Love Over Knowledge

Pastor Anthony and Pastor Tonetta have shared this in previous sermons. The letter that we have that we call 1 Corinthians is not Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. It's probably his second. It was written in response both to things that he had heard about the community, and at least some members of the community had written a letter to Paul seeking either instruction or possibly validation of their behavior.

So the first six chapters Paul spends responding to the reports that he's heard, and then he pivots in chapter 7 to start talking about the things that the people had written to him. And so chapter 7 was about marriage and relationships. In chapter 8, Paul responds to a second set of questions related to food that has been offered to idols.

And frankly, it's kind of easy to skip over this section because there's not a lot of concern for many of us about food offered to idols today. In fact, really, the only person concerned about this is an aging British rocker singing about a white wedding. It's Billy Idol for those of you.

It's going to be a long day. I'll tell you at the end the title of the sermon because that's also not great. So the reason why I think it's important that we spend some time on this is that whilst the actual topic of the question, the subject of food that's offered to idols, doesn't directly impact us today,

it's a really important part of an argument that Paul's going to build over the next few chapters and one that he started in the earlier chapters about how to exist in healthy community, how to care for people in our church family, and how to ensure that our individual knowledge, freedom, wisdom doesn't cause harm to others in our community. So let's dive into the passage.

We're in 1 Corinthians chapter 8. I'm going to read the whole passage and then we'll talk a little bit about it. So I'm reading this from the NIV just because that's the translation that I grew up with.

There are other great translations available. So Paul says now, about food sacrificed to idols, we know that all possess knowledge, but knowledge puffs up while love builds up. Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought, but whoever loves God is known by God.

So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols, we know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one. For even if those so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and lords, yet for us there is but one God, the Father from whom all things came and for whom we live. And there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through him we live.

But, not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificed food, they think of it as having been sacrificed to a God and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. But food does not bring us near to God.

We are no worse if we do eat and no better if we do not. Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak. For if someone with a weak conscience sees you with all of your knowledge eating in an idol's temple, won't that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols?

So this weak brother and sister for whom Christ died is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against them in this way, underwound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again so that I do not cause them to fall.

So as I said, food being offered to idols isn't really a big concern in our 21st century context. And so there's a danger in preaching on this passage of sort of jumping straight to, well, what can we learn from this? Without stopping to ask, one, why this mattered so much to the church in Corinthians, why they wrote to Paul about it, and why Paul felt compelled to take a page or so out of a relatively short letter

to write a response. And there's two sort of key reasons why scholars and theologians think that Paul wrote so much about this and why this was so important to the church in Corinth. So a bit of brief history on the church in Corinth.

This is a Greco-Roman community. It's a wealthy-ish trade route, or on a wealthy-ish trade route. And most of the people in the Corinthian church would have found faith in Jesus having left a Greco-Roman temple-structured religion.

This is not primarily a community of diaspora Jews who have found faith. This is primarily what the Bible lovingly refers to as a pagan or Gentile community. So the reason that that matters is because their worship, their experience of following their gods or their idols, or however we want to refer to them, would have been in these Greco-Roman temples

where a core part of worship was eating food that was sacrificed to the god. And so we have these people who have converted to this fledgling Christian church. And part of that conversion was likely either a conscious or an unconscious rejection of those old worship styles.

They met in a different place. They engaged in the world in a different way. And I think this is probably fairly reflective of all of our spiritual journeys, right?

Our path to our relationship with Jesus involved dropping some habits and picking up some others, even if it's just as simple as being here on a Sunday morning instead of a brunch. So Paul is concerned about this because there were likely many people in this Christian community who had grown up and their cultural worship had included eating food that was offered to idols. And they likely saw their newfound faith in Jesus, their new Christian community, as incompatible with this previous behavior.

So that's one reason. This was a way for Paul to say, look, these people have moved away from this previous tradition, moved away from this previous behavior. They are now different.

And we should not be pulling them back into their old communities. Others have suggested that this isn't actually a disagreement about food or a theological dispute particularly. But it's actually relating to frictions around social status and class dynamics in the Corinthian church.

And Paul is concerned about this. In verse 11, he talks about members of the Corinthian church being destroyed, right? This is not some minor disagreement.

