A Study of 1 Corinthians (2)

 

Introduction (2)

Identity, Ethics, Ethos

Integrity flows out of identity. Paul knows this which he makes identity a major benchmark of this letter.  Whoever or whatever we acknowledge as ultimate and the community of those similarly committed make us who we are. Paul knows this too and in a world with everyone jostling for more honor and avoiding shame he knows the church must be a community in which this fierce pursuit of honor (upward mobility noted above) may be resisted and true honor found in the downward nobility embodied by Jesus Christ. In his church Paul wants us to learn whose we are, who we are, and what we aare to do in the world.

This is not easy though. Identity is not static, gained once-for-all and ossified in place. Rather, the many and changing roles we play, responsibilities and opportunities we have, challenges we face, experiences both good and bad, all vie to be determiners of who we understand ourselves to be. Identity is a project we must pursue each day as well as a reality that orders our lives, This is the dynamic of “the already and the not yet” of biblical theology in the idiom of identity. The latter, then, is both dynamic (replete with possibilities) and contested (filled with obstacles).

Paul knows this and responds in light of Christ and his mission to the Gentiles (which he believed to be the mission of the whole church – boundary crossing, other-focused, inclusive outreach to the world). To do such a thing, he knew a community distinguished by a clear set if beliefs and a supple matrix of practices and ethics which forms a distinctive community was needed. Especially in the face of the powerful and pervasive imperial ideology of Rome, the church’s chief competitor for identity-formation.

Paul wants this church to establish healthy patterns of both appropriate social integration in this Roman world and the boundaries critical to developing the group identity within which we can offer “strong identity performances.” Participation in the Roman world (and or own!) is a matter for case-by-case examination and not a blanket approval or condemnation.

The issue of this letter, then, is determining the appropriate social presence of the church in the Roman world. How we live (ethics) and the quality of our community (ethos) carry the meaning and credibility of the gospel we proclaim. It is Christ, of course, who determines all of that. But for Paul, as for Bonhoeffer in his day, and we in our day, the question of “who Jesus Christ is for us today” is the question that both focuses and challenges our ethics and ethos, and, in turn, our identity.

To use a silly word picture, Paul hopes that in the Corinthian church identity, ethics, and ethos will walk arm in arm in the same direction and at the same pace so our journey together carries coherence and credibility. Walking out of sync, at different speeds and or different directions soon gives the lie to a gospel proclaiming our unity and the world’s hope in Christ.

Structure

Tucker uses the three rubrics of identity, ethics, and ethos to outline 1 Corinthians and that structure seems plausible to me, so I will follow it here. It looks like this:

-First, after the letter opening (1:1–9), Paul expounds matters of the formation of social identity (1:10—4:21), especially focusing the Corinthians’ attention on who they are in Christ.

-Secondly, ethics (5:1—11:1). Here individual behavior is placed in the context of the new identity we have in Christ which Paul has just laid out.

-Third, in 11:2—16:12 ethos is up for reflection. The quality of a community shaped by the new way of thinking and acting earlier set out is parsed by Paul.

 

In sum, in this letter

“identity is composed of several factors that, when combined, contribute to one’s understanding of oneself, including the group memberships that affect that understanding. Second, ethics refers to the individual choices and behaviors made by members of the Christ-assembly based on their prior self-understanding. Third, ethos refers to the resultant character of a particular group based on members’ ethics and patterns of behavior.” (Tucker, Reading 1 Corinthians: 439)

Two disparate but important concluding items before we turn to the letter itself:

-Easily the most troublesome Roman identity Paul needed to deconstruct and reconstruct through Christ relates to Roman masculinity. A masculine gender identity reconceived through him is the burden of a great deal of Paul’s thinking here.

-Christian life is not about particular behaviors or beliefs but about particular discernments of appropriate witness in each new context we meet.