more or less energetically denied by one of the many sections in the Corinthian Church. Sexual abstinence was recommended and practised in marriage according to 7:3. According to 7:12–13, marriages were dissolved where one of the partners was not Christian, and virginity was proclaimed (7:25 et seq.) as the Christian ideal. The all-embracing tolerance with which obviously the majority of the Church let things run their course was confronted by the rigorism of a radical-ethical group. We shall meet their traces again. In dealing with them Paul was not in an easy position; for there can be no doubt that, so far as he was concerned, he was in practical agreement with their trend of thought. He might perhaps repudiate and oppose their motives, their theology, but he could not say no, at least for himself, to the results of their deliberations. “It is good for a man not to touch a woman,” he begins by saying in 7:1. Temporary sexual abstinence in marriage seems to him advisable in order to gain time for prayer (7:3), and in the impossibility of entirely keeping it he sees plainly incontinence. To him, marriage is a divinely ordained condition only in so far as it is a means of avoiding adultery or “burning” (7:5; 9:26). To refrain from divorcing an unbelieving wife he ventures to recommend as his own, not as the Lord’s command (7:12). To marry is no sin, but whoever does so is inviting trouble, which Paul would gladly spare him (7:28). He that is married is forced to care for the things of the world, and how he may please his wife (7:33). He that marries does well; but he that marries not does better (7:38). Happier is a widow who does not marry again, in his opinion (7:40). And Paul’s concluding words to this very last sentence run: “And I think also that I have the Spirit of God.” All this betrays a fundamentally different sentiment from that which prompted Luther to describe the “sacred” state of marriage as a state and order altogether pleasing to God. No, here sexuality is manifestly under the heaviest shadow and suspicion, and Paul’s personal opinion is that, in order to seek the honour of the Lord, it is better to remain single (7:31–35). Nevertheless, as an apostle, as a responsible witness of revelation, he did not say yes to the tendencies of that ascetic school. He contented himself by emphasizing through his public example all those injunctions to the married: “for the fashion of this world passeth away” (7:31). Moreover, if one is married, he can only be married as if he were not (7:29). A last remnant of freedom, a last glimmer of consciousness of being neither man nor woman, nor a sexual being, must also be kept alive in marriage as the retrieved recollection of the corruptibility which governs this life, if it is impossible to shape one’s life entirely in the light of such a recollection. In so far as the chapter emphasizes this “inner-worldly” asceticism in its acutest form, it is to be regarded as a simple supplement to chapter 6 But in its main intention—and here Paul is writing formally against himself—it also designs to expound something else, namely: not a justification of marriage (which will be found here no more than a justification of the State in Rom. 13) but a warning against the hybris of sexual asceticism (just as Rom. 13 is a warning against the hybris of revolution and nothing else).
Sexual abstinence or celibacy is, in Paul’s view, a gift of God, a condition that is desirable, but only to be bestowed by God. Above his own well-founded opinion on this matter, and against the enthusiasm of those who made the matter into a principle, Paul also employs here the words “from God.” So that not even the opposite of sensuality, not even asceticism, may be elevated into any principle that infringes God’s sovereign right, into an intrinsic truth. “Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God” (7:19). It is God who stands in the way of the licentious, but it is also God who stands in the way of the radical moralists. “Let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God” (7:24). “Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called” (7:20). Can there be any worse presumption than to disturb this order under the pretext of designing to serve heaven? Regarded from this side—we have thrown the other side into strong relief—this chapter also falls into line. It makes it clear that the severity of “from God” applies not only to the wicked, but also to the good and the “unco guid”; that the meaning of the goal to which the whole Epistle is moving is the glory of God and really only the glory of God.
§ 4
The next perceptible unity is comprised in chapters 8–10. The subject of which Paul speaks in 8:1, and to which he reverts in 10:25, is the dispute raging at Corinth around the question whether and to what extent a Christian is permitted to eat flesh that has been slaughtered for pagan sacrificial purposes and subsequently sold in the market. An emphatic negative was confronted by an equally sweeping affirmative opinion and practice, the self-consciousness reposing on the freedom of their conscience of some, the irritated and wounded susceptibility of others. The practical counsel that Paul gives is found in 10:25–28; its purport is not to inquire over-anxiously into the origin of publicly or privately offered food, but emphatically to reject it once its origin from a heathen temple, without any specific inquiry from others, has been established. We are dealing with a certain meditated and noteworthy proposal to discover some sort of a path between freedom and constraint of conscience, or the conscience temporum ratione, similar to the more or less peremptory or cautious pastoral advice with which we have become acquainted in chapters 5–7. But Paul did not write either chapters 5–7 or chapters 8–10 for the sake of these practical injunctions. Each time the way is more important than the goal, or rather the way, the real teaching on which the imparting of these counsels is based, is the real goal of this section. Thus here too, it is as if Paul took a sponge and sponged out all the advice he had just imparted, when he writes in 10:31, “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” That is the goal of this section.
The front upon which he fights in these three chapters is directed altogether specially against his own followers in the Church; for it can scarcely be doubted that the conception to which he appeals here as a warning and corrective was fundamentally his own. We have seen how, in chapter 7. Paul wrote to a certain extent against himself, against the experiment of sexual abstinence embarked upon by a few in Corinth, which, for his own person, he quite unequivocally regarded as right. Here, in chapters 8–10, in the case of antagonism between a free and a legally emasculated and solicitous Christianity, Paul must feel much more concerned, and this time far in excess of the mere personal equation. The whole ninth chapter would be incomprehensible if Paul had not obviously felt at one with the Corinthians who thought freely and untrammelled upon this question. They were certainly not identical with the people who were in agreement with him regarding the subject dealt with in chapter 7. Paul, however, is the same person who there expressed as his own personal opinion the unambiguous sentiment: “It is better not to marry,” and here the freedom of the Christian conscience from all pettiness and restriction. Independent, wilful, and regardless of the reproach of inconsistency, he plunges with his opinion, straight through the various camps into which the Church was split up, indifferent whether he appears now as an ascetic, now as a man of the world. He has his own programme and his own way. We do not know whether the ethical radicals of chapter 7 also appealed to his name; it may be. What is certain is that in chapter 8 he stepped into the camp of his own, the real Pauline, people. It is a question of freedom (9:1, 19; 10:29) of power (9:4, 12) to do or refrain from doing this or that; and 10:23 takes up again with due emphasis the theme of 6:12: “All things are lawful.” The question he is discussing is the freedom created in Christ, the power conferred upon him as an apostle, which Paul quotes in the ninth chapter as an analogy, and the whole Epistle to the Galatians testifies how vitally important this freedom was to him. We find in 8:4–6 a short description of the fundamental standpoint which had been adopted by the Pauline Corinthians and approved by Paul himself. Their objection to the rigorous Christians in the matter of meat offered to idols was profound and fundamental; “an idol is nothing … and there is none other God but one” (8:4). With the hypothetical, yes, even with the real, existence of many gods and lords in heaven and on earth, Paul is, indeed, quite prepared to reckon: “For though there be many that are called gods,” verse 8 expressly states. But 8:6 majestically continues “but to us the one God the Father, of whom all things, and we in Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom all things, and we by Him.” It will be noted that the word “is” relating to God and Christ is missing from this sentence in the Greek. The gods exist: the one God,