This is like we are actively harming members of our community. And we'll come back to that idea in a minute. But one of the reasons why theologians think this is a class or a status divide rather than a theological disagreement is that the reality is that most people in Corinth would not have regularly been eating meat.

Meat was the preserve of the wealthy. It is hard to wrap our heads today around a society where most of us cannot afford meat from the supermarket on a regular basis. Suddenly, vegetarianism makes sense.

But so the point that Paul is making here is that meat was expensive. Most people in the community were not wealthy enough to regularly afford it and likely didn't have the social status to attend events when meat was served. So most of the places where meats were served were fancy banquets in wealthy people's homes or, more often, in the temples dedicated to the Greek and Roman gods, not necessarily purely as an act of worship, but as part of a banquet.

It's perhaps helpful to think of the temples of these Greco-Roman gods less like sort of the churches that we imagine today on a Sunday and more of like a fancy club here in D.C. that none of us will ever get to see the inside of. So there is a strong suggestion that the people who were asking about eating meat came from a class of people who could afford to eat meat, who were not necessarily reflective of the regular members of the church in Corinth.

And theologian Richard B. Hayes has sort of developed this idea a little bit more to suggest that perhaps the people asking about whether they could continue to eat meat offered to idols weren't asking out of a genuinely thoughtful theological concern. They were, in fact, asking because they were the elite of Corinth and their social status, their connection to power, wealth, influence, largely hinged on their ability to go to these opulent banquets

in the temples of the Greco-Roman gods and eat the food that was offered. And so Paul might be pushing back against their theological new understanding rather than saying, I disagree with your theology, but actually you seem more concerned with your social status in this community than you do with the care for your brothers and sisters in your community.

So given that little bit of context, I find it easier to sort of relate to why this passage is important and why we shouldn't just skip to what can we learn about it.

So given that framing, right, that this is less of a theological dispute about whether food offered to idols is actually safe to eat and more about what are the wealthy elites in this community doing and how is that harming, potentially, the rest of the community, I want to dive into two types of knowledge that Paul references in this passage. And so if you look back over the passage, you'll see the word knowledge shows up a bunch of times starting in verse 1 and then throughout the rest of the passage.

And Paul is talking to, he is likely reflecting back some of the phrases that were in the letter that he received from the Corinthians. So, for example, in verse 1, we see this, you know, we all possess knowledge. That's the first part of the passage.

And this knowledge that Paul is talking about, the Greek word, don't worry, I'm not going to do a whole Greek exposition. That's where people go to seminary. I didn't.

But the word that Paul uses for knowledge is gnosis, which is where we get, you know, and that is sort of our general understanding of knowledge, right? Gnosis is what we think of as knowledge today. Experts, peer-reviewed articles, logical reasoning.

And so the elite have used this gnosis, this knowledge, this logical reasoning to say, we know that an idol is nothing at all in this world, that there is no God but one. We know this. We have this gnosis.

And so these people who are writing to Paul have logically reasoned that idols are not real and that therefore food offered to them has no inherent meaning or value above and beyond that it's just food. And they develop this argument further in verse 8, potentially relying on the words of Jesus in Matthew, where he says, what goes into someone's mouth does not defile them,

but what comes out of their mouth is what defiles them. And this is Jesus talking in this exact context, right, about types of food that people should and shouldn't eat. And even the apostles themselves, they had a whole council in Acts 15 where there was a lot of tension around food because the Jewish converts to Christianity were very concerned about keeping their traditional Jewish diets

and the folks who came from a non-Jewish background were like, we just want to eat the food. And so there was this huge tension in the church around food. And so in Acts 15, the apostles basically said, we will write to the churches in Corinth and say that no food is considered unclean.

And there's a but there, which we'll come back to in a second, because the but's important. But they say, food doesn't bring us any nearer to God. We're no worse if we do not eat it and no better if we do.

This food that has been offered to idols that Jesus has said cannot defile us by us putting it in our body. The apostles have said that no food is unclean. We can continue to eat this.

We're no better if we do. We're no worse if we don't. And so Paul is pushing back on this knowledge, this gnosis.

