Category: Biblical Studies

If Chapter 13, the “love chapter,” is one of the greatest texts in the New Testament, Chapter 15, the “resurrection chapter,” is one of the most theologically weighty.

The Gospel

Paul first reminds the Corinthians of the “good news” — the euangelion, the gospel — he proclaimed to them and that they received. Paul says the gospel he passes on is the same one he received. Notice that “the gospel,” verses 3-7, is the story of Christ’s death “for our sins” and of his resurrection, all “according to the scriptures.” “The gospel” is not a theory of the atonement — of how exactly Christ’s death is “for” our sins. Nor is “the gospel” a theory of the mechanics of conversion. Of course, “the gospel” invites contemplation of theories of atonement, and even more, the gospel invites our grateful response of faith. But “the gospel” itself is simply the story of Christ according to the scriptures.

When Paul uses the phrase “according to the scriptures” here he is not referring to the New Testament, which had not yet been compiled, and certainly not to his own letters, which he probably did not think of as “scripture.” He was referring to the Hebrew Scriptures. For Paul, then, the story of Christ was already contained in the Hebrew Scriptures. But the Hebrew Scriptures, read within their own original frame of reference, do not clearly predict the “Christ” Paul describes, at least not when read before Christ Jesus’ advent. Jesus himself, and the church that bore witness to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, saw the narratives and prophetic and wisdom texts of the Hebrew Scriptures with fresh eyes in light of their experience. Jesus Christ is the interpretive principle. Jesus Christ is the gospel.

What Paul received, and what he passes on, is a witness to the event of Jesus Christ. Paul says he “proclaimed” (euēngelisamēn) the gospel (euangelion) and the “word” (logō) (15:1), that the story of Christ’s resurrection is “proclaimed” (kēryssetai) and is a form of “proclamation” (kērygma) (15:12, 14), and that Paul and the other Apostles’ “testify” or bear witness (martureó) (15:15) to the resurrection. This constellation of terms, all collected in one place, demonstrates that the gospel Paul passes along is a well-known, foundational narrative that runs from the first Apostles through Paul to the Corinthians — and to us (15:11).

The Resurrection

Despite the central narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection, it seems some in the Corinthian congregation did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. (15:12.) Perhaps some of these Corinthians were Jewish Christians who believed in a general resurrection of the dead at the end of history, as did the Pharisees and other Second Temple Jewish groups, but questioned why the Christ, the Messiah, would rise first.

It seems, though, that the people Paul addresses here do not think the dead can rise at all. Perhaps, then, some of these Corinthians were gentile skeptics about the possibility of a bodily resurrection, like those Paul encountered in Athens (see Acts 17:32). The Greek philosopher Plato believed in the immortality of the soul (or at least, of parts of the soul), and thought the soul was subsequently reborn in different bodies. Aristotle believed in the soul but it is not clear that he though the soul was immortal. Greek skeptics did not believe in the immortality of the soul at all. None of the Greek philosophers or their Roman heirs believed in the resurrection of the body.

Paul states that Christ is raised from the dead, “the first fruits (aparché) of those who have died.” And the resurrection of Christ is central to the gospel, because “death” (thanatos) is the consequence of sin. (15:21-22). The gospel is good news because it changes the reality of death.

In verses 21-22, Paul draws a parallel between Christ and Adam. Adam, a human being, introduced sin and death; Christ, a human being, introduced resurrection. Adam was the firstfruits of death; Christ is the firstfruits of resurrection. We should not press this metaphor into a theology of “original sin,” which is not really present here or elsewhere in Paul, and we certainly shouldn’t take this is a some kind of modern “scientific” statement about human origins. The point is that humanity, at its root, from its deepest origins as humanity, embraces sin and death. Having been given the gift of our created being, we choose to de-create ourselves. But Christ, the true Adam, re-creates us, through the power of his resurrection, which defeats death.

