Protestantism began with Luther finding grace in the Epistle to the Romans where before he had only seen law. Basically every truly Christian experience can be summed up by saying that grace was found in a place where previously only law had been seen. The Reformation was almost entirely fueled by the discovery of grace in Paul's letters. For 1500 years Paul's letters were read as ethical guideposts, as encouragement to do right. And I still read them that way today. In the Evangelicalism where I have lived my life nothing is more common than take a passage from Paul, to give a teaspoon of grace from it and then drop a ton of requirements and dos and don'ts. These are always made to be not requirements for salvation or for God's love but things that all Christians or at least all "good Christians" want to do. Leaving all of us who don't want to do them excommunicated, or at best on the outside looking in. I have heard so much of these explanations of Paul that they are all that I can see when I read him. I know that there is grace there and believe me I have looked for it, but either by my nature or my upbringing I can only find ethics there.
So, a long time ago, I discovered grace where I wasn't looking for it. When I couldn't find Christ in Paul and John, I found Him in Moses and Jeremiah and Hosea. And it is real grace that He brought me, and while that grace is sufficient, I am not satisfied. I want to reclaim the Homeland of Grace from the Law, or rather the pseudo-law.
From 1 Corinthians 6: All things are lawful for me, but all things are not helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. Foods for the stomach and the stomach for foods, but God will destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God both raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power.
Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For “the two,” He says, “shall become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him."
This, I think, is a classic example of Pauline grace that we have turned into moralizing. A typical sermon on this passage contains about two minutes of extolling evangelical freedom, then "edifying the brother" is brought in and we get about thirty minutes of advice on how to stop sinning and live right and build the kingdom. And honestly, that is what it looks like when you look at it. That is in some sense the natural interpretation of this passage. But is that who Paul is? Is that what the New Testament is? It may be kind of stepping out on a limb but I am convinced that Paul is talking about more than morality here. Yes, the Corinthians were sexually immoral, but I think that Paul was trying to strike deeper than that. And I will risk being wrong and sounding like an idiot to find grace and hopefully show it to you. So...
The first thing that it seems to me is wrong with the moralizing interpretation is that it underrates the significance of the way Paul begins this discourse. "All things are lawful for me," We read this as if it says, "Yes Christ has set you free so that you receive no punishment for your actions", and if he was talking about human law that would be the meaning. But for something to be lawful in the sense of the divine law, not only carries no punishment but it carries positive blessings.
From Deuteronomy 28: “Now it shall come to pass, if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all His commandments which I command you today, that the Lord your God will set you high above all nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, because you obey the voice of the Lord your God:
“Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the country.
“Blessed shall be the fruit of your body, the produce of your ground and the increase of your herds, the increase of your cattle and the offspring of your flocks.
“Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.
“Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out.
“The Lord will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before your face; they shall come out against you one way and flee before you seven ways.
“The Lord will command the blessing on you in your storehouses and in all to which you set your hand, and He will bless you in the land which the Lord your God is giving you.
“The Lord will establish you as a holy people to Himself, just as He has sworn to you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God and walk in His ways. Then all peoples of the earth shall see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they shall be afraid of you. And the Lord will grant you plenty of goods, in the fruit of your body, in the increase of your livestock, and in the produce of your ground, in the land of which the Lord swore to your fathers to give you. The Lord will open to you His good treasure, the heavens, to give the rain to your land in its season, and to bless all the work of your hand. You shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow. And the Lord will make you the head and not the tail; you shall be above only, and not be beneath, if you heed the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you today, and are careful to observe them."
Paul was absolutely immersed in the Old Testament and he could not fail to realize that saying something is lawful is saying that the person who does it calls down all of these blessings on himself. Paul knew full well that in Christ all the promises of God are absolutely brought to us. "All things are lawful for me" is another way of saying that "Everything that I do, whether they seem good or bad to us, wise or foolish, right or wrong, whatever in fact they are in themselves, the best things that I do and the worst, are all drowned in the merits of Christ." Can we really believe for even a second that Paul is trying to get us to compare our supposedly good actions, the ones that we think edify our brother and build the kingdom, and are described by Isaiah as "filthy rags" with our worst actions, say sexual immorality, and prefer the one to the other? How can any of our actions be helpful when the one who did not spare His Son but gave Him for us all freely gives us all things? What help do we imagine we can add to "freely gives us all things"? No, Paul's intention must be very different from that.I am no Greek scholar but look carefully at the English version. We read it as if it says, "Not all things are helpful" meaning "Some things are helpful and some things are not." but what it says is "All things are not helpful", "all things are UNhelpful", in fact all of our attempts to contribute only take away from.
