[Dialogue] 12/10/09, Spong: The Origins of the New Testament, Part VIII: The Corinthian Letters

Thu Dec 10 15:24:16 CST 2009

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Thursday December 10, 2009 

The Origins of the New Testament
Part VIII: The Corinthian Letters

Paul was a complicated mixture of many things. He was a missionary who traveled hundreds of miles by foot and by boat to tell his story. He was, as we noted last week when examining the letter to the Galatians, an intense zealot who would fight vigorously to defend his understanding of the gospel. He was a theologian who sought to put his experience of God into rational thought forms so that they could be passed on. Perhaps above all things, however, Paul was a pastor who sought to smooth out disputes, confront evil and ease hurt feelings in the congregations that he founded and served. When we examine his correspondence with the church in Corinth, it is this pastoral side that dominates. Even when he discusses issues like the resurrection, his discussion is pastorally oriented as he seeks to ease in the people of the Corinthian church their anxiety connected with mortality.
The first thing to note about the two Corinthian letters is that they appear to be composites of a more extensive correspondence that perhaps reached a total of four or even five Pauline letters. By a careful analysis of our two remaining epistles to the Corinthians, scholars have come to the conclusion that these "lost letters," to which Paul actually refers in the epistles that we do have, have been included, at least in part, in what we call II Corinthians. These scholars point to such passages as II Cor.6:1-7:1, II Cor.10-13 and even in the extraneous verses in Cor.11:32-33 that appear to be inserts into the texts that actually break the flow of Paul's argument. Despite this strange construction, however, scholars find no evidence to suggest that all of II Corinthians is the authentic work of Paul.
We need to remember that preserving letters in the first century was an inexact and costly procedure of hand copying, and that no one had yet assigned the status of "Holy Scripture" to the writings of Paul. Maybe that is why they preserved only what they believed was most important.
When we turn to the content of these two Corinthian epistles themselves, we find Paul, the pastor, dealing with human beings who are acting like human beings. Paul knows what every pastor knows, namely, that congregations are not made up of angels. At the same time congregations learn very quickly that ordination does not bestow perfection on their ordained leader. Pastoral care is the sensitive attempt to bring wholeness out of an exchange between human passion and human insecurity. It is a delicately nuanced balancing act, the job of which is to enhance the humanity of all who are involved. If we need a text to describe the goal of all pastoral activity, it would be the Fourth Gospel's definition of Jesus' purpose: "I have come," John's Jesus says, "that they might have life and have it abundantly." That is finally both the mission of the Christian Church and the hoped-for outcome in every pastoral situation. Abundant life, please note, does not always mean happiness or even the easing of pain. Many people seek wholeness in quite destructive ways, with addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex and even success being just a few of them. Sometimes abundant life becomes possible only in confrontation and brokenness. Real pastoral care is not about making it feel good; it is about helping wholeness to be created. Paul understood that and every pastor must learn it sooner or later. Wholeness is seen in the freedom to be, in the ability to escape the survival mentality that inevitably locks us into self-centeredness. Wholeness is found in the maturity of being able to live for another by giving our love away. It will be through the lens of that understanding of pastoral care that I will seek to explore the issues found in the epistles to the Corinthians.
The Corinthian congregation appears to have had more than its share of pastoral needs and even to have exasperated Paul on more than one occasion. Some of the issues to which he refers are party lines and divisions among the people. Some claimed loyalty to Paul, some to Apollos and still others to Peter. Beyond that their rowdy behavior had begun to distort the worship of the people. In that early part of Christian history the Eucharist was begun with a community meal called "The Agape Feast." The Corinthians, however, had turned this common meal into a gluttonous orgy that left some of the poor hungry. Then they had turned the Eucharistic wine into an occasion of public drunkenness. Paul obviously needed to speak to this behavior.
There was also a dispute in the congregation about the meat served at this "Agape Feast." It had been bought at a local butcher shop where, in this pagan society, it had been slaughtered in ceremonial offerings to the idols of the people. Could Christians eat meat that had been offered to idols? Some Corinthian followers of Jesus were offended by this idea. Still others had become enamored with Paul's message of salvation as the ultimate expression of God's grace and the conviction that this grace, so abundantly and freely given, was not dependent on their personal behavior. This meant that they had now become what the church came to call "anti-nomianism," that is, some were suggesting that the more they sinned, the more God's grace abounded. This stance appeared to render any sense of personal ethical responsibility completely meaningless. Still others seemed to have a hierarchy of value associated with certain activities of the synagogue. Prophets who shared their prophetic words with the congregation were deemed to be of less value than those who claimed the gift of "glossolalia" or "speaking in tongues," that is, the ability to utter words that only God could understand. This was, they seemed to think, the highest gift of all and thus the most to be honored.
If this were not enough for one pastor to deal with, there was also a gender dispute going on. Some Corinthian women seemed to take seriously Paul's words, in his earlier letter to the Galatians, that "in Christ there is neither male nor female, but all are one." This new freedom and equality for women obviously challenged the patriarchal value system of that ancient world. Some women, quite clearly, pushed these boundaries well beyond even Paul's comfort level. No one, not even Paul, escapes his or her cultural prejudices completely. The extent of this boundary pushing becomes obvious when Paul asserts his threatened male authority by saying, "I forbid a woman to have authority over a man!" Since no one forbids what has never happened, these women were overtly claiming authority over men in the life of the church.
While Paul's prejudiced humanity is in full display in this last conflict, on most of the others he rises to the pastoral challenge. Paul begins by telling them that Christ alone is their foundation and that any division of loyalties among the followers of various leaders was based on the inability to understand that these leaders were simply "servants through which you believed — I planted, Apollos watered, but only God gave the increase." In regard to the Eucharist, Paul upbraids the members of this congregation for eating and drinking in such a way that some are hungry and some are drunk. He urges them to eat and drink in their own homes and to recognize that the act of breaking bread and drinking wine in the Eucharistic feast is "a participation in the body of Christ" and what his life of love and sacrifice was all about. The Eucharist, he proclaims, is a liturgical way in which they participate in Christ's wholeness.
Paul takes anti-nomianism on directly, reminding them of their mutual responsibility to one another. He suggests that immorality, at its heart, was to treat another human being as a thing to be used rather than as a person to be loved. He defuses the debate about meat offered to idols by saying that since idols are nothing, meat offered to idols is meat offered to nothing, so there is no prohibition as to its use. He continues, however, by stating that this stance misses the point of this dispute. "All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful but not all things build up." It was a subtle, but powerful, distinction. The evil in this debate, he continues, is the lack of sensitivity on the part of some to the feelings of others. Candy is not evil, but to offer candy to one battling with obesity is not loving. It does not build up the person or fulfill the goal of Christ.
Finally, Paul gets to the debate on spiritual gifts. There is no hierarchy of gifts, he argues, for all gifts are in the service of the same spirit and are expressions of the same God who inspires us all. The gifts of the people offered in worship are necessary to the building up of all, he suggests. Every gift is for the benefit of the whole community that he calls the body of Christ. Following that analogy of the body, he moves on to suggest that their bickering as to whose gift is the most important makes as much sense as a debate between the eye, the ear, the hand and the foot as to which part of the body has the higher value. 
This sets the stage for Paul's writing of what is surely the most beautiful, the most memorable and the most quoted passage in the entire Pauline corpus. After describing the body in which the various organ and parts work together for the good of the whole, Paul says, "I will show you a more excellent way." Then he begins his famous ode to love. "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal." He continues by defining love as patient, kind, not boastful or jealous and never ending. He recognized that all human knowledge is partial. No one sees God face to face. We all see "through a glass darkly." He urges the Corinthians to put away childish things and to grow up. Finally, he concludes "that faith, hope and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love." It is Paul at his insightful best.