Firstly, in verse 7, he says, hold on, not everyone has this knowledge. Maybe he's simply stating the obvious, right? That not everyone has the time and the wherewithal to develop complex theological treaties about food, idol worship, and faith.

Or maybe, and I kind of hope, he's being a little bit sarcastic. He's kind of turning this knowledge back on them and saying, do we all know that? Are you sure?

Do we want to rethink this? So instead of sort of agreeing with this statement, instead of agreeing with this sort of logical reasoning, Paul asks if that's universally true. Is this known by everyone?

And in that, he poses a different problem, right? He says, you have this knowledge. Maybe not everyone has this knowledge.

And that knowledge can lead to people being puffed up, which is the exact same phrase that he uses in chapter 5, where this knowledge that people had of their superior status and the rejection or the lack of rejection of someone who was a wealthy donor to the church engaging in spiritual abuse and sexual abuse, this same knowledge had led to that same action, this same phrase, this puffed up.

So this knowledge had led for people to excuse sexual misconduct a couple of chapters earlier. And now Paul's saying, well, I have the same concerns about this knowledge that you are presenting to me today. But crucially, there's not a lot in the passage where Paul directly pushes back and says, actually, your knowledge is wrong.

He doesn't say, hey, let me correct your theology. What he actually does is introduce a different type of knowledge.

So in verse 10, Paul brings this different type of knowledge to the fore. And the phrase that we have in the English translation is the conscience of other believers, or in the Greek, which I will mispronounce, synodesis. So we have this gnosis, which is head knowledge, and then we have this synodesis, which is sort of how we would think of as conscience.

So synodesis is knowledge of right or wrong. And it's more than knowledge. It's an inherent sort of, we know intuitively this is right or wrong.

There are certain things that we just know. You shouldn't do that. You should do that.

It's more concerned, shall we say, with morality than empiricism. It sort of asks this question that if something works, right, if something is logical or correct, is it right? So for example, a lot of the work that I do focuses on criminal justice.

So there's an argument that locking up almost 2 million people in prisons and jails around the United States keeps people safe. There's an argument that it works. Is it ethical or morally right to lock up 1.8, 1.9 predominantly black and brown individuals in the name of safety, even if it works?

That's sort of the tension that Paul's setting up here. Paul is explicitly highlighting the synodesis, the conscience of the poor, the marginalized in the Corinthian church, and using that as a reason to question the gnosis or the knowledge of the rich and powerful. But that doesn't really get at the question of, why is Paul so worried about the elites of the Corinthian church eating meat offered to idols?

In verse 10, he gives a sort of an answer, right? He says, If someone with a weak conscience or weak synodesis sees you with all of your knowledge eating in an idol's temple, won't that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? So Paul is suggesting that those with this weaker or maybe less developed or younger conscience synodesis may be more easily led astray by the gnosis of the elite and engage in this forbidden consumption of idol meat.

But that brings us back to this sort of animating question, right? What is the problem here? What is the problem with eating food offered to idols?

And why is Paul so concerned with the weaker conscience, with those of a weaker synodesis consuming idol meat compared to those who have developed this enhanced gnosis? So there's a couple of theologians who have offered some ideas and I just want to talk through them a little bit. And I don't want to make a claim that one of these is necessarily the correct or predominant view, but I think there's some interesting questions that they ask.

Maybe it's pretty simply fairness, right? The conference in Acts 15, where the apostles told the fledgling new church around the nations that they could eat whatever food they wanted, that no food was declared unclean, there was a huge but.

And the huge but was except food offered to idols. So all food was considered to be clean, safe, and would not defile you, except food that was offered to idols. So maybe there's this simple thing of Paul being like, I've told you this already.

I've told you not to do this using knowledge and appealing to your reason. Now I'm going to try and tell you appealing to the people in your community. If you can't do it for yourself, if you can't recognize that maybe your theology is unsound, maybe you care about the people in your community enough to behave differently.

