product of his teaching there? These suggestions are all speculation, but they are not impossible.

The Message of Galatians
The heart of the message of Galatians is thus about what, in fact, makes a person right with God. The argument of Galatians is very thick, perhaps the thickest in the whole Bible. But the basic point is that Jesus is the only way to be right with God. Arguments over whether Gentiles need to get circumcised or whether you need to observe certain days certain ways are ultimately irrelevant to being right with God. Trusting in what God has done through Jesus--that's the ticket!

Of course there are countless debates both between scholars and churches over the details. Paul would no doubt be both perplexed and amused. It might be worth it to take just a little time to spell out what Paul was likely saying so that we can avoid some of the arguments between Christian groups today over theology.

First, it is important to hear exactly what Paul is arguing over concretely. Paul says that no matter how many "works of Law" a Jew might do, it will not make them right with God. It will not "justify" you. Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther heard Paul saying very generally that no one could earn God's favor. No matter how many good "works" you did, you could not earn a right standing with God.

Luther was of course correct. Paul did believe you could not earn God's favor (e.g., Rom. 4:4-5). Whether you were a Jew or a Gentile, all had wronged God and others at some point (e.g., Gal. 2:17; Rom. 3:23), thus requiring Him to overlook our sins. In other words, we all need God's grace, His "unmerited favor."

At the same time, Luther slightly changed the focus of Paul's argument. Particularly in Galatians, Paul is not really talking about faith versus good works in general. He is talking about whether "works of Law," that is the Jewish Law, could gain you right standing before God. [2] In other words, it was things like circumcision, the purity rules of Leviticus, and sabbath observance that were in the "bubble" above his head, not good works like feeding the poor or clothing the needy. One of the documents found among the Dead Sea Scrolls has an argument over "works of Law," and the things it has in mind are squabbles between Jewish groups over what makes a person unclean, not good works.

What Paul is arguing over, therefore, is the parts of the Jewish Law that were most distinctly Jewish, the things that distinguished the Jews ethnically from other people. Around the world, people knew that Jews did not eat pork and did not work on Saturday. These were exactly the kinds of "works of Law" that Paul is targeting. These are the sorts of things at Antioch that got in the way of Jewish and Gentile believers eating together. Paul's main point in Galatians is that none of these things actually help a person get in right standing with God.

In fact, relying on such things can be a slap in Christ's face. Here God has offered a free gift through Christ's death on the cross. It is a gift so good, no one could possibly deserve it. Yet you are insistent on trying to pay for it, and you cannot accept the gift for what it is.

Peter and James apparently agreed that a person could not be in right standing with God apart from trusting in Jesus' death. Paul uses an expression in Galatians 2:16 that scholars debate over, but we think Paul is saying that both he and Peter agree that you could only be right with God if you trusted in the faithful death of Jesus on the cross that one can become right with God. [3] But where they disagreed is in the value of keeping the Jewish particulars of the Mosaic Law. Paul goes on to say that those particulars do not help a person be right with God at all, while Peter and others still saw them playing a role in "justification," in being pronounced right with God. Only trust in what God has done through Christ works.

Paul uses Abraham as his fundamental example of this principle: "justification by faith." Abraham was a superb example because Paul could use him both as a model for the justification of Jews and Gentiles. Paul interpreted Genesis 15:6 to say that Abraham had faith in God, and God considered him right with him as a result (Gal. 3:6). Thus Abraham was a model to Gentiles of how to be right with God. Have faith in what God has done through Jesus the Christ and God will consider you righteous, right with Him. Paul understood Genesis 12:3's promise that all the nations would be blessed through Abraham as a promise that they would get right with God through faith, with Abraham showing them the way (Gal. 3:8-9, 14).

Paul's opponents no doubt had some arguments of their own, and most think Paul is responding to some of them in Galatians. One of the key questions he needed to answer was what the purpose of the Jewish Law was. If it was not meant to show how to be in right relationship with God, then what was it for? Paul's answer is that the Law was like a child's guardian (Gal. 4:24) that watches over it until it comes of age.

So also, the Law served several functions before Christ came. For example, it taught us the difference between right and wrong (e.g., Rom. 7:7). Paul here has seemed to shift a little in what he is talking about. When he was talking about "works of Law," he seemed to be thinking of what many Christians think of as the ritual or "ceremonial" parts of the Jewish Law. [4] But now he is talking about the heart of the Law, what later Christians would call the "moral law." The fact that Paul can glide without notice between these various parts of the Jewish Law is the primary source of confusion over what exactly he meant.

Before Christ, we were all, Paul taught, under the power of Sin in the world. Before Christ, the Law pointed out our weakness in the face of this power (e.g., Gal. 4:3). But now that Christ has come, God's Holy Spirit is available to empower us to do what is right. We no longer need the instruction of our guardian, the Law. We have the power of the Spirit inside us to keep the essence of the (moral) Law.

Galatians thus turns to an exhortation to the Galatians not to let their freedom from works of Law to lead to sinful living. This is the tight rope Paul's theology walks. On the one hand, he argues that the Jewish particulars of the Law cannot make us right with God, nor were we able to live above sin before Christ. But now Christ has enabled us to receive the Spirit of adoption and sonship. Now if we walk in the Spirit, we will not fulfill the desires of the flesh (Gal. 5:16).

Works of law cannot make us right with God, but if we have the Spirit inside us, fruit will follow. The fruit of the Spirit are things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). Quite different are the works of the flesh, things like sexual immorality, strife, jealousy, anger, and so forth (5:19-21).

And so Paul closes his letter to the Galatians, likely to churches in south Galatia like Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, and Pisidian Antioch. He points out the hypocrisy of those urging them to get circumcised. They are not models of Jewish Law keeping. And Paul would know, since he was once a Pharisee who paid close attention to such things. But in the end, it is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision that matters before God, he claims. It is the new creation of the Spirit made possible through the cross of Jesus the Messiah.

[1] Even though we called them "missionaries of a sort," we are not insistent at all that the main reason they have come to Galatia is to further instruct Paul's converts. They might just as likely have come into the area on other business.

[2] Another article in James Dunn's The New Perspective on Paul is a classic here, "Works of Law," ***.

[3] The expression is "the faith of Jesus Christ." To understand the debate, you have to look at a phrase like "love of God." What does this phrase mean? Is it God's love, as in "The love of God led Him to send His Son"? Or is it our love for God, as in "Your love of God should lead you to serve Him better"? The phrase Paul uses, "faith of Jesus," could also mean either the faithfulness of Jesus or faith in Jesus.

The three main reasons I finally concluded that the first expression in Gal. 2:16 and Rom. 3:22 refer to the faithfulness of Jesus are 1) Otherwise these verses are quite redundant, Galatians 2:16 then referring to faith in Christ three times in the same sentence, 2) the parallelism between Romans 5:19--"through the obedience of one person many will be established as righteous" and finally, 3) 2 Corinthians 4:13, while the train of thought is hard to follow, seems to say that just as Jesus had faith and was resurrected, so we must have faith and be resurrected. It thus seems to substantiate the notion that Jesus' faith was indeed one of Paul's categories.

[4] It is significant to point out that a Jew, indeed Paul himself, would not not have categorized things this way.

Paul: Mutiny in Galatia 1

To follow the chain back, see the previous entry in this series, Disagreement and Disorder at Corinth: Spiritual Gifts and Worship.

Now to begin chapter 8: Mutiny in Galatia.
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The Setting of Galatians
Most scholars agree that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians to Corinth while he was at Ephesus in the mid-50s. Not so with Galatians--here we find significantly different theories about when and where it was written, and to whom exactly. Until the twentieth century, the vast majority of scholars thought it was written by Paul at about the time we are placing it, from Ephesus or even later in his missionary journeys. But developments in our knowledge of Roman governance at the time facilitated many to place Galatians earlier in Paul's ministry, and to a slightly different audience. Eventually, the majority of evangelical scholars in the mid-twentieth century came to date it as the earliest of Paul's letters in order to work out some tensions between it and the book of Acts.

The position of the majority of evangelicals, first championed by F. F. Bruce, is thus that Galatians was the earliest of the letters Paul wrote, written perhaps from Antioch in about the year AD48 to the churches he and Barnabas had founded on their first missionary journey. [1] This is an ingenious reconstruction and one that very tidily cleans up a number of conundrums. In this scenario, Paul and Barnabas have recently finished their trip to cities like Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, and a different Antioch in Asia Minor, in the south central part of what is now modern day Turkey. We now know that this region was actually part of what the Romans called Galatia at the time, south Galatia.

In Bruce's reconstruction, the private meeting of Paul with Peter and James (Galatians 2:1-10) had taken place even before the first missionary journey. Bruce had ingeniously noticed that Paul had already gone up to Jerusalem before that journey because of a revelation about a famine (Acts 11:30). So Bruce speculated that the revelation that inspired Paul's visit to Jerusalem in Galatians 2:2 was the same revelation. After all, both the visit in Galatians 2 and the visit in Acts 11 are Paul's second visits to Jerusalem.

So in this scenario, before his first journey, Paul received private assurances from Peter and James that uncircumcised Gentiles can be Christians. But he returns after the journey to continued controversy over the issue among believers. The conflict comes to a head when Paul and Peter have a knock down drag out at Antioch over whether Jewish and Gentile believers can eat together and the Jewish believers not be defiled in terms of the holiness codes of Leviticus. James apparently pressures Peter not to eat with Gentiles, while Paul stands in front of the church and so much as calls Peter a hypocrite.