Notice that “death” here is personified as one of the powers. The resurrection of Christ is an apocalyptic event that inaugurates the end of present age, which culminates when Christ subjugates all of God’s enemies — and “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (15:26.) At the end of history, everything, including the Son Paul says, will be subject to God the Father, “so that God may be all in all.” (As we have discussed before, there are Trinitarian themes in Paul’s thought but he did not have a worked-out theology of the Trinity. This statement about Christ being subject to the Father by later standards would be considered subordinationist.)

In verses 25 and 27 Paul alludes to some of the “scriptures” he mentioned earlier. In verse 25, the reference is to Psalm 10, which says:

The Lord says to my lord:
“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”
The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, saying,
“Rule in the midst of your enemies!”
Your troops will be willing
on your day of battle.
Arrayed in holy splendor,
your young men will come to you
like dew from the morning’s womb.
The Lord has sworn
and will not change his mind:
“You are a priest forever,
in the order of Melchizedek.”
The Lord is at your right hand;
he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.
He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead
and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.
He will drink from a brook along the way,
and so he will lift his head high.

The reference in Psalm 10 to Melchizedek brings forward an obscure figure from Genesis 14, the King of Salem, who blessed Abram (Abraham) after the battle of the Kings and thereby performed a priestly function — although he was not an heir of Abraham and there was as yet no nation of Israel and no Jewish Priesthood.

Melchizedek features in some of the eschatological texts of the Second Temple period. Jesus is compared to Melchizedek in Hebrews 7, also using quotations from Psalm 25. It seems, then, that in the Second Temple period, the notion of Melchizedek, or a Melchizedek-like figure, appearing or reappearing as a priestly figure who recalls the nation to purity, was a known motif, and that this motif was connected to Jesus in early Christianity.

In verse 27 the reference is to Psalm 8, which says:

Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
in the heavens.
Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You made him ruler over the works of your hands;
you put everything under his feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Notice that this Psalm echoes Genesis 1 and 2, in which humans are given charge over caring for creation. There is an echo of a connection here between Adam and Melchizedek, both as mystical figures who perform kingly and priestly functions — one at the beginning of creation and one at the beginning of the Hebrew people. For Paul, then, the resurrection of Christ is the fulfillment of the purposes of humanity and of the mission of Israel, culminating in the restoration of creation itself.

Starting in verse 35, Paul begins to respond to an objection from the skeptics: if the dead are raised, what kind of body do they possess? No one would want to be raised in a rotten corpse. Even more, although ancient people did not understand chemistry or microbiology the way we do, they knew that over time bodies decompose and are consumed by other creatures. If a person’s body is thrown into a river and consumed by fish, does the person become a fish in the resurrection? (A version of this very question was, in fact, answered in the Medieval period by Thomas Aquinas — so it remained a live question!)

Paul says the question is foolish because the present body is like a seed that becomes something greater. In verse 44, Paul says “it is sown a physical [natural] (sōma psychikon) body, it is raised a spiritual (sōma pneumatikon) body.” This leads some interpreters to suggest that Paul does not believe in a material, bodily resurrection, but rather moves the concept of the resurrection entirely to the spiritual realm. But there are several reasons why this is not what Paul is doing.

First, Paul is responding to some of the Corinthians who are skeptical of the resurrection of the body because of their Greek dualism. The skeptics might accept the immortality of the soul, but not the resurrection of the body. If Paul’s response is that the resurrection is spiritual and not bodily, he would be agreeing with the skeptics.

Second, the phrase sōma psychikon translated from the NRSV above as “physical body,” does not really contrast a “physical” body to a “non-physical” one. Paul quotes Genesis 2:7 in verse 45, because Adam is the example of the “physical” or “natural” body. In that text, in the Greek translation (the LXX) quoted by Paul, Adam became a psychēn zōsan — a “living being.” In the Hebrew the word is nephesh, sometimes translated “soul,” but meaning the vital center of life, personhood, passion, desire, and appetite. So Paul is not contrasting the “physical” with the “spiritual.” In both cases — the present sōma psychikon and the future sōma pneumatikon — Paul is referring to a kind of sōma, a body.