It's also possible that Paul wasn't super open to correction of his theology, and maybe he was just annoyed. But it seems that he's perhaps more concerned with the optics of the elite, right? The optics of these wealthy people who he seemed to be at least primarily concerned with their connection to the power structures in the Corinthian society, and developing a gnosis,

developing a theology that allowed them to continue living in their elitist lifestyle in violation of the teachings and counsel of Paul and the apostles. And that's really what was unacceptable. Paul actually, whilst we know he loved being corrected on theology, maybe he's less concerned about the correction here and more about like, you have literally reverse-engineered this justification in order to keep your comfy lifestyle.

Even if you're right, you got here the wrong way, and I'm going to push back really hard on you choosing to continue your elite lifestyle at the expense of those of weaker conscience in the community. And, you know, that's a sort of a common thing that we see today, right?

We are rightly suspicious of theologians and pastors who stand up on the stage and say, the Bible says live life to the full. Jesus said you should have life to the full. Therefore, my vision for my full life is a private jet you should give to me.

Jesus did say we should have life to the full, but it's a little bit of a stretch to say you should continue to support my elite lifestyle because I have this gnosis. I have figured it out. So that's one concern, that Paul is saying you're trying to preserve your power and your status and your wealth, and you reverse-engineered a theology that allows you to stay in power

whilst essentially violating the commands and the instructions of the apostles.

Which still doesn't answer the question, why did the apostles give us this teaching? If they're so worried about it, why did we get there? So I mentioned Richard Hayes earlier.

He's a theologian who's done a lot of work around Corinthians. And he has this interesting take. And he suggests this, that whilst the idols, right, the Greco-Roman gods were nothing more than carvings on rock.

They did not exist. They were not real. That perhaps Paul was concerned with the reality that certainly the first century of Corinth would have believed that there are these evil, demonic, unholy spirits and spiritual entities that exist in the world.

And while they are not necessarily represented by this carving of a Roman god, maybe Paul was concerned that the willingness of people to submit themselves to a spiritual entity opened up the door to other negative spirits that they could be willing to let into their life and their experience. Not because the god of Jupiter had some magical power, but the willingness to submit to this foreign entity opened the door for unhealthy, evil, dark, demonic spirits.

Maybe, I'm not sure where we all stand on sort of the theology of the demonic and I don't want to necessarily get into that, but there is something there around like this isn't, this is about being willing to open yourself up to something that can lead to negative things happening. And in part, this interpretation relies on the fact that, as I mentioned at the beginning, that most of the folks in Corinth would have had, as part of their religious tradition

before they joined the church, worshipping gods through the eating of meat offered to them as a sacrifice. And they had rejected that in their choice to join the church. But the sort of the lasting effect of that, you know, cultural experience, normalization, opening yourself up to the power of a god through the act of eating food offered to them.

And the belief in that having power doesn't magically go away the second you convert to Christ. There's a learning process and an unlearning process that happens. And so, what these theologians or Hayes and others are essentially arguing is that this weaker synodesis, this weaker conscience, might be more susceptible to the corrupting influence of these demonic

or evil powers. Even if the gods they were offered to, the food was offered to, were fictional, there was some risk in engaging in this that opened the door to evil. And so, even if we don't necessarily take this demonic view, I think we can all relate to the idea of being corrupted by external influences that we may not

have considered if we don't think through the places and the spaces where we spend our time, right? Just because we don't necessarily believe in demonic evil, pretty convinced of human evil. and if you don't think about where you find yourself, you can be corrupted by influences that you haven't thought through.

So, there's two ideas there. This idea that Paul is upset because, like, we told you to do this. Stop doing it.

Or this idea that the worship of these idols, whilst the idol didn't exist, potentially opened the door to something more evil, for lack of a better word. Perhaps, and as I've been thinking about this, this is a sort of a somewhat developed thought. It's possible, in fact, it's likely, that at least some of the temples dedicated to these Greco-Roman gods were places of harm, exploitation, financial extortion.

And for many of the converts to the church, even if there was no demonic power, even if all of this was human evil, or human extraction, human exploitation, many of these weaker, supposedly, Corinthian Christians may have been attracted to the message of Jesus because the gospel is, the last shall be first. The elites do not have power.

And perhaps, they were actually kind of upset that they believed this gospel, this promise of Jesus in bringing about this upside-down kingdom, and they joined this church and it looks exactly like everything else. the elites get their own way, the poor have a tough time.

