Welcome to the Pauline Family's "Year of the Bible"! We've been reading the Bible clear through this year. We are finishing the New Testament, so read along with me. But first, let us pray:
Father,
When the fullness of time had come, you sent your Word in the One who said, “Whoever sees me, sees the Father.” No revelation can surpass this until Jesus comes again. By your gift, the Church continues to receive unfathomable riches from the inheritance handed on from the Apostles and guaranteed by the Holy Spirit.
Let the Spirit who inspired the writing of today's pages "guide me in the truth and teach me" to follow Jesus ever more closely, until he calls me to follow him to the Kingdom where he lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen.
Today's chapters are 1 Corinthians 6-8.
The first letter to the Corinthians is noteworthy for getting into the nitty-gritty stuff of life. First, Paul deals with lawsuits. (He had been hauled before one in Corinth himself, but at least that was not by a fellow Christian!) As you read, see how he applies the Gospel to the kinds of human frustrations that we all know very well.
Then it's back to sexual immorality. We should not be surprised. Corinth was infamous for loose morals: Paul's pointed references in 6:9 are not hypothetical. But now he is taking what we might think of as moral "laws" and offering us a moral theology, even a spirituality, based on Christ: "your bodies are members of Christ[.] Shall I then take Christ’s members and make them the members of a prostitute?" "Your body is a temple of the holy Spirit whom you have within you from God.... Glorify God in your body." Paul is inviting the Corinthians to quite a change of worldview: If they saw things as Paul did, they would live in continual adoration!
In Chapter 7, Paul shifts gears. He is still writing about very practical concerns, but now he is actually responding to questions from a letter the Corinthians wrote to him! You can almost imagine him ticking off the points, one by one. Paul addresses matters of pressing importance: If the Lord is coming back, what should engaged (or promised) couples do? If celibacy is so highly recommended (and Paul gives the example of it right in this chapter), can widows remarry? What about slaves: Since the master had complete rights over their persons, did their social situation compromise their Christian standing?
Years ago I wrote that if scholars had a choice: to discover a "Third Letter of St Paul to the Corinthians" or to discover the letter that St Paul was responding to in 1 Cor 7, they would choose the latter. As it is, we have to reconstruct their questions from Paul's answers, as I have in part.
Start reading here.
N.T. Wright's Paul: A Biography is the book I would recommend to someone who wanted to read one (only one) book that combined the life and letters of St Paul. Written by a noted Scripture, this is a flowing narrative that is scripturally enlightening and historically sound. Wright gives the reader a way of following Paul through the Acts of the Apostles and the writing of his letters, making Paul the person that much more approachable, and the letters themselves more readable as a result of having a social and historical context.
While we read Paul's letters to the Corinthians, you might also enjoy A Week in the Life of Corinth. This historical novel is set in first-century Corinth and outfitted with historical footnotes and archaeological sidebars. Ben Witherington III is a Scripture scholar in the Evangelical tradition, so there are some points in which his description of the worship in the Corinthian community mirrors that tradition rather than the Jewish roots of the liturgy we know so well, but his description of the social life and values of ancient Corinth may be extremely helpful in understanding things Paul takes for granted in his letters.
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