Third, Paul’s metaphor of the seed that produces wheat assumes a continuity between the present state and the future state. A wheat germ is not precisely the same thing as a mature wheat stalk, but there is a numerical continuity between the germ and the stalk: this germ, planted in the soil, produced this stalk. Of course, this is only a metaphor, so we shouldn’t press it too far, and Paul didn’t know anything about how a wheat germ becomes a wheat stalk at the molecular or genetic level. But the metaphor does tie into Paul’s overall discussion of how our present bodies relate to our bodies in the resurrection.

At the same time, Paul does say that our bodies in the resurrection will differ significantly from our present bodies. In Paul’s mind, the resurrection is not a zombie-fest of reanimated corpses. He does not attempt to explain how our resurrection bodies will differ, nor does he offer any details about their material constitution. It is something that will happen by God’s power “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” (15:52.)

The result, Paul says, is that Death no longer holds final power over us. In verses 54 and 55, Paul quotes a line from Isaiah 25 and another from Hosea 13. Isaiah 25:6-8 reads as follows:

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
the best of meats and the finest of wines.
On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
from all the earth.

Is. 25:6-8

And Hosea 13:14 says:

I will deliver this people from the power of the grave;
I will redeem them from death.
Where, O death, are your plagues?
Where, O grave, is your destruction?

By quoting these texts Paul again connects Christ’s resurrection to the eschatological hope of the prophetic literature in the Hebrew scriptures — a hope for a restored nation and a renewed creation.

Excursus on Universalism

What precisely is the scope of Paul’s eschatological vision of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15? The mainstream of Christian eschatology envisions a dual outcome: some, maybe only a few, go to Heaven, and some, maybe many, go to Hell. There are important scriptural reasons for this view, including a number of sayings of Jesus in the Gospels and the vision of judgment at the conclusion of the book of Revelation. But there have always been voices in the Christian tradition who imagined an outcome in which every person is eventually saved, a view called apokatastasis. Some, such as the great Third Century theologian Origen of Alexandria, were later censured by the institutional Church at least in part for these views, while others, such as the Church Father Gregory of Nyssa, were always held in high esteem.

Today, both in academic theology (evidenced, for example, in the work of Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart (That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale Univ. Press 2019)) and in popular writing (evidenced by Rob Bell’s Love Wins (HarperOne 2012)), there is a renewed interest, and often fierce argument, over the possibility of apokatastasis. Two verses in 1 Corinthians 15 are important to that debate. These are verse 22: “for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ”; and verse 28, which states that, in the end, God will be “all in all.”

There is no ambiguity about the words Paul uses in these verses: “all,” panta, literally means “all.” Here and elsewhere in Paul’s writings, there is a universal logic and universal language in his eschatological statements. At the same time, however, Paul repeatedly warns that not everyone will inherit the kingdom of God. (E.g., 1 Cor. 6:9-10.) And even in 1 Corinthians 15, there is a hint that some of the unrighteous dead need some help, in the cryptic reference to baptisms for the dead (15:29).

In his interesting and challenging book Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Eerdmans 2020), Duke Divinity School Professor Douglas Campbell suggests that, like many Second Temple period Jews, Paul probably believed in a resurrection only of the righteous. At the “Day of the Lord,” the last day, the righteous dead would be raised and the righteous living would be transformed. The unrighteous dead would be left dead, and the unrighteous living would be annihilated. Some Second Temple apocalyptic literature included a dual resurrection and a judgment of annihilation or exclusion (“Hell”) for the unrighteous living and dead, but Paul seems uninterested in that concept. There is no suggestion in Paul’s writing of an eternal dual outcome: what is left after the end is only God and God’s people.

At the same time, Campbell notes, the universalistic logic of of texts like 1 Corinthians 15 seems to stand in tension with Paul’s apparent assumption that only the righteous will be raised or transformed in the last day. The parallel between people “in Adam” and “in Christ” seems particularly powerful here. There can be no sense, in Paul’s logic, in which any human being is not naturally “in Adam,” and it appears likewise that there should be no sense in which any of humanity is not ultimately “in Christ.”

