At LeTourneau University, we are committed to scripture as the final norm for moral reasoning and the fountain of the virtuous life. This means we often bring our ethical questions to scripture, and rightly so. But sometimes scripture seems to resist our questions, refusing simple solutions but drawing us into an ongoing dialogue. Sometimes scripture even asks questions of us. I want to suggest that this is precisely what happens in a famous passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: that Paul’s aim is not only to answer the question the Corinthians put to him but to ask one of his own—not what may we eat, but what kind of people are we becoming.[1]
Much of Paul’s letter is devoted to a series of topics that members of the Corinthian church had apparently raised to him. Paul raises these in sequence: marriage, spiritual gifts, a financial collection. Among these topics, none is given more space than the question of idol-food. Three long chapters, 1 Corinthians 8–10, address this question about sacrificial food.
For the members of the Christian group in Corinth, this was a matter of pressing social and theological concern. A substantial portion of food available in the cities of the Roman Mediterranean had passed through sacrificial rituals involving the traditional polytheistic gods. Many Christians were alert to the ways that consuming this food could align them with idolatry. This was true for both Jewish followers of Jesus, who had often navigated similar concerns before following Jesus, and gentile followers, who rejected their traditional gods and worship when they converted and had to reckon with the many ways that those cults were woven into the fabric of daily life. For some members of the small church in Corinth, food produced by or otherwise associated with pagan temples, sacrifices, or other rituals was a moral threat, tantamount to idolatry, jeopardizing their adherence to the one true God. For others, faith in God in Christ brought the astonishing, liberating realization that the gods of the nations were nothing (1 Cor 8:4). This entailed a freedom to eat sacrificial food, perhaps even as an opportunity to proclaim their non-existence.
Given the urgency of the problem and the apostle’s lengthy response, one might expect Paul to reach a clear conclusion, resolving the underlying theological problems and directing a concrete ethical action. And Paul does offer specific advice. He instructs the Corinthians to eat without objection the meat sold in the city’s marketplace or served at a dinner (1 Cor 10:25–7). They should eat, that is, unless someone explicitly notifies them that the food has a sacrificial origin, in which case it is better to abstain (1 Cor 10:28).
But readers of 1 Corinthians have not agreed about what all this adds up to. What is Paul’s overall orientation to the consumption of food implicated in polytheist sacrificial rituals? Should it be avoided as complicit in idolatry, or does Christian freedom make it essentially licit? Scholars have taken radically different perspectives. One group of scholars emphasizes Paul’s theology of Christian freedom and argues that Paul ultimately regards food as an “indifferent” (adiaphoron), even if one sometimes ought to accommodate the scruples of more sensitive believers. Paul concludes, they think, that sacrificial foods can no longer hold any true power for the one who is in Christ.[2]
Other scholars have interpreted Paul as taking a much harder line. They see him as a typical exponent of the anti-idolatry polemic evident in much Second Temple Jewish literature, which strongly rejects any association with the rituals or cultural associations of pagan gods.[3] Interestingly, some of these stricter readings in recent decades have come from those with church experience in parts of the world where worship of cult images, ancestors, and other spirits remains a mainstream practice, and where churches must negotiate practical questions of participation in family rituals, festivals, and other events that are embedded within their wider society.[4] For these interpreters, Paul’s warning against idolatry is not a theoretical paradigm for moral choices as it is for many Western readers but pastorally urgent guidance for Christian practice.
Many other passages of Paul’s letters are subject to scholarly debates, of course, but in the case of 1 Corinthians 8–10, the debate reflects the text’s essential character. Both interpretations find genuine support in 1 Corinthians 8–10. The laissez-faire Paul appears especially in chapter 8, where Paul goes out of his way to agree with several statements that might have been slogans of the Corinthians who asserted their freedom to eat without compunction. He invokes a strongly monotheistic confession to endorse the argument for the nonbeing of idols (1 Cor 8:6). And he follows this argument to its conclusion that food is not spiritually decisive, does not “present us to God,” and that its consumption or non-consumption is apparently indifferent, that “we lack nothing if we don’t eat and we profit nothing if we do eat” (1 Cor 8:8).[5]
Other parts of the argument pull in a different perspective. In chapter 10, Paul recounts the sins of the Exodus generation as a warning to his readers. At first, this homiletic exhortation seems disconnected from Paul’s main argument, but he puts a fine point on it: “Flee from idolatry,” he flatly commands (1 Cor 10:14), reintroducing concerns about the worship of false gods as an important component of the moral question of eating. Partaking of a sacrifice is not merely a neutral social gesture but an act that co-opts the eater into partnership in the altar. Although Paul previously endorsed the nonbeing of the pagan gods, he now characterizes them as “demons” (daimonia), who are in fact the recipients of pagan sacrifice and with whom one can become a “partner” (1 Cor 10:20).[6] Food and drink associated with these demons is incompatible with the eucharistic food and drink of the Lord. All of this suggests that Paul sees real moral danger in consuming sacrificial food.
Scholars have devised various methodologies to reconcile Paul’s ambivalence. Many have carved 1 Corinthians into multiple source letters, alleging that portions of chapters 8–10 came from different letters.[7] Others have supposed that the different socio-cultural valences of meat explain Paul’s meaning.[8] Still others have invoked classical rhetorical techniques that, they claim, can explain Paul’s ambivalence.[9] All of these approaches, however, meet serious difficulties in 1 Corinthians 8–10.
