Saint Paul And The Church At Corinth

Have you struggled with understanding the Epistles to the Corinthians? I surely have, and 2 Corinthins seems so fragmented at times it’s hard to make sense of it.

I don’t know about you, but by and large I find 1 and 2 Corinthians a hard read. Some great quotes can be found in these Epistles, but it can be hard to understand the flow and purpose of the letters as a whole.

In 1978 I gave my father the book “Paul ” by Gunther Bornkamm, and I’ve just started reading it. (!)  At last the Letters to the Church at Corinth are beginning to make sense, and it’s wonderful to have an understanding of the events that gave rise to the flow of Paul’s thoughts as expressed in the two Epistles.

Bornkamm explains that the problem with Corinth arose because the Church there was under threat from certain members who regarded themselves as “spirit-filled”. These people were putting their own interpretations on the doctrines of the young church, and ultimately these free thinkers and others like them went on to mount a serious attack on Paul’s credentials as an apostle.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the discussion on 1 Corinthians:

“The present-day reader may be surprised to find that in Corinth the dominant question as to the Christian’s proper conduct in his own sphere of life, his freedom and its limits, what he might do without scruple and what was forbidden to him as a Christian, often arose in areas where one would not have expected it.

“A chief reason for this is that in the post-classical world in which Christianity grew up, the spheres of the cultic and the secular in paganism ran into one another in quite a different way from what they do today. This explains, for example, why, in 1 Corinthians 8-10 Paul was obliged to discuss at such length what was for the Corinthians anything but a captious question - whether a Christian might buy meat offered for sale in the market place which might have bem left over from the sacrifice in one of the nearby temples and found its way to the stalls. Or the question of whether a Christian might have an easy mind in joining heathen friends and relatives at a meal following a sacrifice.

“To these and other everyday questions the “spirit-filled” people had given a considered answer applicable to every case: “All things are lawful” (1 Corinthians 6:12 and 10:23). They paraded their freedom to the point of licentiousness, in contrast to the rest, whose scruples made them uneasy about any defilement and, to preserve their faith, forced them into a strict asceticism…

“Paul does not deal with the question by way of casuistry and law. He allows freedom where it is compatible with faith. But he also says “No, and no again” where there is notorious playing fast and loose with the Christian faith, where outrage is done to moral principles accepted on all hands - even by the heathen (1 Corinthians 5:1 et seq) - and where it involves betrayal of the new life available in Christ to believers (1 Corinthians 6:1 et seq).

“1 Corinthians 8-10 in particular is significant in that Paul resolutely brushes aside all the enthusiansts’ pseudo-theological arguments to justify themselves by taking the theme of responsibility for the others before God and the world as his line of approach to the questions. This is also very apparent in the detailed treatment of the serious abuses in the Corinthians’ worship.

“When they celebrated the Lord’s Supper, they were sincerely convinced that in the sacrament they participated in the redmption wrought by Christ. Yet, at the common meal accompanying it, those better off did not bother about the poorer who came later and had nothing with them.

“In Paul’s view this was profanation of the “body” of Christ - the church (1 Corinthians 20 and 11). He takes the same means of checking the tumultuous contests of the “spirituals” who broke out into ecstatic utterance during worship, and insists on the intelligible, clear word of preaching which might convince outsiders and unbelievers, and win them over…

“Paul took two ways of flinging himself into this chaos and reducing it to order. First, he sent 1 Corinthians, it being in fact, as shown by 1 Corinthians 5:9, at least his second letter to this church. Second, he sent his true helper Timothy to Corinth. Initially both seem to have had some effect. Nevertheless, as 2 Corinthians shows, this was not lasting, and Paul had soon to pass through a renewed and much more acute phase in the struggle with opponents who led the Church astray and stirred it to rebellion against the apostle himself.

“We can at least sketch the causes and course of these dramatic

Bornkamm goes on to discuss the fragmentary nature of 2 Corinthians , which he explains as not a single letter, but a collection of several of Paul’s letters to the Church at Corinth at various times during this struggle, put together (not even in chronological order) by someone else later so they could be transmitted to other churches.

This is a very scholarly book, dealing with the historical life of Saint Paul and his Epistles to the churches he founded, and it really is worth reading. I do have some reservations, particularly on his comments about the veracity of Luke’s account in Acts of events in Paul’s life.  Just from a common-sense point of view, we know that Luke spent a lot of time with Paul - why parts of his account of Paul’s life should be written off as stylistic invention I don’t know - maybe I need to read some other authors on the topic.  But even if one does not go along with everything the author says on Paul’s life, his explanation of the historical scene behind the writing of the Epistles is valuable.

It helps to remember that in Paul’s day there was no “scripture”, and that in some ways this great Saint, who was not one of the original 12 and who never knew Jesus in the flesh, developed his own version of Christianity based on his personal conversion by the risen Christ. He remained true to his vision through over 30 years of evangelising, gruelling travel, bodily suffering and danger. It also helps to remember that as the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul found himself in the thick of some very troublesome issues around reconciling his Gentile converts with strict requirements of the Law of Hebrew religion. I have found this book very thought-provoking.