Introduction
There is an AWFUL lot of primal religion that is kicking about in Corinth, and in these few verses here in 1 Corinthians 8 Paul is addressing believers who have soaked up way too much of it from the atmosphere they are breathing in that city.
And in dealing with those believers who are bung full of that idolatrous culture in their thinking, Paul gives us a model of how to relate to such a polytheistic and pagan culture as believers in the God of the Bible.
It is significant Paul’s choice of words represents the contrast between the way the world they lived in saw things and the distinctive and different way Bible believing Christians see things as they live in that culture … look how he puts it:
ἀλλ᾽ ἡμῖν εἷς θεὸς ὁ πατὴρ
But to us/ for us there is one God the Father
And then mirroring that about the Son Paul says (with the ‘but to us/ for us from the start of the verse carrying over):
καὶ εἷς κύριος Ἰησοῦς χριστὸς
And (to us) one Lord Jesus Christ
This is OUR position as believers in Jesus which we hold distinctively in the multi-cultural, multi-faith, primal religion embracing society in which WE live.
But in which there are held to be may other ‘lords’.
And in this sort of culture, here’s what it is important for us to hold and to communicate to such a society as this: Jesus’s uniqueness and His relationship to Creation.
There is radical identification with the mindset and radical difference from it in what Paul is saying there … but we’ll see that illustrated here as soon as we’ve cleared up the question as to who these ‘lords’ Paul is talking about are, and what they are about.
1) What are these ‘Lords’?
1 Corinthians 8:5: “For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’), 6 yet for us there is but one …”
a) The dictionary definition of the word that Paul chose here
κύριος (kurios) 'lord: master'
lord, master. This can be a title of address to a person of higher status, "lord, sir"; a master of property or slaves; or a NT translation of the H0151 "Lord" or H3368 "LORD", that is "Yahweh," the proper name of God in the OT
This isn’t helping us much here because if that’s what Paul is saying, the rest of the Bible says he’s a heretic.
It is what Mormons say about there being other (for real) ‘gods’ … but the Bible says in Galatians 4:8“Formerly when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods at all.”
Paul’s position there is simply that Polytheists worship beings that are by nature no gods at all
And of course if Paul was saying there really are multiple ‘gods’ in v. 5 that contradicts directly what he says either side of that in vv. 4 & 6.
So what’s going on?
Context is everything when it comes to what a word means in a particular text, so to make sense of this we need to ask what was going on in the religious context of first century Corinth that Paul was speaking to, and how this word was used there.
b) The religious context in first century Corinth
The city of Corinth had a long history as a Greek city state.
Strabo, Appian, Apuleis, Plutarch, Pausanius, and other ancient writers who refer to and describe ancient Corinth.
Once a flourishing center of Greek culture and commerce, Corinth led a league of city-states in rebellion against the expansion of Roman dominance over the Aegean Peninsula in 146 BC.
The Romans overwhelmed the Greek resistance and chose to make an example of Corinth by razing the city, killing the male population, and selling the women and children into slavery. The city was left desolate, and the Greek period of Corinth’s history ended.
From 146–44 BC, Corinth remained almost completely deserted, with only a small number of Corinthian descendants lingering among the ruins. Not all of the buildings were destroyed but Corinth ceased to exist as a city state.
Recognizing the strategic location Corinth once held, Julius Caesar ordered the colonization of Corinth in 44 BCE, a hundred years after its destruction.
The new colony was populated by Romans and quickly began to regain its former prominence among the cities of the region, firmly under Roman control.
By the time of Claudius, Corinth had become the capital city of the province of Achaea, and it was during Claudius’s reign that Paul arrived in the city, nearly a hundred years after its refounding as a Roman colony, now with strong maritime and overland trading links with a very much wider world.
The city itself seemed to be of largely Roman culture (although archaeological evidence from graffiti shows Greek was still very widely spoken) and the villages in the hinterland retained a strongly Greek culture and belief system.
But all this re-founding of the city itself drew in all sorts of religious influences, and religious cults devoted to Greek and Roman deities and mystery religions, and there was a strong adherence to Egyptian gods at Corinth which attracted visitors to its impressive temples and regular festivals.
