Finished 1 Corinthians 9. There's a lot to unpack in what I translated this morning. But in particular, I want to focus on 19-23 and 24-27.
In 19-23, Paul flat out repudiates clinging to one cultural or denominational practice or another by stating that he became like everyone in order to deliver anyone of them. In short, a modern rendition would be like, "I became a Jew to gain Jews, a Catholic to gain Catholics, a Mormon to gain Mormons, a Baptist to gain baptists, a Mexican to gain Mexicans, an American to gain Americans, and so on; I became everything to everyone so that I would deliver some of them." It didn't matter to Paul who it was he preached to or taught how to follow Christ and he did it within the cultural worldview framework with which they were accustomed without passing judgment on that framework.
Paul recognized it wasn't his job to change what they were, so he became a chameleon of sorts in order to disciple them. Paul detached from the Jewish cultural framework he was raised in for the sake of the Gospel, but he remained flexibly detached from the Greek and Roman frameworks as well and moved back and forth among them as needed. If there were Scythians in town, Paul brushed up on his Scythian "manners" and went to work.
Notice, that he never directly preached against or did anything to defile the Olympian gods in front of the Greeks if he could help it. That was the framework within which the Corinthians, the Ephesians, and most of the Greek world lived, and Paul left it alone publicly as he preached Christ. When he was in Jerusalem, he offered appropriate sacrifices in the Temple. In order to not be offensive to Jews to whom they were ministering, He circumcised Timothy even after stating that it didn't matter if a Christian had circumcision or a foreskin.
Paul wasn't wavering or being uncommitted, he just recognized that none of those things actually mattered one way or the other except where they might assist or impeded one's discipleship in Christ or the discipleship of another. Today, this could be applied to statues of Saints in a Catholic Church, or lack of any ornamentation in a baptist one. It could be applied to a crucifix or the absence of any cross in a Messianic Synagogue. Paul would shift from one to the other as needed in order to teach the people how to follow the path of Jesus Christ.
In 24-27, Paul uses the analogy of an athlete competing in a stadium for a laurel wreath. He says in verse 25, "And every person competing controls himself with everything," and what is really interesting is in verse 27, he's very specific about what he's competing against when he says, "but I give my body a black eye and lead it a slave..." As he writes about in his letters to the Romans and to the Galatians, his own body, neurology, and biology is what has to be brought into submission to Christ, and Paul is clear that this is an ongoing competition which he's determined to win and is determined that the Corinthians understand that need to up their game if they're going to win it too.
"Everyone runs, but only one gets the prize." There are only two competitors in this competition, your own body's psychology and drives, and Christ within you, and you must train and fight to keep your own body's psychology disengaged and enslaved to Christ's. It is like the Native American parable of the two wolves fighting within the man, the one who wins is the one he feeds.
"Don't let anyone look for his own thing, but the thing of the other, different person."
Think about this statement for a second. It's not a throwaway platitude. The human malfunction sends the hypothalamus's survival responses into overdrive, treating everything we are attached to or averse from as a survival issue. It programs itself to automatically and immediately attend to what it likes or dislikes because it believes this to be important to the survival of the psyche and the physical being. Not looking out for my own thing immediately goes against these hardwired responses. It's a contradiction which the brain then has to reconcile if it considers it "good" or agrees with it (and thus feels guilty about not doing creating cognitive dissonance which can eventually lead to mental illness), or it is a threat to survival if the brain considers it "bad" or disagrees with it.
I find it instructive that every instruction Jesus and Paul gave immediately fly in the face of and contradict our malfunctioning survival responses.
Another point of interest in 1 Corinthians 10 are the pains which Paul takes to not trigger someone else's conscience, that is, their sense of "good/evil" or "right/wrong." Pertaining back to my last post, the conscience is this malfunctioning survival response which then declares what we attach to "good" and what we are averse to "evil" and did not occur among the human population until the incident in Genesis 3. Judging something or someone, deciding whether they are good or evil, is, fundamentally, the decision of whether you are attached or averse to some aspect of that thing or person, whether it pleases or displeases you or whether you agree with it or disagree with it, and it becomes complicated when it pleases you but you disagree with it, or it displeases you but you agree with it. This is where cognitive dissonance occurs and mental illness can follow if it is not reconciled.
