Our friend, quiavideruntoculi, whose comments I always enjoy, event when they are criticisms directed at my views, has essayed the view that Paul’s comments were directed at Christians with a mature spirituality; I think if one examines Paul’s letters, one can see that Corinth was little different from ourselves now, and that whatever might have been the case for individuals, the church, even though it was in one city, was quite as badly divided as our different churches are now – and equally prone to hypocrisy and scandal.

Paul spent about eighteen months in Corinth before going off the Ephesus, where he spent about three and a half years. It was whilst he was there that reports reached him that things were not faring well in Corinth. He wrote a first letter to them, which has not survived, but in which he seems to have warned them against keeping company with those who were sexually immoral, but in this letter, he has much with which to reproach them.

He had picked up that there were factions within the church which claimed to be following the way of one of the Christian leaders, and he told them in no uncertain terms that there was unity only in Christ. In the three years Paul had been absent, the Corinthians had managed to succumb to the sins of spiritual pride. They had also succumbed to hypocrisy. There was a serious case of immorality in the church (5:1), and that some of the Corinthian saints were taking their brothers to court (6:1ff.). In addition, Paul received questions concerning marriage (7:1), virgins (7:25), foods sacrificed to idols (8:1ff.), spiritual gifts (12:1ff.) and more. The church was, as we might now say, dysfunctional.

Its members had become arrogant – ‘puffed up’ with pride, knowing better than the Apostles themselves, adapting the message they had received so that the Jews and the Gentiles would receive it with greater ease; in the process they had grown rich. As he would tell them in a second letter it was not for profit that the believer preached the word of God, but for the truth of the salvation contained in Christ crucified. He asked them to remember their own humble origins and adjured them to boast of nothing save Christ, and Him crucified. If that made them unpopular with the Jews and the Gentiles, so much the worse for the latter. It was time for Paul to send someone, in this case Timothy, to sort them out.

For those in our society who claim the Church is obsessed with sex, it is only doing what Paul had to do with the Corinthians – and for precisely the same reasons: it is we, as it was the Corinthians, who were obsessed with it, and it was a distraction from the Christian life they were supposed to be leading.

Although the Corinthians were suing each other in the pagan courts, they were quite happy for one of their members to be living with his father’s wife; this is the sort of hypocrisy with which we are all familiar; we compound for the sins to which we are inclined by condemning those to which we are not; has someone transgressed a rubric? That we protest; are they supporting abortion? Well let us not be hasty, who are we to judge? All sorts of things are, he reminds them, lawful, but not to be done by Christians. Perhaps the laws in Corinth allowed the kind of incest being practised, or some of the other sexual sins he mentions, but that did not mean Christians should practice them; not everything which was lawful was moral in a Christian sense.

He reminds the Corinthians, as we need reminding, that the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit, and we should not demean or degrade it in unworthy and immoral actions. Again, not doubt such and such an act is not forbidden to married couples, but does it celebrate love and creation?  Does it bring the couple together, or is it an act of selfishness in which one uses the other, and where the Holy Spirit is absent?  if so, even if it is lawful Christians should reject it.

Whether it is marriage, divorce, sacrificing to the idols (in our case of contemporary wisdom) or doubting the central tenets of the faith such as the resurrection, we are the Corinthians, as we are even when it comes to the solemnity with with the Eucharist is celebrated. We lack that love which Paul celebrates in 1 Corinthians 13. Until we recover it, and until we listen to what Paul told the Corinthians, we shall continue to be like them.