Meanwhile, an already ticked Paul hears that certain Jewish missionaries have infilitrated the very churches he and Barnabas just founded (Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, Pisidian Antioch). They are telling the Gentile believers there that they need to go all the way and fully convert to Judaism in order to be saved from God's coming wrath. Paul goes ballistic. [2] He writes them in the strongest terms that "works of Law" like circumcision do nothing whatsoever to make them right with God.

The controversy finally reaches such a fevered pitch that James and the leaders of the Jerusalem church call a meeting of all the key parties involved, the so called "Jerusalem Council" of Acts 15. The key positions are heard. Certain Christian Pharisees present their position (Acts 15:5). Peter champions the position that Gentiles will be saved by God's grace just as Jewish believers will (15:11). Barnabas and Paul share stories of the Gentile conversions on their missionary journey.

Finally, James--the half-brother of Jesus--renders a verdict. Gentiles do not need to be circumcised to be saved. But they do need to do four things. They need to stay away from things that have come into contact with idols (like meat). They need to refrain from acts of sexual immorality. They need to drain the blood from animals rather than strangle them to death and in general stay away from blood.

In one respect, this is an odd list of fundamental requirements for Gentiles. Many have connected it to the basic expectation God has of Noah after the Flood (e.g., Gen. 9:4). The idea here is that God requires of Gentiles what He required of Noah, while he expects of Jews what He required of Moses. Again, an ingenious suggestion, although we favor the interpretation that sees these four prohibitions as a solution to the question of how Jew and Gentile believer can eat together, rather than one of basic ethical requirements for Gentiles.

And thus, the conflict over Jewish and Gentile relations is largely settled and Peter and Paul move forward in unity and in common agreement on such issues. We might call this reconstruction of the setting of Galatians the "early South Galatian hypothesis," because it sees the letter written to the southern part of the Roman province of Galatia in about the year AD48 just before a Jerusalem Council in AD49. It creates a tidy scenario that accounts for some tensions between Galatians and Acts while maintaining a harmonious and orderly picture of the progress of the early church. We thus understand why it has been the most attractive reconstruction among evangelicals.

However, it faces some serious problems when it comes down to some of the details of Galatians and, for this reason, most scholars in general have not adopted it. Four items in particular seem to make it problematic. First, Bruce was almost certainly wrong to equate the "revelation" that led Paul to go up to Jerusalem somewhat privately (Gal. 2:2) with the revelation that led to the famine relief trip ("gift" trip) of Acts 11:30. The Acts 11 revelation had to do with the famine. The revelation Paul mentions has to do with his understanding of salvation for the Gentiles.

Even more problematic is the timing. In order to make the timing work, Bruce had to take the expression "Then after fourteen years" not to mean fourteen years after his previous visit but fourteen years since he first experienced the risen Jesus. Otherwise Paul's visit in Galatians is pushed too late for the "gift trip." But this interpretation is counterintuitive. Is not Paul's basic point in Galatians 1 and 2 that he had had limited contact with Jerusalem? Is his point not that he did not visit them the first time until three years after his conversion and then not again until fourteen years after that first visit?

Yes, this reading does present a tension with Acts, where the gift trip would have been an intervening visit. But we encounter many such tensions between the biblical accounts, and extensive experience with them leads one to let them fall where they lie rather than insist on reconciling them all. It is almost always necessary to twist one or more of such texts into some far less than obvious reconstruction to reconcile them, which is not the most obvious way to show them respect. It shows a greater valuing of a certain idea about the text than a valuing of the text itself!

The practice with the most integrity is one that lets each text say what it most likely says rather than apply one's intellect to conceive of some less than probable reconstruction. In the end, such hypotheses often create a scenario that is not represented by any of the texts one is actually trying to reconcile. One has substituted the text of the interpreter for all of the texts in question! [3] In this case, however, it is conceivable that the two texts might be reasonably reconciled. Paul is, after all, talking in Galatians 2 primarily about visits having to do with discussion on theological matters, and it is conceivable that he might omit from such a list of visits one that involved no real interaction between him and the Jerusalem leaders on such issues.

So the more likely timing of Galatians 2:1 puts Paul's visit to Jerusalem in Galatians 2 at about the same time as the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15. Most scholars have thus concluded that the two events were one and the same. Paul would thus present the event as somewhat of a private meeting, while Acts would present the event as more of a public one. Here we hit the fundamental reason why many evangelicals have gone with Bruce. Acts 15 is different enough from Galatians 2 to require us to see one as a less straightforwardly historical presentation of the event.

But whether one thinks Galatians 2 was just before the "Jerusalem Council" or is a slightly different version of it, the most likely timing places the writing of Galatians some time after the Jerusalem Council. What this means is that the conclusion of Peter and James in Jerusalem, however it actually played out, did not resolve all the issues between Jews and Gentiles. Indeed, we come now to a third reason why the early dating of Galatians does not seem to fit Galatians. Paul mentions in Galatians 4:13 that it was because of a weakness of his flesh that he preached to them "the very first time." It is a relatively small argument, since it is possible we are reading too much into the word. But the most natural way to take this Greek word is that Paul has already visited the Galatians more than once. If so, then Paul would not have written Galatians until at least after his second visit there, which was after the Jerusalem Conference.

We thus reach the second reconstruction of the setting of Galatians. This reconstruction still sees Paul writing Galatians to the churches of South Galatia (Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, Pisidian Antioch) but sees him doing it at some point during his second missionary journey, probably while he was at Corinth. In this scenario as it usually plays out, Peter took a trip north to Antioch after the Jerusalem Council, whatever its precise nature. For a time, he fellowshipped with Gentile Christians just as Paul and Barnabas did.

Then James, nervous that their allowance to Gentiles would lead Jewish believers also to slack off in their keeping of the Law, sends some people to check on what was going on at Antioch. They convince Peter and Barnabas that they cannot slack off on purity concerns just because the Gentiles can be saved without following them all. Paul goes ballistic, as in the other scenario.

There are two key differences to this scenario from the previous one. The one is the fact that Paul seems to lose this argument. After all, he tells us earlier in Galatians 2 that James, Peter, and John agreed with him on the issue of circumcision. If Peter and Barnabas had given in to his argument at Antioch, Paul would have told us in Galatians. The end result is that Paul's argument with Barnabas in Acts 15:39 probably was about more than just whether to take Mark along on their next trip. We remember that Acts, in keeping with its general approach, completely omits this controversy at Antioch. We have good reason to believe that Paul leaves Antioch on somewhat tense, perhaps even bad terms with the Jerusalem church. We can still feel that tension even when he returns to Jerusalem in Acts 21:20-22.

A second curiosity with this approach is what to make of the letter Acts 15 pictures being sent as a result of the Jerusalem Conference. As we hinted above, its four prohibitions would actually solve the matter of Jew and Gentile believer eating together, at least in the minds of people like James, Peter, and Barnabas. If Gentiles would stay away from strangled meat with the blood still in it, from meat that had been sacrified at a temple, and from sexual immorality, then Jewish believers could eat with Gentile believers. The early Galatians scenario was nice and neat on this question, because it considered the Antioch blow up to have happened before the Council.

But if the blow up at Antioch was after the Council, then the letter becomes anachronistic--at least if it is addressing the question of "table fellowship," who you eat with. [4] If it is only giving a bare bones "Noahic" list of general requirements for Gentiles, then there is no tension. But if it is telling Gentiles how they must get and prepare food in order that Jewish believers might eat with them, then we are forced to see Acts 15 as a somewhat syncopated presentation of what was in history a more complicated and drawn out struggle. In either case, it is clear that Paul did not agree with the letter's position. As we have seen, Paul neither mentions the letter nor takes its position when he deals with the Corinthians on the subject of meat sacrificed to idols. One way or another, Paul's relationship with the Jerusalem church continued to involve some tension, even into his second and third missionary journeys. And we saw this fact in 1 Corinthians where Paul mentions some at Corinth who might say they are "of Peter" in a way that distinstinguished them from Paul (1 Cor. 1:12)

We mentioned four problems with the early South Galatia theory, but we have only mentioned three of them so far. The fourth is a difficulty not only for the first reconstruction but also for the second one we have just mentioned. Paul says in Galatians 4:13 that he first preached the good news to them because of a physical problem. He goes on to say how they would have been glad to give him their own eyes if they could have (4:15). Paul thus seems to have been passing through some part of Galatia when he encountered eye problems that led him to change his plans for an extended period of time.

It is difficult to fit this description of Paul's founding visit with the depiction of Paul's first missionary journey in Acts 13-14. South Galatia was hardly on the way between Cyprus and Antioch. To go there required intentionality on Paul and Barnabas' part. To be sure, some scholars have questioned whether Paul took exactly this path historically. Some even suggest Paul might have been in Greece some ten years earlier than Acts depicts. But these reconstructions seem highly speculative. We really have no reason to question Acts' itinerary at this point.

On the other hand, this founding visit might fit Paul's itinerary leaving south Galatia on his second missionary journey, where Acts says he went on to travel "through the region of Phrygia and Galatia" (16:6). Indeed, could some of the forbidding of the Holy Spirit Acts 16 mentions be its way of referring to Paul's need to stay relatively put in north Galatia because of eye problems? It was this region of north Galatia, where the modern city of Ancyra is located, that most Christians thought Galatians was written until the twentieth century. That is because for most of antiquity, only this area was actually called Galatia. The ethnic Galatians, although they were long gone by the time of Paul, had lived in this northern region.

