Tag Archives: 1 Corinthians

Love in the Time of COVID: St. Paul on Masks

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To mask or not to mask. In the summer of 2020, that is the question.

In the US, the question is strangely rather political, with many Americans perceiving government requirements to wear a mask as a violation of their freedom: they should be free to go outside without a mask if they so choose. Meanwhile, while no one actually enjoys wearing a mask, the evidence showing their effectiveness in reducing the spread of the coronavirus has convinced many other Americans to wear a mask either for their own safety—or out of a sense of duty to others.

Benjamin Franklin once said that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” The tug-of-war between freedom and security has defined much of American politics, and it seems to define the contours of the mask debate as well.

But for a Christian, neither freedom nor security is the highest value. We worship neither the self nor the state, and so our answer to whether to mask or not must be based on our most deeply held value: knowing, worshiping, and serving God through, in, and as Jesus Christ.

So: would Jesus wear a mask?

To answer this question, one chapter from Paul’s letters will be very instructive. Paul faced many controversies of his own as he sought to spread faith in Christ throughout the eastern Mediterranean. In Corinth, a city in southern Greece, a fight broke out over something that seems trivial today: can Christians eat meat that’s been used in pagan religious practices?

This is the topic Paul takes up 1 Corinthians 8, a short chapter that neatly summarizes the Christian attitude towards freedom, responsibility, and society in general. Let’s take a brief look at the text and then see what it can teach us about masks in 2020:

Now concerning food sacrificed to idols: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.

Immediately Paul sets the stage: there is a tension between knowledge and love. Of course, if you ask anyone today whether they wear a mask or not, whichever choice they prefer, they will be sure that their choice is right, and they often denigrate those on the other side. Paul knew all about this “knowledge [that] puffs up” but he called his friends to a different way of life. He continues:

Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “no idol in the world really exists,” and that “there is no God but one.” Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as in fact there are many gods and many lords— yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

Paul is skeptical of arrogant claims to knowledge, yet Paul does know some things. He knows the gods represented by idols are not real—so, if meat is offered as a sacrifice to such a god, nothing in fact has actually happened. For Paul, then, there is no concern about eating this meat. It is food, like any other food. The religious ceremony it’s been involved with was a deception, but so long as the one who eats it does not participate directly in the ceremony, it does no damage to their relationship with God. Now, Paul concludes the chapter:

It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. “Food will not bring us close to God.” We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if others see you, who possess knowledge, eating in the temple of an idol, might they not, since their conscience is weak, be encouraged to the point of eating food sacrificed to idols? So by your knowledge those weak believers for whom Christ died are destroyed. But when you thus sin against members of your family, and wound their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall.

Religious knowledge is not the final word, and Paul now returns to his original theme. Even if he know that idols are in fact just wood or stone, that they are not real gods, some of his fellow Christians may not be so sure. Perhaps they only recently converted, or are more superstitious than he is. And if they see him eat this meat sacrificed to idols, perhaps they will be confused and scandalized. What if this tempts them to eat this meat, which they believe really does link them to the god of the idol? This could cause them to either abandon the Christian faith, or perhaps remain in the church while feeling guilty, compromised, and spiritually divided.

For Paul, this possibility finishes the argument: protecting others’ faith, conscience, and peace of mind is more important than having a nice meal. So, Paul will never eat meat sacrificed to idols—even though he himself sees nothing wrong with doing so. In short, Paul’s love for his fellow believer outweighs his desire for freedom.

Paul sums this up nicely himself: “take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.” Liberty in life is itself good, but it is not the only or highest good. We must look out for others, especially the weak. Indeed, Paul tells us, we must love others more than our own liberty.

Now, surely, if Paul is willing to give up meat—at a time when famines were not rare and quality food often hard to come by—just to safeguard the gentle consciences of others, then he has certainly given us food for thought about wearing masks today, hasn’t he? Because, if wearing a mask—an action that does me no harm, besides causing some mild discomfort—might actually save someone else’s life, then Paul answers the question of whether to wear a mask or not with unambiguously. My freedom to avoid mild discomfort is not as important as another’s life. Period.

“Freedom” is too often just another way of saying “I do what I want!” But Christian faith is built on just the opposite: we are called to abandon selfishness in service to others. In this way, we draw closer to each other, and to God. We see this throughout the Gospels: Jesus heals and feeds without charging a dime; he teaches for free too, and when the going gets tough, he takes on the violence of the state himself, refusing to run away or to put anyone else in harm’s way.

