How to Like Paul Again by Gempf Conrad;

Author:Gempf, Conrad;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Authentic Media

Symptoms and Disease

One of the things that I long for you to be able to do is observe what’s there in Scripture and roll it around in your mind, looking at it in different ways to see if you can spot any patterns. So, does anything strike you about this range of issues?

Something that occurred to scholars back in the twentieth century is that one of the issues is different from all the others. So many of the matters Paul wrote about concerned proper Christian practice and behavior. Only one, the resurrection, seems purely about an idea, a Christian belief. Many academics, especially ones who themselves think that ideas are most important, have explored the hypothesis that the Corinthians’ attitude toward the resurrection is at the root of all their other problems; the disease of which things like their bad behavior are symptoms. Let me explain how this might be.

The best guess about the Corinthians’ beliefs is that they were rooted in the Greek philosophy that they inherited. They are likely to have believed that whatever is physical is limiting and bad, whereas the non-physical is the truer, purer reality. This is not what either Christianity or Judaism teach, exactly.

For Christians and Jews, the physical universe is not inherently evil but a good creation of God, although it has been corrupted in the Fall. And, for us, the soul or psyche of a person is not pristine and unfallen; on the contrary, our decision-making facilities are just as prone to sin.

Anyway, the Corinthians may have been stuck in their Greek mindset and assumed, therefore, that what Christianity did was make you a new, more spiritual person inside. They may have believed that that work was done at conversion or baptism so now they were new, eternal, saved creatures so didn’t need to wait for something later. “A physical resurrection? Why in the world would anyone want that? Surely, the point is to free one’s eternal soul from the lumbering, encumbering, limiting matter!” they would have said.

That’s the hypothesis, anyway. And, certainly, elements of this kind of thinking can be read back in a way that throws new light on some of the other issues. For instance, their casual attitude toward sexual behavior would make sense if they believed that the spirit or soul is eternal and important, but the husk of physical body doesn’t really count for anything. The saying of the Corinthians’, which Paul quotes back to them, “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food” (6:13), is indicative of this kind of attitude. (Although the stomach was not the only bit of their anatomy they were thinking this applied to.) Their attitude was: “Let the physical body do whatever it wants because it is irrelevant to our own spiritual self.”

Tracing the implications of the faulty view of resurrection is helpful. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really explain enough of the issues in the book to sustain the hypothesis that it is the underlying theme of the whole letter.

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