In Chapters 8 and 10 of the First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul dealt with the question of eating meat offered to idols. Father George Montague S.M. explained: “Missionaries know what a struggle it is to wean recent converts from their former habits or lifestyles, which might involve superstition or idolatry. Converts would like to be Christians, but the old ways still have their attractions.”
In a similar way, Father Montague wrote, our culture offers “a dazzling array of alternatives to the Christian faith, options to which poorly instructed faithful are vulnerable, often because some of those alternatives are a hybrid with some Christian elements.”
In Corinth, he said, some converts “even found a theological rationale for participating in the sacrificial banquets of pagans. Others, perhaps the Jewish converts, are shocked that Christians would even accept an invitation to a nonbeliever’s meal at home, since the meat served may have been offered to an idol.”
The “theological rationale” was expressed in two mottos: “all of us possess knowledge” (8:1) and “an idol has no real existence” (8:4).
St. Paul responded to the first motto by stating: “This ‘knowledge’ puffs up, but love builds up” (8:1). He responded to the second by pointing out that demonic forces were behind the idol images (1 Cor. 10:14–22).
Catholic author Stephen K. Ray comments: “The arrogant Corinthians were claiming to have knowledge, but a little knowledge can often be more dangerous than none at all. The ignorant man is usually not proud. On the other hand, a man who imagines he has great knowledge can become proud and arrogant.”
But, Ray says, “a man who has full knowledge is again humble since he understands that everything comes from God—even the knowledge he possesses. True knowledge is not the accumulation of facts and information alone; it is the humble acknowledgment that we only know because God first knew us, and in God’s mind love is the most important.”
St. John Chrysostom said, “The source of all the Corinthians’ problems was not their lack of knowledge but their lack of charity and lack of concern for their neighbour. This was the cause of the divisions in that church, the cause of the vanity which was blinding them and of all the disorder for which the Apostle has censured them and will censure them. He will often speak to them about charity, and try to clarify, so to speak, the fount of all good things.”
St. Paul wrote, “Not all possess this knowledge. But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled” (1 Cor. 8:7).
Preaching to the faithful in the 4th century, St. John Chrysostom invited them to consider the historical context of the Letter to the Corinthians: “They still tremble before idols, Paul says. Don’t think of the present situation, where several generations of your forebears were Christians. Carry your mind back to those earlier times. Imagine a time when the Christian gospel was just beginning to be proclaimed, when pagan impiety still held sway, fires burned on the altars, sacrifices and libations were being performed, and the pagans were in the majority. Imagine people who had inherited paganism from their ancestors and were descendants of pagan fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, people on whom these demons had inflicted much suffering. Consider what their situation would be when all at once they converted, how they would tremble in fear at the demons’ designs. … Suppose someone who follows Jewish custom considers himself unclean if he touches a corpse. If he should see others touching a corpse with a clear conscience and then do the same without sharing their understanding, he would be defiled. This is what these people [the “weak” in Corinth] were experiencing at that time.”
St. Paul declared: “If food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble” (1 Cor. 8:13).
A Bible commentator wrote, “The exercise of Christian love is more important than the exercise of Christian liberty. To assert our freedoms in a way that puts others in danger is to sin against charity.”
St. Augustine said, “It is the very law of Christ that we bear one another’s burdens. Moreover, by loving Christ we easily bear the weakness of another, even him whom we do not yet love for the sake of his own good qualities, for we realize that the one whom we love is someone for whom the Lord has died.”
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