Paul by Campbell Douglas A.;

Paul by Campbell Douglas A.;

Author:Campbell, Douglas A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company


CHAPTER EIGHT

Navigating Sex and Gender

The Corinthian challenge

It is fascinating to see how Paul navigated the issue of appropriate sexual behavior with the Corinthians. The Corinthians were culturally a mixed bag. Many were pagans, arriving in church with all their local pagan sexual mores in place. Paul and some of the Corinthians were shaped by the rather different practices of Judaism. All of this was now intertwined with a new Christian angle on things. Pagan, Jewish, and Christian habits and instructions were all swirling around in a church characterized by insensitivity and rivalry: a recipe for disaster!

Sexual intellectualism

Some of the Corinthians were being too theologically aggressive. In chapters 5 and 6 of 1 Corinthians Paul addresses the way this aggression has led to sexually damaging behavior. Paul had taught the community that the Jewish food rules didn’t matter anymore.

The Kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking

but of deliverance and peace and joy through the Holy Spirit. (Rom. 14:17)

Another way of putting this would be to say “food for the stomach and the stomach for food” (1 Cor. 6:13). It goes in, it comes out, and has no religious significance. Who cares what we eat, where, or how? But what happens if we apply this adage to the penis? “The penis for sex and sex for the penis.” Who cares with whom we have sex, where, or how?

The result of this bold theological inference is that converts from paganism at Corinth could keep doing what they had been doing all along, which was visiting prostitutes regularly. No big deal. (I assume we’re talking mainly about men here.) But this theological boldness had an even more unhelpful application.

A man at Corinth is apparently sleeping with his stepmother. This may not be quite as shocking as it first seems. In the ancient world, women were married at or just before puberty, perhaps as young as twelve then, and often to much older men who had lost their first wives. If a woman’s original husband had died, a stepson from a first marriage could have been older than his stepmother (although we don’t know if the husband/father had died; the adage would apply whether he was alive or dead). And we can see now how the motto “the penis for sex and sex for the penis” underwrites this instance of incest, and the Corinthians who came up with this revolutionary practice are even quite proud of themselves for doing so!

Paul of course is not impressed and writes accordingly. He doesn’t bother with any argument. The perpetrators just have to go. The community must expel them. He works harder on the problem of prostitution (6:12–20).

That he doesn’t appeal to heterosexual monogamy suggests that the problem might be currently single men. He pushes back here on the notion that our bodies are irrelevant, and this issue comes up again at the end of the letter. The connections we make through our bodies affect us, and a sexual connection affects us at a particularly deep level.



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