Power and Wisdom Contradicted

1 Corinthians 1.18-25

When Paul writes his first letter to the Corinthians, he writes to a church that has begun to abandon the Christian way of life introduced by Paul and slide back into the pre-Christian paganism from which it came.  That paganism was all-pervasive in Corinth.  Of all the Hellenistic cities of the first century, Corinth was the most cosmopolitan.  It’s citizens and traders came from every part of the ancient world, and so did its religion.  The city possessed temples and sacred shrines by the bucket-load, most of them devoted to the so-called ‘mystery’ religions of the ancient world, which taught that one could (and should) escape the limitations of this earthly life through the accumulation of a secret ‘knowledge’ or ‘wisdom’.  The mystery cults took a very dim view of ordinary life, the life associated with the body, daily toil and ethical responsibility towards other people.  All these things were regarded as a prison in which the human spirit had somehow become trapped.  Our destiny, the mysteries taught, is otherwise.  Each of us possesses, deep inside us, a spark of light from the divine being who created the universe.  Through the accumulation of secret knowledge (gnosis in Greek), one could aspire to escape that prison and ascend to the world of pure spirit, where the shackles of flesh and toil and care for one’s neighbour would no longer be of any consequence.  In that world of pure spirit, the initiated could expect to be re-united with the divinity from which they had become separated by their ‘fall’ into material existence. 

Most of the Corinthian Christians had been converted in precisely this religious environment.  They took to the new faith with great enthusiasm.  But after Paul left them to continue his missionary journey through Asia Minor, many of the converts began to exhibit signs that their conversion had only been skin-deep.  Instead of reinterpreting the meaning of their world and lives through the story of Christ, and especially of his crucifixion and resurrection, the Corinthians started to do the opposite: to reinterpret the new religious experience of Christianity according to the gnostic imagination they had grown up with as pagans.  As this gnostification  process continued apace, the Corinthians came to some very alien conclusions about Christ and his ways.  Christ, they said, had not become a human being and had not died on a cross.  Christ had only appeared to die, for he was really a demiurge, a lesser deity who had come from the world of spirit to impart a secret knowledge about how to escape the burdens of suffering and death.  As a being of pure spirit, he could not have taken on real human flesh, and therefore he could not have really suffered or died.  To think otherwise, they said, was nothing but foolish superstition. 

This fundamental distortion of Paul’s teaching also had its ethical consequences in the Corinthian community.  The body no longer mattered, and neither did the bodies of other people.  All that mattered was the accumulation of secret knowledge (gnosis again) of spiritual things.  Thus, in the end, one could do anything one wanted to with one’s own body of those of others: you could unite your body to a prostitute or sleep with your own mother; you could eat and drink as much as you liked, even if others went hungry; you could ignore the needs of the weak and vulnerable.  Since it was only the spirit that mattered, you could do anything you like.  The ethical inheritance of Judaism and the ‘ten commandments’, those norms that governed what one could legitimately do, or not do, in one’s bodily life, were to be regarded as part of the problem, part of the prison which kept us from being reabsorbed into the divine life.

Perhaps that little bit of social and religious background will help you see why Paul writes as he does.  The wisdom of the cross of Jesus, he says, is nothing like this secret ‘wisdom’ being taught by the gnostic sects.  It is not a wisdom that separates the body and the spirit, seeing the former as false and the latter as true.  Neither is the wisdom of the cross a wisdom that exults elite societies and specialist knowledge at the expense of the real, fleshly, needs of the weak and vulnerable.  On the contrary, the revolutionary message of the cross is one that seeks to transform and convert all that Greek religion and philosophy would see as wise, and all that Jewish religion would see as powerful and worthy of praise. 

To that form of Greek religion that denigrates the body and exults the mind or spirit God has spoken an embodied word:  the Son of God becomes a human being, and suffers, and dies, in order to show how much God loves the weak and the most vulnerable, in order to save all who the world counts as nothing.  To that form of Jewish religion that looks for signs of naked power, for a messianism that would establish the rule of God through the smashing of God’s enemies, God has spoken a word of covenantal submission:  the power of God achieves its purposes through the humility and condescension of vulnerability and weakness.  The ignominy of God on a cross is, paradoxically, the mode by which the ‘nothings’ of the world find themselves risen with Christ in glory.  Thus, as Paul would have it, the wisdom of God is not the same as Greek wisdom, and the power of God is not the same as the most dominant Jewish notions of power.  In the word of the cross a new kind of wisdom and power is revealed, a wisdom that counts love as more important the knowledge, and a power that counts patient compassion as more important than getting one’s own way.

Of course, the ‘secret knowledge’ approach of the gnostics is not dead in the world.  The advent of Christianity did not destroy it.  The Corinthian controversy continued well into the fifth century of the Christian era.  Most of the early creeds, and the New Testament canon itself, were formulated in order to protect and distinguish the Christian confession of faith in the crucified God over against the gospel of pure spirit and mind preached by the gnostic sects.  And it didn’t end there.  The gnostic instinct is as alive today, in our own time, as it ever was.  It is with us in that theology that seeks, continually, to absorb the singularity of the Christian faith into a form that is commensurate with the philosophy or science of late modernity.  It is with us in that Christianity which exalts the idea that we can have a ‘personal’ relationship with Jesus that bypasses the teaching and tradition of the church or a scholarly appreciation of Scripture.  It is with us in the syncretism of new age religion or secret brotherhoods, which seek to absorb the uniqueness of Christian language and history into a vague pot pouri of universal ‘faith’ or ‘spirituality’.  It is with us in the longing for a return to the time when the church could exercise its power through the instruments of state, for that time when ideology became more important than basic care and compassion for other human beings.

Whatever our gnostic tendencies, and we all have them, we cannot claim to be genuine followers of Christ unless we are willing to accept that the power and wisdom of God are revealed in the literally pathetic figure of Christ crucified.  Unless we are willing to redefine our notions of both power and wisdom according to that history and parable, then I worry for our future, whether ‘political’ or ‘spiritual’.  For the power of God to save and liberate has nothing to do with hunting down terrorists and beating up our enemies; and the wisdom of God has nothing to do with the accumulation of esoteric theories or personal religious experiences.  Power and wisdom are defined, for Christians, by the strange and paradoxical figure of a Jewish man nailed to a Roman torture stake, truly a stumbling block for the ‘powerful’ and foolishness to all who consider themselves ‘wise’. 

In this Lenten season, I would therefore encourage us all to throw caution to the wind and become the kind of ‘fools’ who can change the world as Christ did, not by power or wisdom (as they are conventionally understood), but by patience, kindness, condescension and humble service; and by the fearless proclamation of the kingdom where fools can become saints and nothings the very children of God.