In that setting, Dorvan Tyler tells us:
“The early Corinthian
Christian community was composed of individuals converted from Jewish, Greek, or Roman ethnic backgrounds who had previously worshiped the Jew-
ish God or Greek, Roman, and Egyptian gods or any combination of them.
As these converts joined the Christian community, they brought beliefs and
practices from their former religious experiences with them. The blending of
differing religious backgrounds caused behavioral conflicts between members
of the Christian community, especially between converts from a polytheistic
background and those from a Jewish background.
“Converts struggled to leave the religious constructs of their pasts as they joined the Christian community, showing that Christianity in Corinth was not formed in a vacuum but in constant interaction with the religious constructs that surrounded it.”
(Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council --Online Archive National Collegiate Honors Council (2016) “Flee from the Worship of Idols”: Becoming Christian in Roman Corinth Dorvan Byler Kent State University at Stark,)
c) The Biblical context of these ‘lords’ of the Nations
So in that context we have a pretty clear idea what these ‘gods’ and ‘lords’ are all about, and we can be pretty clear about which Scripture applies to them.
The gods and lords in 1 Cor 8:5 are identified here as having "no real existence" (1 Corinthians 8:4).
In this way, Paul could say that there exists one God and one Lord hand-in-hand with the existence of other gods and lords in other people’s minds … but only in their minds!.
The Greek word θεοῖς (theois) occurs only twice in the NT (here in 1 Corinthians 8:5 and in Galatians 4:8).
The point being substantiated is that these deities have no real existence since they do not subsist in God's nature.
They are , in fact, not gods by nature (Galatians 4:8) … whereas in Paul’s BIBLICAL theology, he describes Jesus as the One Who (Philippians 2:5-7) “… though he existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a slave, by looking like other men, and by sharing in human nature.”
Now that word ‘form’ there has a dictionary definition: “form, outward appearance; nature, character”
The form is the shape … the thing you can trace around with a pencil.
Not at all obvious how the shape of God could be the meaning here.
The outward appearance of God is described for us in the Old Testament … the Jesus we hear of walking around Galilee teaching the people doesn’t remotely resemble that description.
So we’re left with the sense that ‘form here’, μορφή (morfē), refers to His ‘nature’.
Moreover, verse 6 makes it clear that even though or as the NASB states, "although" or in spite of the fact that He possessed equality with the Father, Jesus did not cling to the prerogatives of His deity.
As to His NATURE, then, Jesus is God.
And in the Biblical context, as distinct from the thought world the citizens of Corinth inhabited, there is Biblically only ONE God.
2) The Uniqueness of the One
First of all, it is the uniqueness of the Father and the Son that Paul is going to emphasise, so:
1 Corinthians 8:4 : “So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: we know that
‘An idol is nothing at all in the world’ and that
‘There is no God but one.’”
That’s our unequivocal stance, says Paul.
There is only one true living God.
But there are two things to say about that here.
a) The Father is the One God
Firstly we need to be clear the Old Testament lays the foundation for the doctrine of Christ’s deity firmly on the uniqueness of God the Father
In Deuteronomy 4:35 in Moses’s discourse which Deuteronomy 1:3 ff. tells us took place: “In the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses proclaimed to the Israelites all that the Lord had commanded him concerning them. 4 This was after he had defeated Sihon king of the Amorites, who reigned in Heshbon, and at Edrei had defeated Og king of Bashan, who reigned in Ashtaroth”
In that context Moses explains to the Israelites the relevance of all the great signs and miracles God had shown them the desert:
“You were shown these things so that you might know that the LORD, He is God; there is no other besides Him.”
That gets backed up in the great prototypical Hebrew creed, the Shema in
Deuteronomy 6:4 - “Hear, Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!”
And then it was in tension with the pagan religion they were battling in their days that the great Old Testament prophets spoke in the same terms:
Take Isaiah 44:6 for example: “Thus says the LORD, the King and Redeemer of Israel, the LORD of Hosts: “I am the first and I am the last, and there is no God but Me.”
