Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that ‘all of us possess knowledge’. This ‘knowledge’ puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.
1 Corinthians 8:1-3
In the Roman Empire, to eat food sacrificed to an
idol was, for many, infused with spiritual meaning. The danger was not in that
the idol, or ‘god’, actually existed. The Christians in Corinth realised this and reasoned that the
food could not have been changed or influenced in any way as a result of being
offered to a non-existent entity. They therefore concluded it was alright to eat it.
The fundamental problem behind
this conclusion, and many of the other issues that Paul deals with in the letter,
is the way that the Christians had begun to think like
Greek philosophers. This was normal in Corinth, because it was famed as a centre of philosophy, and the phrase 'all of us possess knowledge' was probably popular both in the church and in the city's schools. Paul
therefore begins his guidance by pointing out the shortcoming in the approach:
that knowledge, alone, cannot create understanding. Love is necessary.
Knowledge puffs up, he explains,
but love builds up. For Paul, everything is anchored in love. He made the point
again, later in the letter, when he wrote about the spiritual gifts and
abilities that Christians can have. As he explains in 1 Corinthians 13, speaking in
foreign or even angelic languages without love is just noise; having prophetic
powers and understanding all mysteries and all knowledge, even when
supplemented with all faith, if it is without love leaves the gifted person as
nothing; even generosity to the point of martyrdom without love gains nothing.
Paul
made the point more obliquely in his guidance on how the Christians should meet
together to remember the Lord Jesus in the Lord’s Supper (what we now also call
Communion, Eucharist or Mass). It seems that the Lord’s Supper resembled the
feasts at pagan temples, so that those who arrived first ate and drank all they
wanted and left nothing for those who arrived later. This reflected the social
divide: the richer Christians arriving first but those who had to work longer
hours, like servants and slaves, arriving later. As a result, ‘one goes hungry,
another gets drunk’!
Paul put
it bluntly: he said that such behaviour despised the church and humiliated those
who had nothing!
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Scripture
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Handling
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