TODAY, ESPECIALLY in America,, Catholics want to be "accepted."
Paul's first letter to the Corinthians is uniquely relevant to such people. Though it talks about dozens of separate issues, the unifying theme is that Christians must be different.
Corinth was the largest, most cosmopolitan and decadent city in Greece. Two thirds of its 700,000 inhabitants were slaves. It was a major port and hub of commerce. Much of the commerce was in human flesh.
"To act like a Corinthian" was an ancient saying meaning debauchery, especially prostitution. Men went to Corinth to take a moral holiday.
The city was also full of idolatry, which centered around Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Her temple, atop an 1,800 foot promontory, had 1,000 temple prostitutes.
Paul had come here in A.D. 51 to evangelize, and now, four or five years later, he writes this letter to address the problems of this new, struggling church surrounded by an "advanced" world just like our own, a world in "advanced" stages of decay.
His main point is that Christians are called out of paganism to a radically distinctive lifestyle. For Christ is the Lord of every aspect of life.
Paul is utterly Christocentric; in l:30 he identifies four great abstract ideals (wisdom, righteousness; sanctification and redemption) with Christ Himself; and in 2:2 he says he "resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ." Any addition to Him would be a subtraction.
America is strikingly similar to Corinth. According to polls, most Catholics consider themselves "Americans who happen to be Catholics" rather than "Catholics who happen to be Americans." Two of the words they dislike the most are "authority"(or "lordship") and "obedience." Yet these are precisely what Paul calls for.
Christ always sought out the most needy, and His church has always followed His lead; Christianity naturally flows to the lowest places, like water. Corinth was the world's lowest place, the spiritual gutter.
Yet the Corinthians thought of themselves as high, not low-like the high and airy temple of Aphrodite. For they were rich due to trade and prostitution and well educated. Though they didn't produce any philosophers themselves, many from Athens taught there. The most prominent philosophical school at the time was probably Skepticism. The last thing any of them would believe was a man rising from the dead.
Into this atmosphere heavy with lust, greed and pride, Paul had introduced the clear light of Jesus (2:15). And he now continues the same strategy: not compromising, not pandering, not patronizing, but calling for the hard way, the distinctive way of living the life of Christ in a Christless world.
This is not a systematically ordered letter, like Romans. It moves from topic to topic. There are many minor topics, but the four major ones are 1) sectarianism, 2) faith and reason, Christianity and philosophy, 3) sex and love and 4) the resurrection from the dead (both Christ's and ours).
Other topics include incest, pagan lawyers, eating food offered to idols, prostitution, virginity, marriage, divorce, the Eucharist, order in worship, speaking in tongues and other spiritual gifts.
The first two major points are treated together, since simple faith unites while pride in reason divides. Paul is utterly scandalized at the embryonic denominationalism in the Corinthian church (1:10-13). Can anyone seriously wonder which of the many "denominations" he would approve today?
1Cor. 1:10-13 I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought.11 My brothers, some from Chloe's household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. 12 What I mean is this: One of you says, "I follow Paul"; another, "I follow Apollos"; another, "I follow Cephas"; still another, "I follow Christ." 13 Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul?
Paul sees the source of division as the proud claim to possess superior "wisdom" and not submitting to Christ as God's wisdom. The wonderful irony and paradoxes of God's folly being wiser than human wisdom (1:183:23) is the definitive text for all philosophers, theologians or "original" minds who resist Christocentrism and want to "advance" in different, schismatic directions.
If the Church ever becomes visibly one again, this passage will be the foundation for unity. And if this passage ever becomes the foundation, the Church will become one again.
On the No. 1 topic in modern morality, sex and love, Paul does three things. First, he condemns sexual immorality in Chapters 5 and 6, and the Corinthians' lax attitudes. Instead of justifying incest, they should excommunicate the offender. Instead of justifying prostitution by the slogan "all things are lawful" (6:12), they should realize that: a Christian, as a member of Christ's body, makes Christ fornicate with a prostitute (6:15)!
Second, Paul gives a positive alternative-a picture of Christian marriage, in Chapter 7. Here he clearly distinguishes God's commands from his own opinion, which is to stay single! There's a wonderful, divine humor in revealing deep and perennial principles of marriage through a celibate who does not personally recommend it.
