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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, the Father, does not “exist.” In place of “to be” or any other predicate he uses with proud satisfaction the word hēmin—he is God “to us,” and the character of His relations to the world and to us is indicated by the prepositions “of whom,” “in whom,” and “by whom.” This evinces an insight which is not less important because, like the expression “things which are not” (1:28), it is clothed in philosophical language and was at least not alien in form to the deeper conception of his Greek contemporaries. It might very well have been that Paul used here the language of his Greek followers rather than his own. What remains valuable to us is that he was able to say here what he wanted: the fundamental (like the distinction between being and non-being) distinction between the gods and our God, the God, Father and Lord, who has the power to command is: in the world, in the world of existing things are the former: the latter, the one revealed to us is the origin, the Creator of all things. But what did Paul mean here? He omitted to complete the antithesis. We can only guess what he meant by the following: According to 8:7, there were in Corinth certain persons who had not yet broken away from familiarity with idols, although they were Christians. They had not yet grasped that shattering distinction between God and idols. They were still peering timidly into the world, at things existent, at the fact that idols, at least, exist; the words “to us there is but one God,” although they even uttered them as a Christian confession, had not yet availed to depress the idols into the sphere of relativity, in which they, in spite of, nay, because of, their existence, must appear to be as nothings. They were still reckoning with them as with powers which could at least compete with God. The pagan-sacramental sphere was repugnant and dangerous to them, but must still be taken with religious severity, and, precisely because they continued to take them with religious severity, they appeared to them repugnant and dangerous. Hence the meat offered to idols was to them real meat offered to idols, repellent as such, and a serious matter. Their Christianity still consisted essentially in a convulsive tension between the regard fixed on God and the regard fixed on idols, between pure and impure, between pious and impious acts. To eat meat offered to idols would be for them a violent and illegitimate disturbance of the tension, an invasion, a relapse into the necessity of idols and lords, a stain on their consciences. Paul’s attitude towards them is plain enough: the “familiarity with idols” is broken. The glance fixed on God, and the distinction between Him and the other gods, has wrought such a devastating effect that the glance fixed on the latter loses all significance; if they exist, they do not compete with God. The tension between them and God is so radical, that all struggle and convulsion can cease. They no longer even count in their relation to God; the pagan-sacramental sphere has ceased to be dangerous, because it is recognised as merely profane. There is no such thing as meat offered to idols; there is only ordinary meat. Why should it not be bought and eaten? Paul later indicates all this incidentally: “All things are lawful” (10:23) only because, according to 8:6, all things are from God the Father and all things are by the Lord Jesus Christ. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof (10:26); over Him the gods have no dominion. We can eat, drink, and do whatever else, all to the glory of God (10:31), when we know, according to 8:5, that we are created in Him and by Him, by the Lord Jesus Christ. This therefore is the real Pauline opinion about sacrifices to idols—his standpoint, so to speak; just as respecting the subject of chapter 7 his opinion was that it was better not only for him, but for everyone, not to marry than to marry, if that were possible. Nor has Paul, here, cheaply surrendered his own opinion upon the matter to another and more arresting consideration. Instead, he proceeded first to support it in the ninth chapter by a rather far-reaching analogy: He, Paul, also knows what it is to do this or that for the sake of the self-consciousness and right of a free conscience through God. Towards the Corinthians, and in this case especially towards the strict among them, he feels with pride that he is, what no one else can be to them, the apostle (9:1–2). Appealing to this fact, and to the fact that he has seen the Lord (9:1), he proceeds to shatter all criticism of his attitude (9:3). He claims the right to do what he likes with regard to eating and drinking, and to found a family after the example of Peter and the brethren of Jesus (9:5–6). He claims, above all, the right to be supported by the community instead of earning his own livelihood (9:7). To the soldier his pay, to the vine-grower and the shepherd their share in the results of their labour, and “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn!” In hope, i.e., not in vain, shall the ploughman plough and the thresher thresh as God has ordained (9:9–10). “If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things” (9:11). Just as, according to the law of the Old Testament, the priests and their assistants were permitted to partake of the sacrifice, so has the Lord ordained (Paul might have recollected Luke 10:7: “The labourer is worthy of his hire”) that they who preach the gospel should live by the gospel (9:13–14). If he has made no use of this right to reward, no one at least is entitled to minimize the glory, the justifiable pride which he gains by way of reward for his voluntary activity—he seems to mean in the obscure, perhaps textually mutilated verse 9:15. So far the analogy is intended to show the reader that Paul also knows the meaning of permission, freedom, having the right, having control of extensive and delightful worldly possibilities. But the meaning even of these three chapters is not just the continuous enforcement of the Pauline standpoint. The line which we have so far followed is strongly intersected by another, and the latter remains determinative and victorious. Stronger even than in chapter 7 respecting his particular opinion of marriage, it is here shown that even his doctrine of freedom, however profound and intimately bound up with his gospel, also has its limits; that an inflexible Pauline dogma does not exist so far as he, its author, is concerned. This manifest, temporary self-suppression, this subdual of Paul by Paul, this shaking of his own standpoint to its very foundations looking to the object of this standpoint, that is what makes this chapter, after Rom. 14–15, most particularly important and significant. The decisive thing that Paul has to urge against himself and his school transpires at once from the three first verses of the section, 8:1–3, where he calls knowledge the proper standpoint from which to regard offering meat to idols. We all of us have this proper standpoint, he says, somewhat ironically, perhaps quoting a letter addressed to him. In verse 7 this pronouncement is supplemented and corrected by the other: “not in every man is this knowledge.” Here, in verse 1, the fact that all have the gnosis, the knowledge, contributes, at any rate, to place the gnosis, despite its incontestable correctness, in a somewhat fatal light immediately. A standpoint that