In my view, we press texts like 1 Corinthians 15 too far if we suggest they are dogmatic statements about apokatastasis. Paul is not writing systematic theology. When his focus is on Christ and the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection, his language is universal. When his focus is on the realities of human sin, his language warns of exclusion.

We do best to take the full Biblical narrative, in all its diversity, together. Sin is judged. We are warned of the possibility of exclusion from God’s kingdom — even by Jesus himself. These warnings for us must remain live. They must spur us to repentance and faith, and to prophetic and faithful witness in a world that seems to oppose God’s peaceable reign. And yet, while we see only through a glass darkly, we know Jesus himself is the interpretive principle. The logic and goal of creation is the resurrection of Jesus. Death is not the last word; death is destroyed. Love bears, believes, endures, and hopes all things. In the end, love remains, and God is all in all. Even God’s judgment, whatever it will be, is a judgment born of love.

Some Questions on this Section

• What do you understand as some of the implications of “the gospel” Paul describes at the start of this chapter?
• What does it mean to you that Jesus’ resurrection defeats “death” as a power or enemy?
• What is your eschatological vision — your hope for the future?

Concluding Remarks

In chapter 16, Paul offers some concluding personal remarks to the Corinthians. He returns to the theme of the collection he is taking for the church in Jerusalem. He promises a future visit, identifies Timothy as his emissary, and offers gratitude for a visit from Stephanas, Fortunatus and Achaicus, Greek converts who apparently were working among the various congregations in Greece. (Based on their names, Fortunatus and Achaicus — “Lucky” and “From Achaias” — were probably present or former slaves of Stephanas.) He also makes a kind of off-handed (passive aggressive?) reference to Apollos.

At the very end of the letter Paul appends his own hand-written greeting. Paul would have dictated the body of the letter to an amanuensis, a kind of professional scribe. This personal greeting in Paul’s own hand was akin to a personal note someone today might add to a typed official letter. We see in that short note the same parts of Paul’s personality we saw throughout the letter: a word of exclusion (anathema) on anyone who does not love the Lord, a common early Christian exclamation in Aramaic– maran atha — and a concluding word of grace and love.

Final Question:

• What thoughts, impressions, or feelings does our study of 1 Corinthians leave you with?

Introduction

In chapter 10 Paul continues the discussion of eating meat sacrificed to idols. This chapter can be a bit confusing because it seems in some ways to pull back from the more flexible approach to this problem in chapters 8 and 9. Remember, though, that this is a letter, not a philosophical treatise. Even though it’s a special form of correspondence, much more formal than a dashed-off note, it does sometimes contain streams of thought that meander, connect, and trail off in various places.

At the same time, we can also see an improvised principle in chapter 10 that ties things together: eating meat sacrificed to idols in the context of certain kinds of religious-cultic practices should be avoided, but eating meat purchased in the marketplace at a private meal is a matter of indifference, even if that meat had been previously sacrificed to an idol. The reticence about cultic practices is consistent with, and rooted in, Paul’s figural use of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jewish confession of one God. The freedom to eat any meat bought in the marketplace, however, was a radical break from Jewish practices. In this way, Paul connects the Corinthian church — and by extension, the church wherever both Jews and Gentiles meet together — to the story and heritage of Israel, while also acknowledging the new character of a community that incorporates the Gentiles.

“Our Ancestors” and Our Story

One of the most significant aspects of Paul’s ethical improvisation about meat sacrificed to idols is easy to miss. In 10:1, Paul refers to the Hebrews as “our ancestors.” For Paul and other Jews, this was of course core to their identity. Yet Paul is writing not only to Jews, but also to Gentiles in the church at Corinth. By identifying the Hebrews as the ancestors of everyone in the church, Paul plays on one of the central themes in the theology of all of his letters: Israel is the root and the Church is the branch. Between Jews and the ekkelesia of Christ, there is no fundamental division. Israel and the Church are one people.