I would like to suggest that the key to understanding this passage is found in Paul's reference to food, or as many older translations appropriately put it, "meat". Basically from the moment Paul began preaching to the gentiles, maybe even earlier, the church was embroiled in a controversy over food, basically over the kosher diet and whether or not you could be a Christian without being a jew. And the very mention of meat here should bring this aspect of the context to mind. If this is to do with the Judaistic controversy then when he says "I will not be brought under the power of any" then what he is thinking of is pseudo-legal so called "Third use" restrictions being placed on the freedom that Christ has bought for us. So whether these restrictions come as straight-up judaism or under the pretenses that modern Evangelicalism prefers the moralism they are beating us down with are exactly what Paul is teaching against, as he indicates by reminding us that both food and the stomach, that the entire order of creation to which such restrictions refer, no matter how spiritual their disguise, is temporary and insignificant compared to the freedom of the Gospel.
Now the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God both raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power.
Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For “the two,” He says, “shall become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.
It is a fact that there was considerable sexual misconduct in the church at Corinth, as there is in any group of human beings, sadly we know all too well that however "sanctified" someone is or seems to be that where sex is concerned they are often no better than the most unrefined sinner. And sure, Paul was trying to clean that up, I grant that. But it must be granted to me, that Paul's mind was never far from the Hebrew prophets. And when they mention adultery, yes they are reproving the sexual habits of the Israelites, but they are aiming much deeper and I can't believe that Paul isn't as well.
From Hosea :
2 Bring charges against your mother, bring charges; For she is not My wife, nor am I her Husband! Let her put away her harlotries from her sight, And her adulteries from between her breasts; 3 Lest I strip her naked And expose her, as in the day she was born, And make her like a wilderness, And set her like a dry land, And slay her with thirst. 4 "I will not have mercy on her children, For they are the children of harlotry. 5 For their mother has played the harlot; She who conceived them has behaved shamefully. For she said, 'I will go after my lovers, Who give me my bread and my water, My wool and my linen, My oil and my drink.' 6 "Therefore, behold, I will hedge up your way with thorns, And wall her in, So that she cannot find her paths. 7 She will chase her lovers, But not overtake them; Yes, she will seek them, but not find them. Then she will say, 'I will go and return to my first husband, For then it was better for me than now.' 8 For she did not know That I gave her grain, new wine, and oil, And multiplied her silver and gold-- Which they prepared for Baal. 9 "Therefore I will return and take away My grain in its time And My new wine in its season, And will take back My wool and My linen, Given to cover her nakedness. 10 Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, And no one shall deliver her from My hand. 11 I will also cause all her mirth to cease, Her feast days, Her New Moons, Her Sabbaths-- All her appointed feasts. 12 "And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees, Of which she has said, 'These are my wages that my lovers have given me.' So I will make them a forest, And the beasts of the field shall eat them. 13 I will punish her For the days of the Baals to which she burned incense. She decked herself with her earrings and jewelry, And went after her lovers; But Me she forgot," says the Lord. 14 "Therefore, behold, I will allure her, Will bring her into the wilderness, And speak comfort to her. 15 I will give her her vineyards from there, And the Valley of Achor as a door of hope; She shall sing there, As in the days of her youth, As in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt. 16 "And it shall be, in that day," Says the Lord, "That you will call Me 'My Husband,' And no longer call Me 'My Master,' 17 For I will take from her mouth the names of the Baals, And they shall be remembered by their name no more. 18 In that day I will make a covenant for them With the beasts of the field, With the birds of the air, And with the creeping things of the ground. Bow and sword of battle I will shatter from the earth, To make them lie down safely. 19 "I will betroth you to Me forever; Yes, I will betroth you to Me In righteousness and justice, In lovingkindness and mercy; 20 I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness, And you shall know the Lord.
Hosea 3 Then the Lord said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by a lover and is committing adultery, just like the love of the Lord for the children of Israel, who look to other gods and love the raisin cakes of the pagans.
To Hosea, to all the Prophets, Adultery is used to bring home Idolatry to us. The comparison of marriage to covenant faithfulness with God is constant in the Old Testament but yet more frequent in Paul. So how does this relate to Paul's controversy with the Judaizers? I think that the key is to remember that in Israelitish idolatry it was almost never an issue of replacing Yahweh with Baal. It was always an issue of supplementing Yahweh with Baal of completing Yahweh with Baal. And Paul does nothing more than transpose the same theme into another key. The major issue in the Apostolic church, and every church, is of supplementing Christ's righteousness with our own, of completing justification with what we call sanctification, of wearing fig leaves on top of the robe of Christ's righteousness, finishing grace with law.
And that brings us back to the problem that I have always had reading Paul and with modern Evangelicalism. It isn't that there is no grace but that grace has been buried under the law. Our minds are so bent towards law that the tiniest amount swamps the superabundant grace. Our sin nature sucks up law like a sponge and is repelled by grace. There is no question of having them in the right proportion because the only way to get any grace at all is to get grace alone. And it is true that the moralizers can explain Paul better than I can. They can write commentaries where every passage fits together in a harmonious and logical whole, and I can only grab one passage and stubbornly say that it is about evangelical freedom whether it fits or not. But it is about evangelical freedom whether it seems to be or not.