I wonder whether, instead of squeezing Paul’s discussion into an enforced uniformity, we might accept the argument’s apparent ambivalence. Perhaps Paul’s primary intention is not to finally resolve the ethical question by endorsing the principles of one side or the other but to shape a certain kind of Christian and a certain kind of community. At points, Paul himself seems to acknowledge his own argument’s ambivalence, as when he explicitly recalls his agreement about the nonbeing of idols while presuming the dangerous presence of the gods as “demons,” making little effort to resolve the evident ambivalence (1 Cor 10:19–20).
Throughout the argument, Paul asserts love’s fundamental importance. In fact, he introduces the whole topic of idol food with a famous contrast between knowledge and love—knowledge, although doubtless good, is always incomplete and tends to “puff up,” while love “builds up,” producing something immeasurably more solid and important (1 Cor 8:1). Paul emphasizes that the question of whether to eat ought to be controlled by defense and support of fellow Christians, even if that means self-sacrifice (1 Cor 8:10–13). The long excursus in chapter 9 defending Paul’s apostleship, which many scholars have judged extraneous, is used as a concrete example of Paul’s willingness to forfeit his “rights” for the good of those he loves. And the conclusion of the whole section returns to this central theme: Everything is to be done for God’s glory, and this means trying to seek the advantage of others rather than oneself (1 Cor 10:31–33). “Be imitators of me,” he concludes, “just as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). The emphasis is not on correctly adjudicating ethical implications of eating or avoiding idol food but on the type of people his readers are becoming as they imitate Christ.
Paul regards love and deference not as mere qualifications of a defined ethical position but as the essence of his response to the Corinthians. To this end, the argument’s ambivalence is not a defect but a strategy. Paul employs it to reorient the Corinthian Christ followers to an ethical calling more fundamental than their dispute. He does not diminish the serious questions that underpin the Corinthians’ ethical debate, but he does set those questions on a different footing. Above all, he seeks to shape a people characterized most markedly by unity, humility, and mutual love. Paul’s ambivalence in this passage offers us an example and a reminder. When scripture seems to resist our appetite for tidy answers, it may be asking us better questions. To treat scripture as the final norm for moral reasoning is not only to seek its verdicts but to submit to the ways it seeks to form us, together, into people who bear the likeness of Christ.
References
[1] The historical and exegetical details that underpin this reflection are worked out in my “Meat and Early Christian Identity” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2026).
[2] Landmark twentieth-century examples in English include Hans Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians: A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1975), 149; F. F. Bruce, 1 and 2 Corinthians, NCBC (Oliphants, 1971), 79; Charles K. Barrett, “Eidōlothyta Once More,” in On Paul: Aspects of His Life, Work and Influence in the Early Church (T&T Clark, 2003), 27–35.
[3] See, for examples, Paul Gardner, The Gifts of God and the Authentication of a Christian: An Exegetical Study of 1 Corinthians 8–11:1 (University Press of America, 1994; repr. Wipf & Stock, 2017), 176–90; David E. Garland, “The Dispute over Food Sacrificed to Idols (1 Cor 8:1–11:1),” Perspectives in Religious Studies 30, no. 2 (2003): 173–97; Gordon D. Fee, “Είδωλόϑυτα Once Again: An Interpretation of 1 Corinthians 8-10,” Biblica 61, no. 2 (1980): 172–97.
[4] See, for example, Khiok-Khng Yeo, Rhetorical Interaction in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10: A Formal Analysis with Preliminary Suggestions for a Chinese, Cross-Cultural Hermeneutic (Brill, 1995); Alex T. Cheung, Idol Food in Corinth: Jewish Background and Pauline Legacy (Sheffield Academic, 1999), 304.
[5] Translations are the author’s.
[6] The Greek word is more neutral than our word and was commonly used of superhuman beings.
[7] Relatively little of the most important scholarship is translated into English, but helpful overviews can be found in John Coolidge Hurd, The Origin of 1 Corinthians, 2nd ed. (Mercer University Press, 1983), 41–43; and Yeo, Rhetorical Interaction, 78–80.
[8] Gerd Theissen, “The Strong and the Weak in Corinth: A Sociological Analysis of a Theological Quarrel,” in The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth (Fortress Press, 1982), 121–43; Gordon D. Fee, “II Corinthians vi. 14–vii. 1 and Food Offered to Idols,” NTS 23, no. 2 (1977): 140–61; Ben Witherington III, Conflict and Community in Corinth: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians (Eerdmans, 1995).
[9] See especially Joop Smit, “1 Cor 8,1–6: A Rhetorical Partitio. A Contribution to the Coherence of 1 Cor 8,1–11,1,” in The Corinthian Correspondence, ed. Reimund Bieringer, BETL 125 (Leuven University Press, 1996), 577–91; John Fotopoulos, “Arguments Concerning Food Offered to Idols: Corinthian Quotations and Pauline Refutations in a Rhetorical Partitio (1 Corinthians 8:1–9),” CBQ 67, no. 4 (2005): 613.