What does this say about the person of Jesus, the reality of Jesus' power, if the church is just the same as everywhere else? I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know what Paul's primary reason was for suggesting that the elites of the Corinthian church shouldn't be eating meat offered to idols. Maybe it was all of them. Maybe there's another one.

But whatever was animating Paul's concern, his point is that regardless of the knowledge that you have created as an elite, you should not allow that knowledge to harm your community. I have rights, but we also, as we learn in social studies, we have responsibilities that go with those rights. Just because you have a right to do something, we also have a collective responsibility.

Paul is concerned more with the protection and the edification of those who do not have all of this knowledge than with whether these elites have come up with some genius theological breakthrough. So to put it another way, Paul's hot take for today is that love and care for the vulnerable in our community will always win out or should always win out

over knowledge. Paul's concern is that for a Christ-centered community to be truly Christ-like, those at the margins need to be centered. Just because the elite of a community have supposedly figured something out, doesn't matter.

It really doesn't unless it centers and uplifts those without power and authority. Jesus came to bring about an upside-down kingdom where the last shall be first. The 99 must wait for the one to be found.

And Paul is writing explicitly to these elites in Corinth to say that if you use your knowledge to harm even the least of those in your community, you have missed the point of the gospel. And he then spends the entirety of chapter 9 talking about all the things that he's deprived himself of in service of the gospel.

And he gives us one example in verse 13 where he says, you know what? If me eating meat caused anyone in any community to doubt their faith in God, I would give it up in a heartbeat. Not only is he saying I wouldn't eat meat offered to idols, but let's throw away the whole concept of meat.

Let's just not eat it at all. If that's what it takes to keep our community safe and protected and whole, let's throw meat out altogether, never mind meat offered to idols.

So one example of this practice, and I do want to try and leave us with some examples because it would be sort of ironic to do a whole sermon on. Here's all the gnosis. Where's the application?

So one of the things, when I first started at the table, we used to have, when we did communion, we used to have wine in a cup and we had grape juice in a cup. And the idea behind that was that that was accessible, right?

People who didn't want wine could have grape juice. One of the challenges that was voiced by folks in recovery was that they were really worried about dipping the bread in the wrong cup. If you've ever, you know, this was particularly prevalent in some of our buildings where the sound wasn't great and it could be quite loud when you're trying to get communion

and having a conversation about is this wine or grape juice when neither of the, neither the person serving nor the person receiving can really hear what's going on, looking into two cups that are exactly the same color, people were worried. There was a barrier to people taking communion because we knew as a community that, hey, wine's fine for communion.

We are not, you know, there are some traditions that really think that wine shouldn't be used at communion. We're not that. We're free from that.

We have this knowledge. We know that wine is fine. But what about the conscience or the sobriety of those in recovery?

Is that more important than our knowledge? And we decided, no, it's not. We don't need wine.

Throw it out. We'll just do grape juice. No one's worried.

There is no barrier to taking communion. And this isn't just people in recovery, right? Some people can't drink alcohol for any number of reasons.

So that we removed that barrier. Not because we decided that we were wrong or that there was some new theology, but there are people that need this. We can do that.

We are willing to forego wine in order to make our community more welcoming and look more like Jesus. So, taking that example, I want us to think about are there other ways where we're using our superior knowledge to gatekeep or exclude marginalized people from our spaces. What does it mean for those of us who have knowledge or authority or influence to cede that space to those who could be harmed or excluded by the exercise

of our supposedly superior knowledge? What would it mean for those of the margins to rightly demand that their concerns be centered? What does it look like for our community to say, we all think this is okay, but there's one person who's really hurt by this?

How do we resolve that? How do we center that person's hurt? How do we center that experience?

How do we call out knowledge that protects the social status of the few while sidelining the needs of the many? How do we ensure, essentially, is the animating question, that while each of us have been set free by Christ to live our lives, how do we make sure that our manifestation of our freedom doesn't harm someone else?

Let's pray. Father, thank you for these words. Thank you for the wisdom that transcends time and place.

As we look to build a community that's focused on you, I pray that we would remember to center those whose voices we don't hear, to be willing to make space and to cede our power and authority where we have it to ensure that those who need space have it. Amen.