Hays – First Corinthians

When we read Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, we are literally reading somebody else's mail. This letter was originally addressed to a fledgling mission church, a small band of people in the ancient Mediterranean city of Corinth. No doubt the Corinthian Christians of Paul's day would have preferred that this correspondence not be broadcast to the ages, for it portrays them in an unflattering light and divulges a number of things that they might well, with the wisdom of hindsight, wish to have kept private. Fortunately for us, however, the letter was preserved, widely circulated, and ultimately canonized as a part of the New Testament. Thus, we are given a privileged glimpse of one particular tension-filled moment in the life of the first generation of the Christian movement. The letter, though not written to us, allows us to overhear a fascinating argument in progress.

What are we to do with the information gained by eavesdropping on this conversation between the agitated apostle and his refractory followers? How does it speak to us? Paul, after all, was not aiming to write timeless truth or even a general theological treatise; rather, he was giving direct pastoral instruction for one community that faced a specific set of problems in the middle of the first century. For example, was it permissible to eat meat sold in the market if the meat came from an animal sacrificed to a pagan god? What does it mean to take Paul's advice on such a topic, addressed to ancient people in a very different world almost two thousand years ago, and to declare it to be Scripture? What hermeneutical maneuvers permit us to read these particular pastoral instructions as God's word to us? We are so accustomed to thinking of 1 Corinthians as part of "our" Bible that we seldom see the full complexity of this interpretive problem.

To discern how the word comes to us through this ancient letter, we must be alert to discovering imaginative analogies between the world of the letter and the world we inhabit. While recognizing that 1 Corinthians is not written to us, we learn to read it as though it were. We project ourselves imaginatively into the faraway life of the Corinthian congregation and thereby learn to see our own lives in strange and challenging new ways. The act of preaching (or teaching) such a text in the church requires us to create a metaphorical overlap between then and now and to listen expectantly for God's truth. Since it is God's truth for which we listen, however, our work of interpretation must never be confused with mere imaginative cleverness on our part; we can read someone else's mail as God's word to us only because God has chosen-oddly, we might think-to convey ongoing guidance to his people through the finite medium of this specific text. So the church confesses, and so we preach. Interpretation, then, always involves a dialectical process of distancing ourselves from the text enough to see its foreignness and then allowing the text to draw near again and claim us.