Jesus never insists on freedom—but he always insists on love. Not the superficial, saccharine love of romance novels, but the spiritual love of sacrifice for the good of others. This divine love asks not what I can get from someone, but rather what they need from me. And this is precisely what Paul teaches us in 1 Corinthians 8 (and he continues the theme in chapter 9).

Again: “take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.” If you don’t want to wear a mask because it’s hot outside, you don’t like the way it looks, or it irritates your skin, just remember that this tiny sacrifice might keep someone else out of the hospital—or the grave. When such a tiny sacrifice of liberty yields such a great harvest of love for another, the Christian’s duty is, I think, perfectly clear.

TL;DR: Jesus wants you to wear a mask!

Plumbing Eternity, Getting Caught in the Depths

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chrysalisApart from healing and feeding people as he traveled through Galilee and Judea, Jesus also spent a lot of time teaching people. Sometimes this meant interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures–explaining or reinterpreting the Law, for example, or quoting and applying passages from Prophetic literature. But frequently, when people ask him a direct question, they ask him about one specific thing: eternal life. “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” is a frequent refrain (Luke 18, compare John 3, etc.). Jesus spends a good deal of time, then, explaining what humans should do to attain this state of eternal life. But eternal life itself remains more or less un-explained. When Jesus does reference it, he almost always refers not to the state of one human being existing eternally, but to what he calls the “Kindom of Heaven” or the “Kingdom of God”. And when he does start to explain and define this, he invariably speaks not directly, but in parables: “the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed…”

Considering how important both Jesus’s followers, and Jesus himself, seemed to regard eternal life, it’s a bit curious that the term remains so nebulous, so undefined. His followers are exhorted to seek eternal life, to live lives of love that can lead to it, but what it is exactly is never really offered. This has left a gap in Christian thought in which a wide range of ideas has entered. A whole range of concepts and definitions have been put forward to explain what eternal life will be like. Some are sophisticated and deeply grounded in philosophy, as per the ideas around the beatific vision, explored especially in Roman Catholic Thomist thought. Others are more folklorish and popular, such as the trope about playing ping-pong with grandma in heaven. The trouble is that none of these ideas seem to have a firm foundation in Scripture, all seem to owe more to secular and even pagan ideas, cultures, and values than anything identifiably Christian (the beatific vision easily brings to mind neo-Platonism, while many lay Christians’ conception of heaven looks more like the pleasures of the Elysian fields of Greek polytheism than anything in Scripture).

That Jesus is himself quiet on the details of eternal life is itself something worth considering. As mentioned above, when he does say anything about it, it’s always indirect, constructing analogies through parables. Here, in this space, I’d like to offer one way of making sense of this unwillingness of Christ to say more, when, on other topics, he seemed quite happy to be explicit, as, for example, in his ethical instructions around wealth or caring for those in need (see e.g. Matthew 25).

What reason might there be for Jesus, if he came to reveal the Truth to humankind, to be so silent on what seems to interest us humans most of all? If achieving eternal life is so important, shouldn’t we be told more about it? It has been common for Christian authors in the past to respond to such questions by an appeal to the importance of faith: if we knew the truth fully and directly, such an argument goes, we would not choose it for the “right” reason: what use would faith be, if we simply knew what was at stake? But surely this is a churlish argument at best, and morally outrageous at worst. If God, manifest in Jesus, wished to convey to humanity the importance of living righteously, wouldn’t God be willing to use any tool, any information, to convince us to mend our ways? Isn’t faith, ultimately, to be commended only because it is necessary here and now, only because of our incomplete knowledge and deficient faculties? As Paul says: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor 13:12).

Faith is necessary now, Paul seems to be saying, not because living in faith is somehow better than living in knowledge or wisdom, but rather because there is something about the way we human beings are now that makes knowledge impossible. In other words, Paul is making a point that is–to employ a perhaps over-used and often-abused term–rather postmodern. He is making it clear that knowing everything about the world–in this case, what it would mean to inherit eternal life–is not just a matter of cataloging sensory experience and then organizing it rationally. Such an attitude towards knowing assumes that human beings can basically know everything there is to know, can come to have knowledge about any and all modes of being, if only we pay close enough attention and organize our conclusions rationally and systematically.

Paul is pointing to the possibility that there may be limits to what kind of information, generally, and what modes of being, more specifically, a given kind of knowing being might be able to access, process, or make sense of. The human way of sensing and knowing, that is, may have limits. This is a point that will more formally be made by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason and  will go on to be a central plank of his critical philosophy, itself providing the spring-board to what comes to be known as post-modern thought: that is, philosophy that questions the assumptions of modernism, the mode of thought launched (to oversimplify intellectual history drastically) by Descartes and Locke.