However, we must reckon with the fact that the Romans expanded the territory in 25BC to include the southern area. The cities of south Galatia thus were thus part of Galatia as well. We have decided to fall off the log with Galatians primarily written to the northern territory, classic Galatia, but we have to admit it is a close call. We must face the odd situation, for example, that we do not know the names of any churches Paul founded in this area, while we know many names of churches he founded in the south. Nevertheless, as we will see, we think Galatians fits the general preoccupations of Paul while at Ephesus better than when he was at Corinth.

[1] Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free. **

[2] That Paul is infuriated when he writes Galatians should not be in doubt given his comment that he would be quite pleased if these individuals bent on circumcision would just cut their whole thing off (Gal. 5:12).

[3] The most notorious example is of course Harold Linsell's suggestion in The Battle for the Bible (***) that Peter might have denied Jesus six times, three before a first crowing and three more before a second. He applied his ingenuity and created a scenario that differs more from each gospel text than each of them actually differ from each other!

[4] And here let us add to our list of books one might read to master Paul the masterful collection of essays by James D. G. Dunn over the years called, The New Perspective on Paul (***). His essay, "The Incident at Antioch" is, in our opinion, the most definitive discussion to date on the blow-up. Dunn takes the second scenario position on Galatians, that it was written in the early 50s from Corinth to southern Galatia.

1 Corinthians Disorder 4: Spiritual Gifts and Worship

Previous posts in this series, Life Reflections on Paul and His Writings, include:

1a. Born at a Time and Place 1; 1b. Born at a Time and Place 2
2a. A Change in Life Direction; 2b A Change in Life Direction 2; 2c A Change in Life Direction 3
3a. The Unknown Years 1; 3b. The Unknown Years 2; 3c. The Unknown Years 3
4a. Life Beyond Death; 4b. Life Beyond Death; 4c. Life Beyond Death; 4d Life Beyond Death
5a. Disunity at Corinth; 5b. Disunity at Corinth 2; 5c. Disunity at Corinth 3
6 How Not to Have Sex
7a. Disagreement and Disorder 1; 7b. The Lord's Supper. 7c. Women and Worship

Now part 4 of "Disagreement and Disorder":
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Spiritual Gifts and Worship
1 Corinthians 12-14 form yet another sequence of thought, this time on "spiritual matters," principally spiritual gifts. [1] While chapter 12 treats spiritual gifts rather generally, Paul returns to two in particular in chapter 14: tongues and prophecy. If you remember, the second half of 1 Corinthians addresses questions that the Corinthians themselves have sent to Paul. The first had to do with sex within marriage and whether virgins should marry. The second had to do with meat that had been sacrificed to idols. Now Paul addresses questions they had about spiritual gifts.

The fact that Paul has sandwiched a beautiful tribute to love in the middle of this discussion gives us a fair sense of the heart of the problem. Those with varying gifts in the community are not showing love and respect for the gifts of others but instead thinking themselves superior because of the particluar gifts they have. After going through various kinds of spiritual gifts a person might have, as well as key roles in the church like apostles, prophets, teachers, and so forth, Paul sets out love as a more excellent preoccupation than all the various giftings a person might have.

When he returns to his answer in chapter 14, Paul gets down to business apparently with the heart of where the divisiveness lies. The entire tenor of 1 Corinthians 14 is to corral the practice of tongues speaking in Corinthian worship and to promote the practice of prophecy as more beneficial. "Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts, and especially that you may prophesy. For those who speak in a tongue do not speak to other people but to God; for nobody understands them, since they are speaking mysteries in the Spirit" (1 Cor. 14:1-2). This sense of correcting and steering the use of tongues continues throughout the chapter, and seems to indicate that it stood at the heart of their division over spiritual gifts.

It thus seems likely that some of the Corinthians thought themselves more spiritual than others in the church because they spoke in tongues. "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal" (1 Cor. 13:1), Paul tells them. It does not matter that you speak in tongues if you are not loving toward others in the church.

He has perhaps already chastised these who think themselves spiritual back in 1 Corinthians 3:1: "I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ." In the verses right before these, Paul spends some energy distinguishing between what a spiritual person is like in contrast to a "soulish" person, sometimes translated as an "unspiritual" or "natural" person. We might even translate it as a "merely animal" person. Given the same use of the word spiritual, it is easy to see a connection with the question about spiritual matters in chapters 12-14.

This suggestion might seem strange at first, that those who "possess knowledge" in 8:1, who think they are already kings on earth in the kingdom (4:8), are the same people as those who boast in their spiritual gift of tongues. Is this not the Apollos group, those who identify with the "university professor" from Alexandria? Is this not the group that knows "no idol in the world really exists" in distinction from the "less intelligent" people who are still superstitious?

What we are getting at is that the Western world pushes us to distinguish the intellectual people who know there is only one God and are not superstitious from the emotional people who have mystic religious experiences and believe in demons and lots of gods. We are not culturally programmed to think of people who speak in tongues as being the same kind of people who are intellectual. However, this way of categorizing people is modern, not ancient. Knowing God in the ancient world was an experiential kind of knowing rather than some Spock-like, dispassionate intellectual pursuit. The philosophies of individuals like Pythagoras and Plato were deeply mystical and religious.

The tongues speaking at Corinth was apparently not too unlike some of the pagan religious experiences that were known in Greece. Paul starts off chapter 12 talking about being "led astray to idols," a reference some think is to the kind of wild, frenzied activity that went along with the festivals of Dionysus (12:2). In 14:23, Paul suggests that an unbeliever coming into their meetings might think you are "out of your mind," which might also refer to some of the ecstatic kinds of religious experiences that sometimes took place in the so called mystery religions. Part of Paul's intention in these chapters is thus to avoid the appearance of pagan worship in the Christian assembly.

Whether this is the right reconstruction of the situation at Corinth, it seems clear enough that Paul's goal in 1 Corinthians 14 is to steer the use of tongues in worship in a healthy direction while not prohibiting its use. He begins the chapter praising prophecy as good for the congregation in contrast to the self-edifying benefit of tongues. He mentions briefly in verse 13 that a tongues-speaker should pray for the power to interpret their language and then returns again for another twelve verses to speak of the barrier creating effect of tongues on insider and visitor alike. Finally he concludes with concrete rules for tongues and prophecy, with the stipulation that tongues should not be used in worship unless an interpreter is present.

The entire tenor of the chapter is thus away from the use of tongues in public worship with the exception of those instances where an interpreter of the "languages" (the meaning of tongues) is present. This thrust is clear enough when Paul says tongues are not to be forbidden (14:39), which indicates that he has been limiting its practice but does not wish to eliminate it. A comment like, "I would like all of you to speak in tongues" (14:5) is like the young woman who tells a young man interested in her, "I like you, but I don't want to date you." The first statement is meant to ease the pain of the second. So also it would be great if they all spoke in tongues, but intelligible speech is really what is appropriate in worship. "I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you," Paul says to affirm the value of tongues. But only to go on to say, "nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind, in order to instruct others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue" (14:18).

The rules that Paul lays down are to bring order to Corinthian worship. "All things should be done decently and in order" (14:40). Two or at the most three people should speak in tongues in any one worship time, and only if someone who has the gift to interpret is present. They should speak one at a time. The same applies to prophecy. As it is, Corinthian worship is chaotic: "When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation" (14:26).

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, speaking in tongues has gained incredible prominence in Christian worship around the world. In fact, the fastest growing segment of Christianity in the world is the charismatic movement, particularly in the southern hemisphere. Some charismatic churches are careful to have interpretation of tongues speaking in worship, others are not. Clearly speaking in tongues is, as Paul said two thousand years ago, edifying to the person who has the experience.

What is happening when a person speaks in tongues? Is it an angelic language? Is it a psychological phenomenon that some brains are simply wired to experience? Different individuals will no doubt have different opinions on the question, and of course brain research might weigh in at some point with scientific evidence.

But what we know is that the experience is a blessing to the person so "gifted," and we should rejoice with those who rejoice as fellow believers. Paul's concern that a worship service be uplifting to everyone present and that it not be a bad witness to outsiders who visit also seem concerns that carry through to today. It may be possible, for example, that we have the benefit of so many different church options that those who attend tongues-speaking churches may actually find it uplifting to watch another believer speak in uninterpreted tongues. And such a church will rarely if ever be the sole representation of Christianity to the unbelievers in town. In other words, it may very well be that the limitations Paul places on tongues in worship may not apply in some charismatic churches.

By the same token, there may be some churches where the presence of tongues-speaking would be so divisive that Paul would encourage tongues-speakers there to practice their gift at home. The use of tongues in worship is not needed for the body and will only cause disorder. They can surrender their "rights" so as not to put a stumblingblock in front of the church.

Are tongues today the same as tongues so long ago? After all, tongues speaking was very rare in the two thousand years since the Corinthians till the Azusa street revivals of the early twentieth century. Some would say that tongues were purely an early church phenomenon to spread the gospel at first to people who spoke other languages. But we have no clear biblical basis on which to claim such a thing. [2] It is true that the tongues speaking in Acts 2 seems to be other human languages, but the tongues speaking of 1 Corinthians 14 may very well be conceptualized as angelic languages (cf. 1 Cor. 13:1), in any case languages not known to the congregation.

Some would say that those who speak in tongues are serving as conduits for demons and often curse God in other languages. These stories are often repeated with such a similar form that we suspect they are mostly urban legends with little or no basis in fact. In general it is dangerous to attribute to Satan what is actually the work of the Spirit. This is actually a sin Jesus says is unpardonable, so we should probably avoid such accusations (cf. Matt. 12:32).