– John Shelby Spong 

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

John Ford, via the Internet, writes:
I had to smile when reading your recent newsletter in which you suggest that you might be becoming a mystic. I have always read you as a mystic.
God's peace be with you. 

Dear John,
I appreciate your words and even your insight. I don't believe one can volunteer to be a mystic, a prophet, a seer, an intellectual or a genius. Those are qualities attributed to you by others sometime well after your earthly pilgrimage is complete. It is meaningful, however, when another attributes one of those titles to you — so thank you.
Mysticism is to me primarily coming to terms with the limitations of words. That seems to be harder to do in religious circles than anywhere else. Words are always symbols or pointers. They are not the truth or the essence they seek to describe. They are always human, always time bound and always time warped. When any human experience is reduced to words, it is always distorted by time, place, one's level of knowledge, one's time in history and one's culturally conditioned language Nowhere is that more clear than when we try to frame who or what God is in the vehicle of human words. A horse cannot communicate to another horse what it means to be a human being, for a horse cannot escape its horse nature. A human being can never tell another human being what it means to be God, because human beings can never escape the limits of our human nature. Perhaps that is why all human images of God look very much like a great big human being.
The deeper I experience the reality and presence of God, the less my words seem like adequate vehicles to express that truth. Then words cease and one enters the experience of wordless wonder. Perhaps that is the realization of the mystic.

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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