Well, I’ve clearly gotten well ahead of myself, and have meandered far beyond the boundaries of Scripture. But I think it’s necessary to make these connections, so that we can see what Paul is really up to. What can, at first, look like a somewhat sloppy, semi-mystical phrase turns out to be, upon closer inspection, a serious epistemic point. And Paul is not alone. Scripture frequently points to the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of formal limits on human ways of knowing–that is, it frequently offers a critical epistemology, or indeed a critique of overly confident epistemologies.

So: what if one of the states of being that human knowledge is unable to make sense of is the state of being called “eternal life”? That would make sense in at least two ways. Exegetically, all of the sudden, the fact that Jesus refrains from any kind of clear-cut discussion of eternal life looks to make a lot of sense. Secondly, it also may, somewhat paradoxically, tell us something about eternal life, even in the moment we announce our necessary ignorance of it.

This latter point is actually contained within the quote from 1 Corinthians above. Paul says that we see darkly now, that we have limited knowledge now–but he also says that, “then”, that is, once eternal life is present or has been achieved, we will see “as face to face”. He seems to be suggesting that the epistemic limits he points to in the first clause will themselves be transcended in the second. So how does this tell us something about what it might mean to attain eternal life? It seems that Paul is telling us there will be a transformation, from the kind of knowing being we are now–one with serious limits to our knowing–to a kind of being who will know differently, and indeed, better, perhaps even perfectly.

This idea of transformation is not limited to this one passage. Paul will himself say, later in 1 Corinthians: “we will not all die, but we all will be changed” (1 Cor 15:51). Likewise, too, Jesus in the third chapter of the Gospel of John says that we must be “born again” or “born from above” in order to enter the Kingdom. Whatever this may mean, it certainly suggests a serious transformation of our way of being.

Now, some may see such a move as a way of shutting down the question: by saying that eternal life will involve a transformation of some kind from the kind of knower that we are now to a different kind of knowing–that is, that an ontic change in our mode of being will effect an epistemic change in our mode of knowing–it may seem like we are just kicking the can down the road, avoiding hard questions. I’d like to conclude by providing two examples which may show, formally, the logic of this move. Pointing to analogies does not provide a shatterproof argument, but it may allow us to understand a previously-made argument with greater clarity and sophistication.

First off, we can quote Paul again, who speaks about the change between being a child and being an adult, in the sentence which precedes our original quote from 1 Corinthians 13: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.” Imagine trying to explain certain adult experiences to a young child: sexual attraction, or the stresses of the workplace, or the responsibility of paying bills. We can, of course, use language to present these experiences. But there is no way to really understand what it’s like to feel sexual attraction, occupational stress, or the burden of bills, until one actually undergoes those experiences. One has to be the sort of being who goes through those experiences to really understand any linguistic expression about them.

Another, more radical example is that of the caterpillar and the butterfly. We talk about the process through which the former becomes the latter as one of transition or growth, but in many ways, the process actually involves the death of the caterpillar and the birth of something totally different. Yes, they have the same DNA, but the two beings are constituted completely differently. The body shape, the legs, the mouth, the digestive systems, even the eyes and other sensory equipment of each are completely different. The caterpillar builds a cocoon which becomes a chrysalis–and within this, the caterpillar is effectively dissolved, and its matter reorganized into a totally new mode of life: the butterfly.

Now, presumably, neither the caterpillar nor the butterfly has what we humans would call self-consciousness. But imagine that they did. For the caterpillar, the chrysalis is really a death. Its consciousness would end as its brain and sensory organs are dissolved. However, it could be the case that the butterfly, upon its birth from the chrysalis weeks later, might look back upon the caterpillar’s existence as an earlier stage of its own life–just as I do, in fact, look upon my life as a 5-year old as an earlier stage of my own identity, even though the life I live and the consciousness I now have would be totally unrecognizable to that 5-year old version of myself–who has, in a real if figurative sense, died.

We Christians may be eager to imagine eternal life as our current identities, or at least some best-version of them, living on for eternity. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus was referring to. He was calling for us all to endeavor to be changed–to be re-created into the true of image of God, that which we were meant to be but which we fail to attain in this fallen life. Imagine that a prophet-caterpillar came to a colony of caterpillars and promised them renewed life in the chrysalis. Imagine that they all rejoiced in the thought that they would enter the chrysalis and then live as caterpillars for eternity. Of course, that’s not what the chrysalis is, what the chrysalis does. It will transform them. Looking back from their butterfly-future, they may identify with their past selves, their caterpillar-selves. But first, they must be transformed into something radically different.