I personally like to think that just as God often amplifies certain natural talents we have for ministry and Christian service, perhaps some people's brains are wired to have this experience in general. After all, we hear of these sorts of experiences not only among Christians but among other religious groups as well. [3] Perhaps God then "sanctifies" or amplifies this natural potentiality for such individuals, giving them a personal sense of blessing through the Holy Spirit. In any case, we cannot look down on this spiritual gift any more than we can think ourselves more spiritual than others for having it.

The lesson of the Corinthians is thus for the tongues-speaker--or in fact anyone with any special gift from God--not to think less of others in the community who do not have that gift. We are not more valuable to God because we have some particular gift. We may serve different functions in the body of Christ, but we are all of the same status, whether social or spiritual.

[1] 14:1 does not actually have the word "gifts." It simply says, "spiritual [matters]." However, the content of the chapters makes it clear that spiritual gifts are primarily in mind, especially tongues and prophecy.

[2] Some used to reference 1 Corinthians 13:8 as an indication that tongues would cease as a gift, but that is clearly not what the verse is saying. It is simply saying that languages come and go over time.

[3] It is hard to know when to date the Testament of Job, but it depicts the daughters of Job speaking in angelic tongues. That portion of the book may be influenced by Christians, but if it was part of the non-Christian Jewish part of the book, then we have an indication that some non-Christian Jews spoke in tongues.

The Authorship of 2 Peter

The final exam in General Epistles approacheth, and it promises a mini-essay on the final exam about the authorship of 2 Peter. I told the students I would send them some notes on what points they should cover to get full points, although I am not demanding that they take any particular position on the issue. Most, I assume, will argue for literal Petrine authorship.

Here are the relevant data to consider in the essay:

1. The Greek style of 2 Peter

• Style is different from 1 Peter, often called "Asiatic"
• Would a Galilean fisherman write Greek with Homeric and classical Greek overtones?
• What if both 1 and 2 Peter were written by different secretaries, who were primarily responsible for its style and manner of presentation?

2. The likely incorporation of material from Jude

• Why would Peter borrow from Jude? If Jude is late, it would seem to preclude Peter.
• But we do not know for sure either when Peter or Jude died, when Jude as written, and of course some think Jude borrowed from 2 Peter.

3. The contrast in eschatology from 1 Peter

• 1 Peter says the end of all things is near and that the judgment has begun. 2 Peter seems to say that in the future, scoffers will ask why Christ has not come back yet.
• This difference seems quite substantial. At the very least it would seem to imply a different audience from 1 Peter. But of course this is a tension Christians affirm even today. We affirm an imminent expectation of Christ's return while living as if the world might still be here in a hundred years.

4. Alternation between present and future tense

• 3:3 says, scoffers will come. But 3:4 speaks of them in the present tense, "they forget."
• If pseudonymous, the shift surely would imply that the audience would know it was not really Peter writing, but a literary device, and thus no deception would be involved.
• Could be vivid writing, getting strongly into the heads of future scoffers; sometimes you can see what's coming, even though it's only starting

5. Possible sense that the apostles are all dead

• 3:2 could be taken to talk about the apostles and founding Christian prophets in the past tense; 3:4 could be taken to say that the fathers of Christianity will die before the scoffers come.
• If pseudonymous, surely the implication would be that a literary device is in play, since anyone would notice a document talking about its putative author in the past tense.
• Apostles could be more general than the twelve; prophets could refer to OT prophets.

6. Possible broadening of the scope of Paul's audiences

• Paul wrote to specific audiences. 2 Peter seems to be written to all Christians. 3:15 seems to imply that at least one of Paul's letters, perhaps Romans, was directed at the audience of 2 Peter, and thus all Christians. How naturally would the historical Peter have made this shift, to see Romans or Paul's letters as letters to all people rather than particular letters to particular audiences?
• If we believe in revelation, God could inform Peter of such a shift in an instant.

7. Possible collection of Paul's writings

• Would Paul's writings be available somewhat universally within 10 years of their writing?
• It is possible.

8. Consideration of Paul's writings as Scripture

• Paul's writings seem to be considered Scripture like the Old Testament writings--quite remarkable development within some ten years of their writing and by someone known to differ with Paul on various issues in the past.
• Again, God could inform Peter of such a shift in an instant.

1 Corinthians Disorder 3: Women and Worship

Previous posts in this series, Life Reflections on Paul and His Writings, include:

1a. Born at a Time and Place 1; 1b. Born at a Time and Place 2
2a. A Change in Life Direction; 2b A Change in Life Direction 2; 2c A Change in Life Direction 3
3a. The Unknown Years 1; 3b. The Unknown Years 2; 3c. The Unknown Years 3
4a. Life Beyond Death; 4b. Life Beyond Death; 4c. Life Beyond Death; 4d Life Beyond Death
5a. Disunity at Corinth; 5b. Disunity at Corinth 2; 5c. Disunity at Corinth 3
6 How Not to Have Sex
7a. Disagreement and Disorder 1; 7b. The Lord's Supper.

Now part 3 of "Disagreement and Disorder": "Women and Worship"...
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Women and Worship
For whatever reason, some of the women in the Corinthian church seemed to be a source of controversy. We already observed in the previous chapter that 1 Corinthians 7 seems to focus unusually on women in a way that makes us wonder if some Corinthian women were wanting to use the gospel as an opportunity for them to free themselves of their husbands and perhaps of sex. Perhaps these same women come up again in the first part of 1 Corinthians 11 and, if the verses are original, in 14:34-35. Perhaps it is no coincidence that it is only here in 1 Corinthians that Paul mentions Aquila first and Priscilla second (16:19). [1]

In 1 Corinthians 11, the problem apparently has to do with conflict in the church from women not veiling their heads when the community is worshipping together. Although scholars have debated quite a bit about the passage, we think the heart of the problem is the fact that married women are not veiling their hair in the presence of men who are not their husbands. [2] We have evidence from other Jewish literature at the time that pious, married Jewish women wore a veil over their hair down to their shoulders (not a face veil). For example, in the Jewish novel Joseph and Aseneth, the widow Aseneth is told to put the veil of a virgin back on her head when she converts to Judaism. Even though she had been married before, her conversion "revirginates" her! [3]

It is not hard to imagine how this conflict might arise. First, the fact that worship took place in houses immediately creates a tension for women because they would not normally wear the veil inside but outside. As we mentioned back in chapter 5, the Corinthian church likely met in the house of a wealthy man named Gaius when they all met together (Rom. 16:23). It is not hard to imagine especially that his wife and daughters if he had them might resist having to wear a veil in their own home! And it is not clear that the Gentile women of the city followed the practice of veiling either. We cannot know for sure, but it is at least possible that some of these tensions were between Jewish and Gentile elements in the congregation, with Jews finding temptation or offense in the absence of a veil. [4] So while men and women were often kept separate, the house church would put men and women who were not their wives in close quarters.

This hypothesis seems plausible enough, and it would seem to account generally for what Paul actually says in the first part of 1 Corinthians 11. Paul begins by affirming the Corinthians for following the traditions he left them. Whatever he has in mind, this chapter apparently qualifies them in some way. Since he goes on to give proper relationships between husband and wife, it would appear that the traditions to which he refers must have been something like Galatians 3:28, that in Christ "there is not male and female." [5] In other words, it would appear again that something the Corinthian women are doing requires Paul to qualify the empowerment of women that was apparently part of the gospel.

He invokes the cultural roles of husband and wife as they commonly played out in the Mediterranean world. The idea that the husband was the head of the wife was not an idea that Christians came up with or that comes from the Old Testament. The earliest use of this language is actually found in the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 300s BC. In his Politics, he suggests that the husband is the head of the wife and that he rules over her in the same way the ruler of a city rules over the citizens of the city. [6] He goes on to say that nature generally makes the male fitter to command than the female, although he acknowledges there are some departures from nature.

So Paul invokes the cultural categories of his day to address apparent conflict that is taking place in worship because of men and women being in such close quarters in a home. He urges the wives of the assembly to wear their hair veils when they are praying and prophesying so that they do not dishonor their "heads," their husbands. An unveiled woman is like a woman with short hair, which everyone would have agreed was shameful. It made her look like a dishonorable woman, like a prostitute. It was like taking off your wedding ring and flirting with other men, shaming her husband and possibly angering other wives who were wearing their veils.

The mention of appearing unveiled before God and angels upped the stakes. God of course has no genitalia--references to Him as male is not literal language but metaphorical to help human understanding. Nevertheless, God and angels were conceptualized as male. In fact, both many Jews and Christians at the time understood Genesis 6:1 to be about angels having sex with human women, which is almost certainly what 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6 are referring to. [7] Like the men in their midst, Paul tells them they should wear the veil on their head as an indication of their honor in the presence of God and angels while praying or prophesying.

One point of great interest here is that Paul does not contest that women can pray and prophesy--which is the only "preaching" like activity we hear of in the Corinthian church. Paul is trying to resolve conflict and remove disgrace in husband-wife relationships, but he assumes without question that women will be praying and prophesying in public worship in front of men. When we think of debates today over women in ministry, it is very important to notice that Paul never connects the two issues. The language he occasionally invokes of husband headship has nothing to do in any of his writings with women ministering or "preaching" in worship.

This observation leads us to one of the two most controversial passages on women in the Bible: 1 Corinthians 14:34-35:

"women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church."

These are puzzling verses. Has not Paul already assumed they can do pray and prophesy in worship? For Paul to be consistent, we must assume that Paul is not talking about spiritual speech but about disruptive chatter. This verse thus again has nothing to do with the question of women in ministry. Only one verse in the entire Bible thus seems, when read in context, to take a negative position on wives teaching their husbands, and we will look at that verse in greater depth in our second volume. [8] In general, one should not base a practice on a single verse in the Bible, especially one as suprising and strange as those in 1 Timothy 2:12-15!