This theme is more implicit than directly stated in 1 Corinthians. It is stated most plainly in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Romans 1-11 has often been misunderstood as a tract about the problem of individual sin and as a statement about God’s election of some individuals to salvation. Themes relating to individual sin and salvation are present in Romans 1-11, but that is not the main point of Paul’s argument there. In that text, Paul, a pious Jew, agonizes over why most of his fellow Jews have not recognized Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah. His conclusion is that God has allowed Israel’s heart to be hardened for a time so that the Gentiles could be incorporated into the community of God’s Kingdom. Paul’s arguments about election in Romans 1-11 are primarily about corporate election, and Paul’s ultimate conclusion is that, in a way that God has not yet fully revealed, Israel will come to recognize Jesus, so that — surprisingly — God’s eschatological Kingdom will include both the Jews and the Gentiles./1/

There are at least two important conclusions we can draw from Paul’s theological vision concerning Israel and the Church. The first is that Paul’s theology does not entail supercessionism — in fact, Paul’s theology entails exactly the opposite. “Supercessionism” is the notion that the Church replaces Israel in God’s economy of salvation. Paul would respond to such a claim with a stock phrase he often used: me genoito! No way! May it never be!

Unfortunately supercessionist theology has a long history in the Church, from the early church through the Reformation and into modern times. The Holocaust, including the complicity of much of the German church in the Holocaust, prompted a reappraisal of this tradition, including contemporary scholarship about the Jewishness of both Jesus and Paul. For Paul, the Gentile Church is grafted in as a branch onto the root of Israel. For Christians to persecute Jews is literally to shoot ourselves in the heart.

Of course, significant differences remain between the community of Israel that does not (yet) recognize Jesus and the Church, both Gentile and Jewish, that does acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Christ. We can’t pretend that difference doesn’t matter — and it definitely mattered for Paul. But as between these communities, this is an intra-family difference, not a fundamental division. And, from the perspective of Pauline theology, it is a difference that we in the Church should fully expect will one day be mutually overcome, joyfully and peaceably.

The second theme we can draw from Paul’s theological vision, which is explicit in 1 Corinthians 10, is that Israel’s story is our story. At the start of chapter 10, Paul draws on the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt as a figure of the Church’s current circumstances. This kind of figural reading of the Hebrew Scriptures is a common motif in Paul’s letters. (See Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press 1993.)) Theology is a form of narrative, and the stories of Israel provide the basic narrative themes through which the Church can identify itself and shape its corporate life.

You can see how closely, and idiosyncratically, Paul uses the exodus narrative in verse 4: “For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ.” Paul here refers to a story that is only partially present in the canonical sources of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy). The Jewish sages wondered how the children of Israel found water to drink when they spent forty years wandering in the desert after leaving Egypt and before entering the promised land. In Exodus 17:6, God provided water when Moses strikes a rock with his staff. The sages concluded that God had miraculously caused this rock to follow the people from place to place as they wandered. Paul picks up on that story and then embellishes it further by identifying the rock with Christ!

Paul’s identification of the wandering rock (or well) with Christ is not meant literally. Paul doesn’t suggest that the rock was an early incarnation of Christ. He does, however, suggest that in God’s provision for Israel Christ was already spiritually present and active in Israel’s story. The story of redemption unfolds in history but is already present before it is fully known.

Some Discussion Questions on this Section:

• Does it change your self-understanding as a Christian to know that Jews and Christians are really one people?
• What are some elements of the narrative of the exodus from Egypt that you think might be figures for our times? (One thought: this narrative was very important in black spirituality during slavery and is central to liberation theologies today.)

The Narrative Crisis: Idolatry

The arc of any compelling narrative involves a central crisis. A central crisis in the narrative of the Hebrew Scriptures is idolatry. The first commandment on the tables given by God to Moses is “you shall have no other gods before me” and the second, third, and fourth commandments relate to making idols, misusing God’s (YHWY) name, and keeping the sabbath. (Exodus 20:1-8; Deut. 5:6-16.) These commandments, often depicted as residing on the “first tablet” of the law, are the foundation for the commandments on the “second tablet” concerning murder, theft, false testimony, adultery, and coveting. (The fifth commandment to “honor your father and mother” has been viewed as a transitional commandment that links the first and second tablets.)