Third, Paul writes the most famous passage about love ever written, Chapter 13. This is the essential alternative, for both married and unmarried, to pagan lust, and a clear and distinctive lifestyle and Christian witness. After all, Christ had prophesied that the world would be able to distinguish Christian from others by their special kind of love (John 13:35).
First Corinthians 13 is often read at weddings because it is the best definition of love ever written This love (agape) is not a feeling or desire [Eros) but a life; it is, as Dostoyevsky put it, "love in action" rather than "love in dreams."
The first paragraph (13:13) gives the infinite value of love by contrasting it with other things of great value. speaking in tongues, prophecy, knowledge, faith, even the works of love without the soul of love.
The second paragraph distinguishes this love from all others by describing it in 15 characteristics (47). Love is the skeleton key that unlocks all these doors. For example, it's impossible to be patient without love, but love brings patience with it.
Finally, the last paragraph shows the eternal destiny of love. Everything else, including all the things the Corinthians set their hearts and lives on, is doomed to die. Even faith and hope and earthly wisdom are not needed after death But love is. When we love now, we plant seeds for eternity.
Chapter 13 is sandwiched between two chapters on spiritual gifts, especially the gift of tongues and its use in worship. Paul shows moderation and wisdom in avoiding both extremes of enthusiasm and suspicion, and in subordinating everything, even supernatural gifts, to love. He himself speaks in tongues and wants everyone to do so (14:5,18), but the issue is much less important for Paul than most charismatics and anticharismatics think.
Next to Chapter 13, Chapter 15 is the most famous and most important. It is the primary text in Scripture on the resurrection of the body. None of the Greek philosophers in Corinth believed in bodily resurrection, 'not because they didn't believe in miracles, but because they didn't believe the body was good and created by God.
Their sexual materialism and their philosophical spiritualism somehow went hand in hand. Paul revealed instead that the body was more real, good and important than they thought: a holy thing, the Spirit's temple (6:19) and the seed of something destined to live with God eternally. It's more than a mere animal organism seeking sexual pleasure as its greatest good.
Plato had called the body "the soul's tomb." Paul tells the Corinthians, who were probably influenced by this philosophy, that to deny or ignore Christ's bodily resurrection is to abandon the whole faith. Without the resurrection, "then empty [too] is our preaching; empty, too, your faith" (l5:14), "you are still in your sins" (15:17), and "if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all" (l5:19).
And this resurrection is no mere symbol, no merely subjective reality or some such silly subterfuge. The Greek words for "the resurrection of the body" are anastasis nekron, which means "the sitting up of the corpse"! Denial of the literal resurrection, according to the Word of God, is denial of Christ, of the faith.
After demonstrating the truth about the resurrection (l5:12-34), Paul gives some hints about its nature (15:38-58) through natural analogies. This body is the seed of another one; this body is as different from the resurrection body as a planet differs from a star. Paul's contrast between a "physical body" and a "spiritual body" doesn't mean that the post resurrection body won't be tangible. Christ's was. It means that the source of our present body is physis, nature, the dust we return to; but the source of our resurrection body is the Spirit of God, who will raise us as He raised Christ.
Paul concludes with words that sound like trumpets (indeed, that is why Handel accompanied them with a trumpet in his "Messiah" ). He concludes by sticking his tongue out at death, taunting it: "O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?"
The central theme in each of the specific topics Paul addresses (probably from questions in a letter the Corinthians had written him) is the theme of Christian distinctiveness. This is seen most strikingly in Chapter 6, where Paul is scandalized that Christians sue other Christians before nonChristian lawyers and judges. No one today even blinks at that practice, for we have so radically lost that sense of distinctiveness.
Why would a cat go before a dog to adjudicate a dispute with another cat? The difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is not, to Paul or to the whole New Testament, a difference between two beliefs, but a difference between two beings, two species.
I continually ask my classes the simple question, "According to the New Testament, what is a Christian?" They always answer it not according to the New Testament but according to something else. For they always say what a Christian thinks, believes, does, or desires, but not what a Christian is.
Paul had the correct answer: A Christian is a little Christ, a member of Christ, a cell in Christ's body. From this radical transformation everything else follows. As he put it in 2 Corinthians 5:17, "so whoever is in Christ is a new creation."
In our desperate, bored search for novelties and "new theologies,'' we can never be more radically new than to simply rest on "the Church's one foundation . . . Jesus Christ her Lord."
Peter Kreeft is the author of many books including "Making Choices'' (Servant Books) and Back to Virtue (Ignatius).
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