In the end, however, we would join the minority of scholars (but nevertheless, a list with a number of evangelical, faith-filled names on it) and conclude that these two verses are not likely to have been in the copy of 1 Corinthians that Paul sent the Corinthians. Anyone who has used different versions like the New International Version and the King James Version will know that these translations occasionally differ in text from one another. The reason is the fact that there are some variations among the thousands of copies of the New Testament that have survived from the ancient world.

In the case of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, although these verses do appear in all the manuscripts we have, they do not always appear in the same place. Curiously, some manuscripts have them after verse 40 at the end of the chapter. A good explanation for this phenomenon is the suggestion that they were not originally in the text of 1 Corinthians but that they were written in the margin of a very early copy of the letter. Then later copiers put them in the text at more than one place.

This is a slight manuscript basis for suggesting they were not original, but there are much stronger reasons for drawing this conclusion from internal evidence. The main one is that these verses do not really fit here in 1 Corinthians 14. Paul is talking about the use of tongues and prophecy in worship. If these verses are not read, the train of thought is perfectly smooth:

"For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged. And the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets, for God is a God not of disorder but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints, or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached? Anyone who claims to be a prophet, or to have spiritual powers, must acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord." (1 Cor. 14:31-37).

The two verses on women are unexpected and do not really fit the train of thought.

But the nail in the coffin is the switch from the context of 1 Corinthians to a different context. 1 Corinthians addresses the church, singular, at Corinth (1 Cor. 1:2). It does not address churches, plural. But the two added verses tell the churches of God, plural, to make women keep silent. Because we as Christians read 1 Corinthians as Scripture, as God's word to us, plural, it is easy to miss this significant shift. But Paul is telling the singular church at Corinth to be orderly like the other churches of God. If he then went on to tell women to be silent in other churches, it would have left the Corinthians asking themselves, "Who is he talking to? Isn't this letter to us?" It is thus very unlikely that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 were even in 1 Corinthians in the first place.

The issue of women in ministry is a strangely live one in the church today, ironically even in churches of my own tradition, the Wesleyan tradition. We were ordaining women in the late 1800s, long before so called liberal churches did or before feminism was popular. We did so, along with many charismatic churches, because of our strong sense that the Day of Pentecost implied that women had the Spirit just as men, and that Acts 2:17 was serious when it said that the sons and daughters of those with the Spirit would now prophesy in the new age.

But it is deeply ironic that in an age when we recognize that there is nothing about a woman's brain--let alone the rest of her body--that would imply she cannot lead or minister, Christians themselves are the ones holding out. In the New Testament, the empowerment of women is a major consequence of the new age but it was tempered by the social conflict it caused at places like Corinth and perhaps Ephesus, the implied context of 1 Timothy. So then, full empowerment was limited by culture. Now, ironically, it is a certain segment of the church that is holding back full empowerment when Western culture would allow it!

In the end we have to wonder if there are other things going on in the minds and hearts of those who will not let women answer any call God makes on their lives. And it is not always men who oppose women in ministry. It is just as often other women. If a person has sincere doubts, a great place to start is with the recognition that, even in the Old Testament, the tendency for men to take leadership was never absolute. There was always a place for exceptions like Deborah the general or Huldah the prophetess. If you are willing to make exceptions for those women who are truly called and not shut the door completely, then God will do the rest. You will see that God wants to call lots of women to all different levels of ministry and leadership in the church.

[1] Unlike Romans 16:3 and, assuming Paul was the literal author, 2 Timothy 4:19. Acts also mentions Priscilla first twice (18:18, 26) and Aquila first only when it first introduces the couple in 18:2.

[2] The other two most common interpretations are that 1) Paul is addressing a particularly showy hair style or that 2) he is not addressing a particular conflict at all but suggesting in general that a woman should have long hair.

[3] Another relevant passage is in Philo, ***

[4] We in the West might find it hard to imagine that men might be unduly tempted by a woman’s uncovered hair, but a Christian from the Middle East probably would immediately appreciate this notion. Westerners might have to picture a woman coming to church in a swimsuit to get the same sense of the dynamics here.

[5] Some have suggested the words of Galatians 3:28 might have been spoken over those undergoing baptism in the early church in some circles.

[6] ***

[7] Jude explicitly quotes the book of 1 Enoch, which tells the stories of (fallen) angels having sex with human women. The proximity of the 1 Enoch quote to this mention of angels from the days of Noah held in chains till the judgment makes it almost certain Jude, 2 Peter, not to mention 1 Peter 3:19-20.

[8] 1 Timothy seems to suggest that because Eve was deceived rather than Adam, wives should not teach their husbands. Nevertheless, women can be saved from the state of transgression left by Eve through childbearing (1 Tim. 2:15), a strange statement since we believe Christ atoned for all sin, including the sin of Eve. In general, it is the only verse in the Bible that forbids wives to teach their husbands (we would argue it is not even about women in general but the husband-wife relationship) and a strange one at that--not the kind of basis one would want to base an entire theology of women or women in ministry on.

1 Corinthians Disorder 2: Lord's Supper

Previous posts in this series, Life Reflections on Paul and His Writings, include:

1a. Born at a Time and Place 1; 1b. Born at a Time and Place 2
2a. A Change in Life Direction; 2b A Change in Life Direction 2; 2c A Change in Life Direction 3
3a. The Unknown Years 1; 3b. The Unknown Years 2; 3c. The Unknown Years 3
4a. Life Beyond Death; 4b. Life Beyond Death; 4c. Life Beyond Death; 4d Life Beyond Death
5a. Disunity at Corinth; 5b. Disunity at Corinth 2; 5c. Disunity at Corinth 3
6 How Not to Have Sex
7a. Disagreement and Disorder 1

Chapter 7, "Disagreement and Disorder," continues...
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The Lord's Supper
Chapters 11-14 of 1 Corinthians all seem to deal in one way or another with issues of worship in the church. Chapter 11 begins with the question of how women should dress in worship. It then ends with the shameful way the Corinthians are eating the Lord's supper. Then chapters 12 through 14 deal with the proper exercise of spiritual gifts, with the "love chapter" of 1 Corinthians 13 sandwiched in the middle of the discussion. It is a not so subtle reminder that unity is a "more excellent way" than arguing over who is spiritually superior (12:31).

1 Corinthians 11:17-34 just may have been one of the first parts of this letter Paul wrote. He mentions that he has heard of divisions among them, and he partially believes it. Surely by this point in the letter he is more than a little convinced! We remember that the ancients did not just sit down and write a letter the way we write an email today. [1] Writing a letter involved some expense and planning. It is at least possible, then, that in the "archaeological dig" of 1 Corinthians we have hit one of the earliest layers in this section.

The social divisions we have suggested existed at Corinth seem especially to have come out in the way they were eating the Lord's Supper. Just as Jesus' Last Supper was a meal, so it would seem the Lord's Supper was among the earliest Christians. It seems not a little likely that the "love feasts" that Jude 12 mentions (the "agape") were their way of celebrating what we now call communion or the Eucharist.

Eating in the ancient world was a big deal. You ate with people who were of the same status as you, people either of the same honor level as you or who might enhance your status. In Judaism, eating was a potential source of defilement because of the purity rules of Leviticus. Within the context of the Leviticus, the concerns of the Pharisees toward Jesus' eating with prostitutes and tax collectors were perfectly understandable.

The disfunction of the Corinthian church during its love feasts thus flowed nicely out of the culture of the day just as much as it illustrated what the way of Christ was not supposed to be. It is not entirely clear from 1 Corinthians 11 whether everyone was expected to bring some food as in a pot-luck dinner or whether the host of the house, presumably Gaius, provided the bulk of the food. In any case, some believers apparently are getting to the meal later than others, often suggested to be slaves and those of lower status. Meanwhile, the wealthy owner of the house and those of his social stratum have perhaps already feasted sumptuously and are drunk by the time the others have arrived.

Anticipating what will come later in his discussion of spiritual gifts, Paul indicts such individuals as not understanding the body of Christ. They think themselves somehow more worthy than the others when in fact God does not deal in such distinctions. Some, Paul says, have actually become sick and died as a result of their sin of division in the church.

This passage has often led American Christians to become very introspective before communion. They have taken the words, "Examine yourselves" (11:28), to mean that you need to have everything right with God before you take communion. Some American Christians even avoid the four Sunday evening services a year their church does communion out of fear! Suffice it to say, this passage has nothing to do with such hyper-introspection or need to be completely right with God before partaking, as if one needs to mention and repent individually for every sin you have committed before you eat and drink.

The Lord's Supper is actually an excellent time for us to hit the "reset button" on our relationship with God and Christ. But it should be celebrated with joy, not with dread or fear. The problem with the Corinthians was that of division and a divisive spirit, not one of individualized imperfection. Ironically, when we celebrate this communal meal today with individualized wafers and communion cups, we usually miss one of Paul's main points--the unity of the body of Christ: "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread." (10:17).

And the Corinthians, as all the early Christians, probably had this meal every week, probably one of the most central activities they did together. Later Christianity set the Eucharist off into a specialized ritual to be performed by specially ordained priests. Very specialized theology developed around this tradition, centered on the words of Jesus at the original supper. Unless we want to say that God let Christianity wander off track for two thousand years, God apparently did not have too much of a problem with celebrating it this way. God surely meets each Christian tradition today in the way each has come to celebrate it. This is God's way, to meet us where we are, for we cannot possibly get to His level.