So in the Old Testament there is no question that God the Father was the One True God.
Now, secondly then, the interesting thing in the New Testament is that the Father’s divine uniqueness gets carried right over into the way the New Testament talks about the Lord Jesus … in just the same way … mirroring the language used about God the Father in the language used to describe the divine uniqueness of God the Son.
b) The Son (Jesus) is the ONE Lord
So, in the words of 1 Corinthians 8:5-6
“even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’), 6 yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.”
All those Egyptian and Graeco-Roman deities they were dancing around in Corinth … v. 4 says they were ‘nothings’, they (quite literally) ‘are not in the world’.
And although there are these λεγόμενοι θεοὶ … καὶ κύριοι (that is ‘so-called ‘gods’… ‘and lords’) kicking about their culture, there is just one Father God and just one Lord God, Jesus Christ.
There is not a distinction between ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ there … there is a construction there known as parallelismus membrorum which says the same thing in two separate ways in two parallel elements in the sentence for emphasis.
One God and Lord, the Father and the Son.
So there’s the first angle of approach to a primal religious culture and it involves being radical in difference from that culture … holding to the fact that there is one true living God and that God is One God in two persons, the Father and the Son.
We’ll see next week the One God is three persons but two is as far as we’ve got so far!
The second angle of approach Paul takes in a primal religious culture lies in an area of radical identification Paul identifies.
3) The One God’s relationship to Creation
You must have noticed how primal religion attributes deity to created things rather than the Creator God Who is above all, forever praised?
Paul addresses this in a more systematic way in Romans 1:21-26 where he says first of all that there’s enough to see in Creation to get people thinking there’s a God and set them looking for revelation of God’s truth but …
“ For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is for ever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts …” and then Paul goes on to describe how this leads to indulging same-sex attraction and so on.
It’s v. 25 that is so very telling for us:
“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is for ever praised. Amen.”
That is EXACTLY what happens when you slip BACK into primal religion too.
And Paul therefore realises that when you are in that sort of primal faith culture you need to have a strong theology of Creation!
Here it comes …
a) God the Father’s relationship to Creation, v. 6 a
For God the Father’s relationship to Creation you go right back to Genesis - the book of the beginning - and there you find a list of all the things God made by Himself out of nothing, by the sheer authority of His word of command.
Why do you think those particular things that were created are listed out there in Genesis … when that is not a comprehensive list of everything that was created, but covers just certain things that can be observed in Creation?
Well, it just so happens that the things listed are just the sort of things that the peoples of the Ancient Near East actually tended to worship … and the Creation accounts in the early chapters of Genesis list them all as not being gods but as material things that were created by the one true living God.
So here in 1 Corinthians 8:6a we read:
“yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live …”
There’s the second major theme of the Old Testament’s contextual theology.
God the Creator from Whom all things came is also by virtue of His action in creation God the Sovereign Lord … our Suzerain in Ancient Near Eastern vassal treaty language … FOR, Whom we live.
So here is what 1Corinthians 8 models for us as an essential element in the Christian witness to a primal religious culture …
God the Father is the one and only one
i) From Whom are all things
All things are ἐκ (ek) 'out from' … they originated in Him.
What you’ve got there is pure vintage Genesis 1-2 aged in the casks of Old Testament history and poured neat onto the pages of the New Testament.
It is strong theological drink and it is ESSENTIAL to a Biblical understanding of life, the world, the universe and everything.
God?
He fundamentally before everything else MADE us.
Relating Him to the culture we now live in, we simply have to both reason for and announce the truth of this foundational fact of the faith.
But there’s an equally foundational one that arises out of it … and this really starts to scratch where a primal-religion culture tends to sorely itch.
It is out of God’s Creatorli-ness that we find our purpose.
ii) For Whom we exist
That ‘for Whom we exist’ there is expressed in the text as
καὶ ἡμεῖς εἰς αὐτόν
You have to scratch your head over that expression just a little bit for a similar expression in English, but it comes out as something like:
‘for the use or service of’, as in John. 6:9; Luke 9:13 and 1Corinthians 16:1.