It is my belief that Paul understood these things well enough to avoid judgment of others and especially the unbelieving as much as possible, even as Jesus taught, "Don't judge so you won't be judged," and to take great pains to not trigger the other person's conscience and so initiate their malfunctioning or "sin" response.
I started on 1 Corinthians 11 yesterday and, being preoccupied with something else, just got through verse 16 this afternoon. Truth is, this isn't a fun passage to comment on in this day and age because of how it has been interpreted.
Like several other passages of Paul's writings, it's helpful to understand the context of the culture and society within which he was writing. Where most translations render what he's talking about as "covering the head," what he's really talking about is the kind of veiling of the face and head of a woman as is still commonly practiced in certain middle eastern countries. What may not be understood in our day and age in western countries is that the veiling of a woman during Paul's day and age was a sign of a woman's respectability and social status. Lower class women and prostitutes did not veil and in some societies were forbidden to veil. So, if a woman walked around without a veil on her face in public, in that society, it meant she was probably a slave girl/woman, or a whore advertising her wares and availability. There was a good reason why Paul strongly encouraged the women of the Corinthian church to veil themselves. He didn't want them to give the wrong impression and appear trashy. It would be the same, culturally speaking, as if he was strongly encouraging the women of a church today to not wear bikini tops and too short skirts in public, or something else designed to show off as much skin as possible.
We don't recognize this because we're so used to seeing unveiled women in period pieces and Bible movies, but that is anachronistic and culturally incorrect. Veiling of respectable women was a common practice in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East up through the Byzantine period, whereas it was virtually unknown in western European societies from which our cultural traditions in the U.S. come.
In verse 10, the word "angelous" should probably be rendered "messengers" rather than "angels" as it fits more with the context of the women of the church not giving the wrong impression to the general public, of which they would have had regular contact with messengers going to and from.
The general message of this passage is for the Corinthian church to follow respectable societal norms in terms of dress and presentation. This goes back to what he was saying in the previous chapter where he says "become harmless to both Judeans and to Greeks, and to the congregation of God, just like I also strive to please everything to everyone not looking for my own benefit but the benefit of the many, so that they might be delivered." The very next thing he says in 11:1 is "Become mimics of me just like I am also of Christ."
The goal here is not to please ourselves, but to do anything and everything necessary, even changing our own habits and customs if necessary, to enable others to see Jesus in us so that we might be Jesus for them and give Jesus to them. If how we dress, or how we eat, or how we do anything impedes that, then we need to seriously look at which psychology is in control, ours, or that of Jesus Christ. If anything impedes our submission to Jesus Christ, if anything impedes others seeing Jesus Christ instead of "us," then, as Paul saw it, it must be done away with.
It should go without saying that, while in Paul's society veiling was proper and appropriate, in modern U.S. society it really isn't considered the norm except for certain religious groups and subcultures. It carries very different connotations and implications in modern western society.
The same is true regarding his comments on men and long hair. In Roman and Greek society, if you've ever seen any Greek or Roman busts or statues of men, they always have short hair. It's very possible that long hair on a man in their society indicated a male prostitute who dressed and acted like a woman of the kind which served at certain temples (there were some who underwent castration and masqueraded in their temple sexual rites, something which was immediately offensive to Paul's Jewish Torah sensibilities). This would also seem to be indicated by the word used as it refers to someone "pluming themselves" with long hair and putting on airs. In modern U.S. society, long hair on a man does not necessarily indicate effeminacy, and certainly has no connotations towards a man being a temple whore, but can, within the right context, project masculinity instead. It is the personal and societal context which is important here.