At the same time, many Christians could no doubt improve their celebration of the Lord's Supper by getting back to basics. Fellowship and the unity of the body of Christ is clearly the key dimension of the meal that Paul focuses on in 1 Corinthians. Remembering and reappropriating the sacrificial, new covenant-making death of Jesus is another obvious key function. Healthy Christian communities still find themselves accomplishing these functions in one way or another, as Christians regularly "break bread" together and set up mechanisms for accountability and thanksgiving to God and Christ. Communities that do not find themselves doing these things are deficient, unhealthy. The faith of someone who only comes to sit for an hour a week in a pew without fellowship or meaningful reflection on Christ can hardly be anything but anemic, if it can even remain genuine Christian faith for long.


[1] Or the way we used to write letters :-)

Reading (12-8-09): Green on Soul

Finally got back to the second half of Joel Green's second chapter in Body, Soul, and Human Life. In this half, he talks about some of the factors that confuse the issue. Whether you agree fully with him or not, he is almost completely right in his correction of some oversimplified understandings.

The first is to make a stark distinction between Greek and Hebrew thinking, where it is assumed that the Greeks were dualists of body and soul while the Hebrew Bible sees a person as a single whole. He notes that Bible scholars have caught up since Hengel forty years ago with the fact that Judaism had been under the influence of Hellenism for two hundred years before Christ. What scholars have not as much realized is that Greco-Roman thought itself was not nearly as dualistic as often assumed, indeed that the soul was generally thought of as material to ancient philosophers. The book that first turned me on to this was Dale Martin's The Corinthian Body.

Similarly, Green points out the language fallacies that often accompany such discussions. In particular, there is the assumption that words always mean the same things, such that the word psyche in itself might mean "soul" in some Cartesian sense. I'm not fully convinced that 1 Peter is not dualistic between flesh and spirit in 4:6, as well as in 3:18-19. But in general, Green successfully shows that the Bible is not nearly as dualistic as it might seem when we simply invest these words with our meanings.

The last part of the chapter deals with the meaning of humanity being "in the image of God." I feel like Green sees a little more theology in Genesis than its author might have but he's right, I think, to start off with a kind of "governmental" understanding of the image in Genesis 1. Humanity is in the image of God in Genesis as the ruler of the creation, like God is ruler of all. Green takes it a little further to the image being primarily relational and covenantal, and I don't really see this in Genesis' use of the expression.

As I said the NT often does in a controversial post, the New Testament then understands "image of God" in its own way in the New Testament, without placing any real emphasis on the governmental element that dominates (ha) Genesis 1, in my opinion. In the NT, it seems to me that the phrase image of God is more emotive and leans more toward humanity as a honor reflection/representation of God, much as a father might be proud of his son if he is a "chip off the old block." Christ is also a reflection of God in a more prominent and Sonship kind of way.

A good chapter...

Davids on Bauckham on 2 Peter

Came across this statement by Peter H. Davids in his 2 Peter commentary in the new Pillar series, writing about Richard Bauckham's understanding of 2 Peter as a testament. I cannot think of any basis on which to disagree with Davids:

"While Bauckham believes that 2 Peter is pseudepigraphical, he also believes that it is written in a testamental form and that the genre would have been recognized by any contemporary reader as being written in the spirit of Peter rather than having been written by Peter. Thus, he argues, the document was neither intended to deceive nor did it in fact deceive its first readers. They would have thought of it as being about Peter rather than by Peter. Bauckham may be right or wrong on this, but the position he holds is fully compatible with evangelical affirmations about the trustworthiness of the canonical Scriptures in all that they truly affirm (versus what we may misread them as affirming)" (130 n.20).

Who's a scholar?

I was musing yesterday at the "scholarly" coping mechanism that has evolved in biblical studies to gloss over scholarly developments and consensuses. On the one hand, we should probably celebrate that all points of view can get published, a situation bequeathed to us from postmodernism and pluralism. But I can't help but feeling that in an age where it feels like people have given up on even trying toward objectivity, in my mind there's a glut of special pleading out there now on the biblical studies book market.

It seems like whenever a study or trajectory of real significance arises, some "conservative"--meaning someone resistant to change--then commissions a counter-study to address it. Such counter-studies, far from actually disproving the new development, more innoculates the complacent, who can now simply say, "You can see that the new book by D. A. Carson or John Piper shows that this or that is not in fact true but another liberal conspiracy to corrupt the masses."

So Krister Stendahl in the 60s and E. P. Sanders in the 70s expose the faulty understanding of Judaism that has pervaded scholarship since its inception. Now finally D. A. Carson, Mark Siefrid, and Peter O'Brien strike back with two volumes, Justification and Variegated Nomism. It can now become the "scholarly" excuse for ignoring genuine developments. Of course the volumes themselves are far more "new perspective" than old. They remind me of the current "conservative" views on race. There are no Republicans in Congress today who have the same views as Strom Thurmand did in the 50s. Like it or not, the perspective on Judaism has changed, and these sorts of works are more foot dragging than real defenses of older views.

So also N. T. Wright introduces the actual ancient background of the New Testament into his interpretations of Scripture and it begins to make its way down into the masses. Commission a study! So John Piper produces a "scholarly" volume refuting it to innoculate the masses. Sorry. Just because you can write a book doesn't mean you haven't been caught snoozing in the cockpit.

Another reactionary "scholarly" innoculation is D. A. Carson and Greg Beale's Commentary on the Use of the Old Testament in the New. Sorry. The truth doesn't care. The New Testament simply isn't majorly concerned with the context and original meaning of Old Testament passages.

There have been a glut of new commentary series it seems this last decade, but most of them promise to fill Amazon with these sorts of innoculatory pacifiers. Books to allow us not to grow, not to wrestle truly with hard issues.

Oh where is objectivity to be found? Nowhere, of course, but there are better and worse examples of the attempt. It used to be that we simply ignored the experts. Now the anti-intellectuals have infiltrated them, across the spectrum of scholarly disciplines in America.

1 Corinthians: Disagreement and Disorder 1

Previous posts in this series include:

1a. Born at a Time and Place 1; 1b. Born at a Time and Place 2
2a. A Change in Life Direction; 2b A Change in Life Direction 2; 2c A Change in Life Direction 3
3a. The Unknown Years 1; 3b. The Unknown Years 2; 3c. The Unknown Years 3
4a. Life Beyond Death; 4b. Life Beyond Death; 4c. Life Beyond Death; 4d Life Beyond Death
5a. Disunity at Corinth; 5b. Disunity at Corinth 2; 5c. Disunity at Corinth 3

Chapter 6 is entitled, "How Not to Have Sex," and deals with Corinthian issues like sleeping with one's step-mother, prostitutes, homosexual sex, and divorce. I submitted it as my sample chapter, not sure if I blogged any of it. May have to rewrite it now that I have adopted a certain style. In any case, it's on to chapter 7, "Disagreement and Disorder," which now looks at the remaining issues in 1 Corinthians, food sacrificed to idols and issues in Corinthian worship. 1 Corinthians 15 is mentioned in chapter 4.

I might also mention that my weekly post on the seminary Dean's blog is up as well.
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We first met the Corinthian church in chapter 5, where we saw that disunity was the fundamental problem in the community. This disunity showed itself in various factions in the church that thought they were superior to the others. Then in the last chapter, we saw some of the problems the church had in relation to sexual matters. Some Gentile believers had apparently not changed their lifestyles in relation to visiting prostitutes, and one had gone so far as to sleep with his step-mother. Meanwhile, it is possible that some women in the congregation were trying to use Christianity as an excuse to stop having sex with their husbands, perhaps even to divorce them.

In this chapter we want to look at the specific issues the Corinthians were divided over. These largely fall into two categories: 1) questions over whether the Corinthians should eat meat that had been sacrificed at nearby temples to other gods and 2) matters of Corinthian worship. The second--problems in worship--seemed especially to bring out the divisions of the church, whether it be at the Lord's Supper, in how the wives dressed, or in their exercise of charismatic gifts.

Disputable Matters
At first glance, the question of whether you should eat meat sacrificed to a pagan god does not seem immediately relevant to us today. There aren't a lot of pagan temples around these days, and I for one have never even seen an animal sacrifice before. In that sense, we might be tempted to consign 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 to those sections of the Bible that do not seem to relate so directly to our world today.

But if we step back, we can actually see in these chapters, indeed all of 1 Corinthians 8-10, some of the most relevant material in the New Testament to today. The reason is that these chapters deal with what we might call "disputable matters," issues over which Christians disagree. Christians--at least those in continuity with other Christians who have lived throughout the last two thousand years--agree on a lot of things. We agree on who Christ is, on the basic nature and power of God. We agree that Jesus rose from the dead and will come again. We agree that there will be a day of justice yet to come for the living and the dead. We agree it is important to live a life befitting God, one that is based on love for one's enemy and neighbor, that murder, adultery, and all such actions are not acceptable to God.

But we have our own thoughts on countless additional issues, which some call "adiaphora," issues that are not part of the core Christian faith but that Christians disagree over. The problem is, of course, is that Christians have historically sequestered themselves into their own little corners and vastly expanded the core faith. This is especially the case in America, where our democratic and entrepeneurial spirit has led to a proliferation of denominations to the tune of tens of thousands. Inevitably, we come to see the ideas of our little group as those of God himself, which would not be too bad in itself if we didn't go on to think of other Christians in other groups as half-Christians and Samaritans.

