the Corinthians, but he warns them: “All … were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea,” he says, with a happy allegorical touch, in 10:1–2, and we are reminded of 8:1: “We all have knowledge.” Christ, with His spiritual meat and drink, was in their midst, 10:2–4 states bluntly—but 10:5: With many of them God was not well pleased … and they were destroyed of the destroyer (10:10). Therefore: “Let him that thinketh he stand take heed lest he fall” (10:12). Obviously, what temptation is, the claim to dominion of a world hostile to God, offered, not to its own children, but to God’s elect, with all the awfulness of backsliding and getting lost that lurks behind it, they do not yet know. God’s faithfulness alone is a match for the force of this claim. It is above the secular power, and, when temptation comes, it provides a way of escape for its own, so that they are able to endure and conquer it (10:13). It is just God! Therefore, flee idolatry! (10:14). The word was uttered in 10:7. Paul does not spare his readers hearing it again. Only by virtue of God’s faithfulness is it true that the pagan-sacramental sphere, which they enter when they buy and eat flesh that has been offered to idols, is not dangerous to them because it is profane. Merely by virtue of their human knowledge this is not true. What the Corinthians are thinking of, their consciousness of freedom and superiority, does not protect them from idolatry, from the reality of temptation, to which only the quite other reality of God is superior. Paul appeals to the reader’s intelligence, to his discriminating capacity (10:5). The Lord’s Supper which Christians celebrate or, more strictly, the reality of God which is designated by the Lord’s Supper, or, according to 11:26, announced thereby, is living communion with Christ (10:16), (and, as 10:17 shows, Paul immediately identifies this with their living communion with one another), just as the sacrifice in Israel designated, preached, and guaranteed “the communion of the altar” (what is meant is the community of those sacrificing upon the altar) with God. What, however, is the communion into which they enter who sacrifice to idols, or even only sojourn in the whole sphere of this sacrifice, in the incense of the pagan world of religion? Certainly, meat offered to idols is nothing in itself, and the place whither it is brought is also nothing in itself. In uttering this warning it did not perhaps occur to Paul to take the pagan world of religion seriously as a magical element in nature (10:19), but that sacrifices are here offered to devils and not to God—that, at any rate, is something. It goes without saying that Paul was familiar with contemporary ideas and customs, especially those relating to sacramental eating and drinking: as, for example, the wholly secular banquets which were expressly and solemnly arranged under the auspices of Serapis, Anubis, Jupiter, and Hercules (details of which are quoted in Lietzmann’s commentary on these verses). But I do not believe that this contemporary historical interpretation can supply the clue in the understanding of the passage. Paul was quite serious, whatever he may have thought in concreto (and he was, of course, thinking of perfectly concrete things), when in 8:5 he said: Not idols as such and idols’ meat as such, but gods and lords exist. The devils are the invisible, but extremely real, world powers, from whence came the temptation to which the majority of the Israelites succumbed in the wilderness, and the strength of which even exceeds the strength of Christians. These world powers constitute the meaning, the object, and the reality of pagan idolatry. Whatever its gods are called, paganism is the worship of devils, the religious veneration of world spirits and world forces instead of God. To be in contact with this atmosphere and not to be severed from paganism, that which the Corinthians cherish and prize as their freedom, may, regarded objectively, be communion with devils every time, and the subjective element, their human knowledge, will not prevent its actually being so. Then the comrade of Christ becomes the comrade of devils; blind just because of his knowledge, upon which he builds, he falls into their hands. Subjectively one may be an absolutely honest Christian, full of the most sincere confidence in his pure conscience and in the “all things are lawful for me,” and objectively may serve the devil as long as he lives, and will and may not once observe it just because of his certitude! And then arises the Either-Or which Paul sketches in 10:20–21. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils; ye cannot be partaker of the Lord’s table and of the table of devils. Ye cannot. If you do so—and what guarantees you against doing so? your freedom perhaps!—then the cup and the table of the Lord become nothing but lies, nothing but Greek religious magic, like others may also have. In the formula “Christianity and …” lurks betrayal of Christianity, backsliding and perishing. In the face of this threatening danger, it is not the free disposition of man that is the abode of the real, the sacred freedom, but the freedom alone that God has and confers. We are not to challenge God, to provoke Him to anger by presumption, by aiming to be stronger than He, by recklessly availing ourselves of our freedom, where He in His freedom perhaps just halts, and also bids us halt (10:22). That is what Paul designs to offer as food for reflection to the discriminating faculties of the Corinthians, and, indeed, of his own supporters in Corinth in particular. Is not your freedom perchance this freedom from the fear and the trembling of the man of God, who has to be faithful not so much to himself as to his Lord? If it were that, then would judgment already be upon you. If it be not that, then it cannot profess to be an unrestricted freedom.
“All things are not expedient; all things edify not,” we now read again in 10:23, as in 6:12, but on a higher plane and in a dialectically more refined connexion than there. But what is the limitation planted in freedom by God? I would not say, like Lietzmann, that 10:17, with its at first surprising emphasis upon communio—the idea of the Lord’s Supper applied to the Church—is a digression from the main thought. Rather the plain steering direct to the leading thought is the explanation of the verse. The communion with Christ is in Paul’s view not to be severed from the communion in the Church. In 10:24 occurs the same injunction that is placed right at the beginning of the similar section Rom. 14–15. Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s. Paul has already said what is vital upon this in 8:8–13. His concern for the Corinthian gnostics and what they understood by freedom then prompted him to make this further digression 9:1–10. We must now go back to those verses in the eighth chapter. Making use of that freedom has in itself no positive value. To eat questionable meat does not commend us to God; to refrain from eating signifies no deprivation; to eat is no gain (8:8). But there is more than one “weak one” in the Church, who has not the right knowledge, the freedom and superiority which spring from the right conception of the idea of God. He makes the eating of that meat a matter of conscience. A regrettable restriction, certainly. As we saw, Paul does not conceal what he thinks of the matter. But how unimportant is this deficiency compared with the fact that he is a brother for whom Christ died (8:13). The use that the Pauline gnostic makes of his freedom may become a stumbling-block to him, may cause him to follow his example without the approbation of his conscience (8:9–10), and through that he will perish (8:11). What Paul thought about conscience was this: our own good conscience gives us no charter, does not preserve us from temptation, which only God can do. But in the alien good conscience, in the personality of another, as it is constituted, with its possibilities and limitations, we meet the inviolable majesty itself, the insurmountable check set upon our liberty. The Church may not be torn asunder. We know why: its communion is identical with the communion of the body and blood of the Lord (10:16, 17). Hence, he who sins against his brother by such maltreatment of another’s conscience sins against Christ (8:12). And hence, Paul continues (8:13) impetuously: If my eating is an offence to my brother, I will eat no flesh to all eternity. Mention has already been made of the pastoral advice which Paul gives upon the basis of this whole reflection (10:25–30). The conclusion of the section (10:31–33) shows that the question of sacrificing to idols, and its answer, was really only the occasion, but not the theme. Whether ye eat or drink, do all to the glory of God. With the vexatious modern idea that the whole of life, including eating and drinking, must be, and can be, a service of God, this, of course, has nothing to do. Paul is not concerned with eating and drinking and the other activities of man, but with using or not using the freedom that is founded in the knowledge of God. What is done in the freedom of God, really in the freedom derived from God, in the knowledge that is no puffing up of man but is his being known of God (8:3), that is done to the honour of God. In this sense, the Corinthians are enjoined to aim at giving no offence (10:32); what is meant is that they are not, through excessive religious confidence, to be the cause of stumbling-blocks, but to be bearers of the testimony of God, and for God’s