The foundation for all of Israel’s ethics therefore was the recognition that God alone was God. This foundation is reflected in the central Jewish prayer, the shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one.” (Deut. 6:4.) In Deuteronomy 6, the shema is followed by the basic commandment that precedes all the other detailed provisions of the law: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deut 6:5.) Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, from the exodus all the way through the exile, the Hebrews often fail to keep this central commanding principle and thereby lose God’s blessing and incur God’s judgment./2/

Paul alludes to one such infamous episode in verses 6-10 — the golden calf. (Exodus 32.) Instead of waiting patiently for Moses to return from the mountain with God’s instructions, the people, led by Moses’ brother Aaron, create an idol, a golden calf, and worship it. Exodus tells us that after building the idol, “they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.” (Exodus 32:6.) The fallout from this event was fierce: according to Exodus 32, Moses made the people drink water with bits of the ground up idol, and then, under Moses’ command, the Levites (the Priestly tribe) who had not worshiped the golden calf, killed 3,000 of the people (a civil war? Exodus 32:19-29.)

Paul connects this central theme in Israel’s story to the Corinthian church in relation to eating meat sacrificed to idols. In chapters 8 and 9, Paul focused on why the “stronger” members should refrain from eating idol meat if it would hurt the “weaker” members. In chapter 10, Paul asserts a prohibition against eating idol meat because to eat such meat is to practice idolatry.

But Paul has already agreed with the “stronger” members of the Corinthian church that the gods represented by the pagan idols are not real. If that is the case, and the “stronger” members in their wisdom know this, how can they be charged with idolatry? Paul warns them that even in their strength they will be tested. God will give them the strength to endure the testing, but they should not presume they are above the possibility of failure. (10:12-13.)

The test of idol meat, Paul says, is dangerous because the reality behind the pagan idols are not gods by “demons.” (10:20.) To participate in these rituals therefore is a particularly gross form of idolatry — one that twists what should be worship of God into worship of demons. The parallel is even more important because the form of worship is a meal. The meal of the demons in eating pagan idol meat is a horrible perversion of the meal of the Lord’s supper. (10:21.)

The reference to “demons” here is unsettling for modern readers. As we previously discussed concerning Paul’s reference to “satan” (5:5), Paul lived in a world in which there was no “secular” space. There were elaborate angeologies and demonologies in some of the Jewish Second Temple literature, but Paul does not get into that kind of detail here. He simply asserts that the pagan temple feasts are devoted to “demons.”

Paul then shifts gears from concerns about idolatry and demons to a more conciliatory mode. He returns to the basic principle of chapters 8 and 9: “do not seek your own advantage but that of the other.” (10:24.) He then gives permission to eat any meat purchased in the market, even at the home of an unbeliever, and even if the meat may have previously been sacrificed to an idol. The only admonition is to avoid eating if someone raises the questions whether the follower of Jesus should be eating such meat. (11:23-30.) Otherwise, the principle of conscience is that someone else’s conscience should not provide the measure of judgment.

The notions of “conscience” and “liberty” (or “freedom”) here are important in Paul’s thought, in earlier Greek philosophy, and in the history of Christian ethics. “Conscience” is synderesis and “freedom” is eleutheria. You shouldn’t think of synderesis merely as some kind of feeling. The concept is much broader. It entails the innate human capacity know the first principles of right action prior to discursive reasoning. That innate human capacity is not, at least for the Greek philosopher Aristotle and later for the Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas, just an abstract impression. Rather, it is a capacity to form habits of life that enable a person to perceive the right course of action. Eleutheria in ancient Greek thought was the personification of liberty, associated with the goddess Artemis. But the concept meant primarily the status of not being a slave. It was used in connection with Greek political philosophy of democracy to denote a citizen of the commonwealth. (See, e.g., Mogens Herman Hansen, Democratic Freedom and the Concept of Freedom in Plato and Aristotle, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 50:1-27 (2010)). This was not a libertarian concept of freedom, meaning merely the freedom to make one choice rather than another. It was a concept tied to membership in the commonweal — a freedom “for” as much as a freedom “from.”