Let’s summarise this:
He made everything in Creation … so He’s the greater One and therefore the One to be worshipped, the Creator not the object.
And the Maker makes things for a purpose, for His service and worship … our point and our PURPOSE.
A clear idea about these things … identity and purpose … often seems to be very lacking in primal cultures and is certainly lacking in our reprimalised society …
Our point and our purpose as designed by our Maker is to serve and worship Him living in and caring for His world!
But here comes today’s big question: where does Jesus fit in to all this?
b) God the Son’s relationship to Creation, v. 6b
You’ll find Liberal Theology (which is in many ways the thin end of the reprimalisation wedge) clinging to heresies.
You’ll find a host of Christian deviations departing from essential truths while striving to remain a respectable veneer of orthodox respectability.
And as they get away from God’s revelation of His truth in His Word and deviate from that they always do damage to the doctrines … the essential doctrines … of Jesus.
But look at what Paul’s saying here …
1 Corinthians 8:6b
“for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live”.
i) Through Whom are all things,
Here’s the thing.
Just as it was through God the Father that all things came, Paul insists that the One Lord Jesus Christ was active in JUST THE SAME WAY in this Divine act of Creation.
Check the language there:
δι᾽ οὗ τὰ πάντα
That genitive construction there means: through, by means of … the One Lord Jesus Christ.
And more than that … probably comprised WITHIN that … it is through Him, Jesus, that we actually exist.
ii) Through Whom we exist
δι᾽ οὗ τὰ πάντα καὶ ἡμεῖς δι᾽ αὐτοῦ
He also is the One by means of Whom all things exist and by means of Whom we do too.
The Deity and Divine Creator-liness of the Son is nailed tight to the Deity and Creator-liness of the Father.
So as His creatures we worship Him our Creator, and we do not worship other (more passive) parts of His Creation.
And this is born out in other passages of Scripture like John 1 where the embodiment of truth and reason (‘the Word’, identified as being the Lord Jesus Himself in John 1:14-17) is described as both being God (John 1:1) and being the One “Through him all things were made”.
OK.
So where does this leave us as we try to work out how to both hold to and to hold out the truth about Jesus in our culture which is moving away from revealed religion to trying to work out life, faith and spirituality without reference to the revealed truth of God … God’s Word written … the Bible?
Conclusion
The first obvious thing to notice in what Paul teaches us here is the call to meet the confusing complexity of primal religion with the simple truth of the uniqueness of the One … the one true living God.
You see, in dealing with the diversity of belief in a reprimalised, pagan and idolatrous culture, you’re dealing with an awful lot of confusing complexity.
Keeping it simple is the path that Paul models for us:
God is not many but one … one God known to us in the three united but not identical persons of the Godhead.
The second obvious thing Paul models for us in dealing with this issue arises from the fact that reprimalised people (like their older cousins primal faith people) make a very great deal of Creation … although they don’t always acknowledge a Creator.
They tend to worship the stars and planets above their heads and the features of the planet around them and beneath their feet.
Meeting them on that ground displays a radical identification with their worldview, while the clear proclamation of the unique One-ness of the Father and the Son challenges the primal worldview by way of radical difference.
You’ll notice I’m referring back there with those terms to a set of sermons earlier this year that involved a close look at the way Paul addressed the Areopagus in Athens in Acts chapter 17.
How are we to relate the Bible’s teaching about Jesus as God the Son in the context of OUR culture?
- Firstly, by avoiding paganism’s confusing complexity and uncertainty on the basis of what (primarily) God has revealed in His Word for cultural contexts that are similar to ours …
So, we go about this by holding forth the total uniqueness of the persons of the Father and the Son as the One True Living God, and
- secondly by holding out their relationship to their Creation and the purpose and the identity this confers on humanity, which is for all those who turn back to God, trusting in Him alone for the forgiveness of their sin and pinning all their hopes in life and in death to the Cross of Christ the King.
If you’d like to just crystallise in your thinking what characterises primal religion and also find a summary of how to engage with it this link will take you to a University of Missouri presentation on the subject that I wish I’d discovered before I wrote this Deep-Dive into these verses!