And it is here that the debates at Corinth over food sacrificed at pagan temples is potentially some of the most important teaching in the New Testament on how to get along in the church when we disagree over things. As background, there were almost as many temples in the ancient world as there are churches in a typical American city. And all of them involved animal sacrifices. Indeed, ancient religion was not about how to live, how to treat one another. That was the kind of thing philosophers did. It wasn't even about having a happy afterlife, by and large. Most of the ancients probably didn't really believe in much of a personal afterlife. [1]Ancient religion was about keeping the gods happy so that they didn't spew volcanic ash all over you or cause your boat to capsize at sea.

So they sacrificed to the gods--lots and lots! Such sacrifices were not like the "whole burnt offerings" of the Jews where the entire animal was consumed. Even in the case of the Jews, it was only one kind of sacrifice. Sacrifices only burned off the fat to the god. The meat itself was then shared by the priests' families and the families of those who brought the sacrifice. Going to offer sacrifices could thus also be something like going out to eat at a restaurant, except that you provided the meat. Some of the temples at Corinth even had rooms attached where you could eat. [2]

Meat itself was the food of the rich. It would not have been hard in most ancient cities to be a vegetarian for most people, simply because the vast majority did not have meat except on special occasions. At the same time, a religious festival might involve so much sacrificing that a poor person might have an opportunity to eat meat. Yet even on a normal day, there might be enough animals sacrificed for some of the meat to end up in the marketplace.

It is here that the issue of conscience came into play. It was more than possible that any meat you might find in the public marketplace would have come from a nearby temple. This is food that had been dedicated to a pagan god. [3] A Jew in particular might immediately perceive a problem with the first commandment--"You shall have no other gods before me" (Exod. 20:3). Can a faithful Jew eat such meat and not thereby violate this central commandment?

As with so many issues of debate today, most Jews did not see this question as one that was debatable. Indeed, even the apostles of Jerusalem and James apparently did not see it as debatable. For them this was a core issue, central to Christian Jewish faith. [4] The Jerusalem letter of Acts 15:23-29 forbids Gentile believers in no uncertain terms from eating meat offered to idols. This issue may very well have been part of the argument between Peter and Paul at Antioch in Galatians 2:12, that Christian Jews could not eat with Gentile believers if they ate meat of uncertain origin. John the Revelator himself understood the risen Jesus to forbid blatant eating of meat that had been sacrificed to idols (Rev. 2:14).

However, it is possible that Apollos had not taken this approach in his teaching, although we have no way of knowing for sure. Most scholars believe that 1 Corinthians 8 gives us some of the slogans the Corinthians were using to justify not only eating meat sacrificed to idols but in fact to justify eating at those temples. They were saying things like, "no idol in the world really exists," "there is no God but one," and "all of us possess knowledge." They used that knowledge--that there really was no one home at the pagan temple--as a justification to eat at such temples boldly.

We can see their logic very clearly. I can eat boldly at a pagan temple because I know that its god does not really exist. Suffice it to say, this reasoning would not have gone over well in Jerusalem among the leaders of the Jerusalem church, nor among conservative Jews throughout the world. Indeed, it is probably this issue alone that stands behind Daniel and other Jews not eating meat in Daniel 1:8. And we can probably see in 1 Corinthians 8-10 a certain squeamishness even on Paul's part. It is one thing to eat meat in the marketplace, but actually to go and sit in a pagan temple?!

Paul thus, both tactfully and being consistent to basic principles, walks a fine line both here and in Romans 14-15 toward the issue, giving us a great model for how we can get along together today when we disagree but feel very strongly about certain issues. On the one hand, he does not deny any of the Corinthian slogans. Yes, it is true that idols are nothing. Certainly there is only one God... and for us who believe we might now add that there is only one Lord as well, Jesus Christ. [5]

And Paul does not wish to contradict the strength of their conviction, of their "knowledge." Scholars used to resonate a little too much with Paul's affirmation of the Corinthians' knowledge here and the "strong" conscience of the person in Romans 14-15. In the 1700s and 1800s, the move toward monotheism was understood as part of the evolution of civilization, thus it was all too easy to see this issue as one of "smart versus stupid," with Paul showing off his enlightenment.

So then when in 1 Corinthians 10:20 Paul indicates sacrifices at pagan temples are offered to demons, those same scholars accused Paul of inconsistency, of saying on the one hand that other gods do not exist in chapter 8, then affirming their existence in chapter 10. The problem of course is not with Paul, but with the biases of those interpreters. Paul is involved in a rhetorical enterprise here. He does not want to deny any of the fundamental principles of the Corinthians--or perhaps of Apollos. But he did associate pagan temples with evil spiritual powers.

His proposal is a compromise between the hard line position of Jerusalem and the "liberated" position of some Corinthians. First, it was simply a conflict of loyalties to go to a pagan temple. You are who you eat with and you cannot partake of both the table of demons and the table of Christ (1 Cor. 10:21). But meat in itself is neither clean nor unclean (Rom. 14:14; 1 Cor. 8:8)--a position with which the hard liners would almost certainly have disagreed. So what is important is not the meat itself, but what is going on in your head as you eat it.

Paul thus advocates a "don't ask; don't tell" policy. If you buy meat in the marketplace, if someone offers you food in a home, go ahead and eat it without asking where it came from. After all, everything belongs to God and so does that meat, regardless of where it came from. But if you find out it came from a nearby temple, do not eat it so that neither you nor those around you see your eating as a conflict of loyalty.

This incident potentially provides us with an incredibly helpful model for getting along with each other as Christians even though we disagree with one another. For one, we should accept the fact that we will disagree on various issues--even on issues we consider to be essential and core to Christian faith. That is to say, we will even disagree on which issues are actually disputable and which are not. The Jerusalem church did not likely agree with Paul's instructions to the Corinthians. For them, it was almost certainly essential to find out where meat had come from before eating it, leading some Jews scattered throughout the world to become vegetarians (Rom. 14:2).

When we look at issues like that today, it is not difficult to find similar issues. For some it is how you baptize. For others it is how you vote. Indeed, there are some who at least call themselves Christians who believe "monogamous" homosexual relationships are not incompatible with Christian faith. God of course knows what He requires despite our debates. Romans 14:22-23 give the final answer on Christian disagreements: "The faith that you have, have as your own conviction before God. Blessed are those who have no reason to condemn themselves because of what they approve. But those who have doubts are condemned if they eat, because they do not act from faith; for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin" (NRSV). In other words, one may or may not be correct on their convictions, but at the very least it is essential that a person act with conviction that they are being faithful to God.

Here is an essential point. We are not wrong to have convictions on what is core faith and what is not. But God is the final judge. It is not up to us to decide who will be in the kingdom and who will not. That is God's business. Christ commands us to love our enemies, so we must certainly love those who claim to be our brothers and sisters, even if we are not certain ourselves. And certainly the burden of proof is surely on those who stand outside historic Christian beliefs and practices, even if it is not to us that they must prove themselves.

Interestingly, Paul does not associate evil with things themselves--the food itself is neither clean nor unclean. This is a remarkable position for a faithful Jew, since Leviticus clearly considers some foods unclean. Not just mainstream Jews, but no doubt many Christian Jews themselves would have disagreed with Mark's interpretation of Jesus words in Mark 7:19--that Jesus was implying that all foods were now clean. [6] And despite Peter's vision in Acts 10, we find him wrestling with such issues years later in Galatians 2.

Paul takes what we might call a "nominalist" position, one that fits well with current trends in sociology and philosophy. The meaning and significance of an act or of language itself is inextricably linked with the context. The food itself is morally neutral. It is the context of eating, or what eaters are thinking while they eat, that makes something good or evil.

We can no doubt debate this point. Although Paul takes this position on food, he might not have on some other issues. He was not, after all, presenting a systematic philosophy or theology. His thinking itself related intimately to the situations and contexts he was addressing. Many of the conflicts between Christian groups over doctrine and practice have in fact resulted from our systematizations of Paul's thought.

The key issue for the Corinthians and Romans for Paul was consideration of other brothers and sisters in Christ. When Paul calls some "strong" and some "weak," it is not entirely clear that he is doing anything but stroking the egos of those who are causing dissension and strife in these communities. He is very tactfully, as he does so often, beginning with where they are and leading them to the right course of action by way of skillful rhetoric. The fundamental principle is not to put any obstacle in the path of one's fellow believer that might lead them into sin or cause them to stumble. Here as elsewhere in Paul's writings, the principle is to think of others before thinking of your own self-seeking desires.

It is thus no coincidence that Paul sandwiches 1 Corinthians 9 in the middle of his discussion of meat. In this chapter, Paul reinforces what he is asking the Corinthians to do by reminding them of how he himself surrendered his rights to their support and instead supported himself. He did not accept their patronage, as other traveling teachers like Apollos no doubt did. [7] Instead, he surrendered his rights for the betterment of the community. In like manner, he urges the Corinthians not to think of themselves or what they have coming to them, but to be willing to surrender their freedoms when those freedoms might harm another member of the community.

To be sure, there are plenty of issues where we might potentially anger someone else, but on which we are not in any danger of harming their faith. Paul is not telling us to do or not to do something because we might anger or offend someone else. We are talking about really harming someone else's faith here. And on that point, Paul is quite clear. We should not exploit our "rights" in such a way that we hurt others.

In the end, Paul seems to suspect that some of the Corinthians are not really acting from faith in the first place. At the beginning of 1 Corinthians 10, he tells of how the Israelites who left Egypt went on to worship other gods in the wilderness. They didn't make it, he eerily announces. So also he indicates at the end of chapter 9 that his place in the kingdom is not assured if he does not remain faithful (9:24-27). And the issue he has been discussing is his willingness to put the gospel first over his own personal interests.