Even with these qualifications about the concepts behind synderesis and eleutheria, this is a major concession to the “stronger” members, who also must have been among the wealthier classes if they were able to attend meals in homes at which meat was served. In fact, we could imagine that the person raising a concern might be a servant (slave) who was also part of the ekklesia and who was horrified that another, wealthier member of the ekklesia was eating this food. Alternatively, or in addition, we can imagine the Jewish members of the ekklesia objecting — for them, eating meat from the market that was sacrificed to an idol was not kosher and was as much a participation in idolatry as participating in a pagan temple feast. For the Jewish members, the Torah gave commands on these points that could not be qualified by appeals to synderesis and eleutheria./3/

Paul concludes this section with a summary principle: “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.” (10:31.) This principle entails giving no offense to anyone and always seeking the welfare of others — in imitation of Paul, but even more basically, in imitation of Christ. (10:22 – 11:1.)

In light of this broader principle as it relates to the question of idolatry and conscience, it could be helpful to remember that the temple feasts were public or semi-public events that connected to the Roman elites’ understanding of what held their culture together and gave their place in society legitimacy. Whatever exactly Paul had in mind by his reference to “demons,” throughout his letters he pictures the “powers” of this world in contrast to the Kingdom of God. For a follower of Jesus, a worshiper of the God of Israel, to partake in a public temple feast, was to engage in performative rituals that gave legitimacy to a system of powers that opposed the peace and justice of the Kingdom of God. A meal in a private home, however, was simply an act of friendship. This was what Jesus himself did — he ate with “sinners.” Participating in a public ritual that stands against God’s Kingdom dishonors God and is idolatrous; participating in a private friendly meal enacts God’s Kingdom and glorifies God. That, at least, seems to be what Paul had in mind.

Some Discussion Questions on this Section:

• We return to the question of the “powers” and idolatry: where do you see the “powers” actively tempting us to idolatry today? What would it mean for us to emphasize the problem of “idolatry” to the same degree as the Hebrew Scriptures, and as Paul does here?
• 1 Cor. 10:13 is a famous text: “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” How have you experienced “testing?”
• 1 Cor. 10:31 is also famous text, often seen on posters and the like: “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.” What does it mean for you to “do everything for the glory of God?”
• How do you see the concepts of “conscience” (synderesis) and “freedom” (eleutheria) in Christian ethics?
• In his famous treatise “The Freedom of a Christian,” Martin Luther said “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” How does this statement of Luther’s sit with you?

Notes

/1/ An important point of clarification here: “Israel” means the ethnic-cultural-religious-political community that can be identified as heirs of God’s covenants in the Hebrew Scriptures with Moses, Abraham, and David. From the time of the early church through today, this means the disapora of Rabbinic Judaism in all of its forms. It does not mean the modern nation-state of Israel. Whatever other views one might hold about the modern nation-state of Israel, the “Left Behind” type of Zionist theology that identifies the modern nation-state of Israel with Biblical “prophecy” is bad Biblical exegesis and bad theology.

/2/ From a historical-critical perspective, these strong statements about idolatry and the oneness of God likely were drawn out and emphasized within the canonical texts of the Hebrew Scriptures as they took their final shape during the Babylonian Exile. Worship among the early Hebrews might always have been more syncretistic than the commandments suggest. In various places even in the canonical texts, God (YHWY) does not always seem to be depicted as the only “god.”

/3/ We should not, however, imagine that pious Jews viewed the Torah without any flexibility at all. The Rabbis engaged in extensive debates that provided glosses on the Torah and made distinctions based on specific cases. These debates formed the mishnah, or oral law, which was later redacted and incorporated into the Talmud.