Our take away is thus that we are to love our fellow believer, even when they disagree with us. Love and unity is far more important than agreement on every issue of belief and practice. Even when we feel as strongly as the Jerusalem church did about meat sacrificed to idols, we need to let God, in the end, make the final decision. After all, He will anyway.

[1] If we have our R.I.P. ("Rest in Peace" or "Requiescat in pace"), a common ancient tombstone was "I was not. I was. I am not. I care not."

[2] E.g., the Temple of Asclepius, the god of healing.

[3] Scholars debate whether we should translate the Greek word Paul uses as "food offered to an idol," "food sacrificed to an idol," or "meat sacrificed to an idol." Although the debate surely would cover any food offered to a pagan god, it seems pretty clear that the fundamental point at issue is meat that had been sacrificed (e.g., 1 Cor. 8:12).

[4] Remembering that they would not have distinguished Christian faith from Jewish faith at this time.

[5] "Lord" was a term that could be used of pagan gods as well. In the late first century (AD90s), the Roman emperor Domitian put the phrase "Lord and God" on his coins.

[6] Interestingly, assuming that Matthew used Mark as we now have it (the majority position of scholars), Matthew chose not to keep this parenthetical comment, possibly implying that he and his audience at least had significant doubts whether all foods were clean for Jewish Christians (Matthew's audience). Mark's audience, on the other hand, was likely made up of Gentile Christians.

[7] He may have had other motivations for avoiding such patronage. Ancient patronage came with informal expectations, with "strings attached." Paul therefore may have avoided such patronage so that he could freely exercise authority over his churches. The classic work here, and one that we include in the fifty or so books one should read to master Paul, is Bengt Holmberg's Paul and Power: The Structure of Authority in the Primitive Church as Reflected in the Pauline Epistles (*: Wipf & Stock, 2004 [1980]).

5c. Disunity at Corinth 3

And now to finish the first draft of chapter 5: "Disunity at Corinth." Previous drafts in this series include:

1a. Born at a Time and Place 1; 1b. Born at a Time and Place 2
2a. A Change in Life Direction; 2b A Change in Life Direction 2; 2c A Change in Life Direction 3
3a. The Unknown Years 1; 3b. The Unknown Years 2; 3c. The Unknown Years 3
4a. Life Beyond Death; 4b. Life Beyond Death; 4c. Life Beyond Death; 4d Life Beyond Death
5a. Disunity at Corinth; 5b. Disunity at Corinth 2
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Reflections
1 Corinthians is one of those books whose instructions often jump right off the page of the Bible and into our lives. Not all of the biblical books are this way. They were, after all, not written directly to us in their original settings but to a myriad of different ancient contexts. True, it was the same God speaking to them as to us, and so as Christians we believe that all these books are for us even though they were not originally to us. Indeed, God can meet us in these words even when we have no sense of their original meaning at all. At the same time, it is hard to deny that the words of 1 Corinthians leap much more quickly from the ancient world to today than those of Leviticus, Nahum, or Jude.

The fundamental problem of the Corinthian church was disunity, driven by powerful and fundamental human desires like sex, power, and pride. We will discuss the various challenges at Corinth relating to sex in the next chapter. Then in chapter 7 we will look at some of the specific issues on which they were divided, like what they should eat and how they should worship. An underlying factionalism lay behind these debates, an underlying dynamic of one group thinking they were better than another. And along with this "party spirit," this "us versus them" mentality, was a thirst for control and power on the part of some. It is into this mix that Paul himself asserted his authority as an apostle, with some submitting and others obviously not.

One of the reasons 1 Corinthians seems so directly relevant to the church today is the fact that division and factional pride remains a perennial problem in congregations across the world. Indeed, one of the key features of American Christianity is the "church split," where one part of a congregation gets disgruntled with another part and then leaves with a bunch of people because they do not have enough power to get their way. Even in congregations that stay together, someone probably will immediately spring to mind at the words, "church boss." Who is the person or family you need to get on your side if you want to do anything in your church--even if you are the pastor?! Humans are apparently herd animals and prone to "tribalism" of a negative sort. The church is far from immune.

The lessons of 1 Corinthians, so simple, yet apparently so hard to sink in, leap off the page to us today. Some believers may have more authority than others in the church, but no one has greater status than any other. All the parts of the body of Christ should be equally valued, even if we all have different roles to play. At God's table, it does not matter whether you are the employer or employee (slave or free), whether you are male or female, whether you are the "tribe" in power or the one with less earthly status (Jew or Gentile). [1] God wants to give everyone the same menu at His table.

Everyone is expendable. A church whose health is tied to a single person is not a healthy church nor is that person a good leader. Churches often fall into hero worship. One sign of an unhealthy church is when its attendance drops off dramatically after a particular pastor or leader leaves. Such leaders sometimes mistake their followings for importance or God's favoritism. Their gifts are indeed God's grace toward them, but God does not play favorites. In God's eyes, their gifts do not increase their status one bit, since they did nothing to get those God-given gifts in the first place! The humble soul who is truly thankful for the one little thing God has enabled them to do is more worthy than a thousand powerful leaders of great influence who think they are special in God's eyes for abilities that they did nothing to earn.

The conflict between followers of a previous pastor and a new one will be familiar to many church goers. Of course in the case of the Corinthians, Apollos had already left too, and of course Paul was an apostle. At the time, however, Paul's apostleship and authority was not nearly as obvious as it is to us in hindsight. Paul needed the Spirit to convince his churches of his authority then just as we need the Spirit today. Or viewed from our human perspective, Paul had to demonstrate the validity of his call and spiritual authority then just as we have to today.

Some of the Corinthians thought they were more spiritual than others even though they were far from it, another experience we have in common with the ancients. Today we would rarely say such a thing to others in the church. We know we are not supposed to say we are more spiritual than others. [2] But there are plenty in the church who think they are better than others when they are plainly not.

I come from a Christian tradition that has rightly emphasized the importance of Christ-like living and real life transformation. But we went through a period in our history where external appearance sometimes got confused with real heart change. Whether a person dressed a certain way or wore certain kinds of rings was mistaken for love, joy, peace, and the true fruits of the Spirit. How ironic to hear someone looking down at someone else as being unspiritual because they had a certain kind of ring! The very comment betrayed a much more sinister unspirituality in the heart of the speaker.

Again, there are different roles to be played in the church and in the world, but for Christians they should not be connected to whether we are a "Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female" (Gal. 3:28). Most Christians today are comfortable with the first two comments, although some think we should distinguish differing roles in the church and the home based on gender. We will discuss God's ideal on this issue when we get to chapter 7. [3]

When we apply to today the distinctions between slave and free, between Jew and Greek, we find principles most of us might agree with, that is, until we get down to specifics. We might agree that it should make no difference whether a Christian is British or American. But we might get a little more uncomfortable, maybe even irritated, if we are saying a Mexican, Palestinian, or Haitian Christian was just as precious in God's sight as the nice middle-class US born citizens on our church boards. And of course Christians regularly indulge in not a little denominational condescension.

The New Testament does imply that there are levels of reward in the kingdom (e.g., 1 Cor. 3:10-15; 2 Cor. 5:10; Rom. 2:6-10). But these rewards are not based on our abilities or talents, nor are they based on our innate goodness. They are based on the degree to which we submit ourselves to God's power, enabling us to become Christ-like in our thoughts and lives. Needless to say, thinking ourselves more spiritual or more important to God than others is hardly something God will reward.

Division is thus one of the fundamental problems that 1 Corinthians addresses and not only 1 Corinthians, but the New Testament as a whole. And it remains just as much a problem today as it was two thousand years ago. Division is trickier than adultery or murder, not least because we often have a way of telling ourselves we are divided over principles. "I am against you because you are wrong on how to live," or "I am against you because your understanding is wrong." Sometimes we are probably right. Just as often it is probably we who are wrong, simply given the averages, and it is we who are mistaken.

No matter what, it seems clear that we must love not only our enemies, but our Christian brothers and sisters as well. Perhaps on a rare occasion, groups within a congregation might agree to disagree and part company, but we imagine the vast majority of church splits have not fallen into this category. And those who are thinking of leaving their mainstream denomination should be mindful of what their absence will facilitate among those who remain, even if their leadership does seem to have strayed .

[1] The question of "Jew and Greek" does not map exactly to the question of ethnicity or "tribe." After all, the Jews actually were God's chosen people in a way that no other nation was. But despite their place of honor in the kingdom, Paul does deny them any greater ultimate value, status, or righteousness in the kingdom. And in that sense, the question of ethnicity does relate.

[2] Of course some people in the church are more Christ-like than others, and there is a better than average chance that most people in the church could tell you which is which. We are not supposed to stay just as sinful in our behavior after God forgives us as we were before, and there are concrete observations that, as in Paul's day, immediately indicate that a person is certainly not spiritual. But a truly spiritual person would not trumpet or boast about being spiritual--that would be an indication that a person in fact was not.

[3] And certainly in the second volume of this book when we look at the Prison and Pastoral Epistles. In general, we argue that while some of the later books of the New Testament do follow the practices of the day in assigning different roles in the home based on gender, this is not the trajectory of God's kingdom. It does not make sense for us to maintain the roles indicative of a fallen world when it is possible for us to move closer to the kingdom. Western culture has already moved in this direction in relation to slavery, a practice the New Testament never indicates should be done away.