Paul's Four Commandments for Church Life

Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, as we have it in the New Testament, closes with a brief set of injunctions on how the Jesus community in Corinth should carry forward.  Working from several English-language translations and paraphrases, however, II Corinthians 13:11 seems confusing.  The translators and paraphrasers render the verse in quite different ways.  For example:

• American Standard Version (ASV): "Finally, brethren, farewell. Be perfected; be comforted; be of the same mind; live in peace: and the God of love and peace shall be with you."


• New Revised Standard Version (NRSV): "Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you."


• Today's English Version (TEV): "And now, my friends, good-bye! Strive for perfection; listen to my appeals; agree with one another; live in peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you."


• The Message (MSG): "And that’s about it, friends. Be cheerful. Keep things in good repair. Keep your spirits up. Think in harmony. Be agreeable. Do all that, and the God of love and peace will be with you for sure. Greet one another with a holy embrace. All the brothers and sisters here say hello."


• Laughing Bird Paraphrases (LB): "Sisters and brothers, I finish my letter by wishing you every joy and offering these last words: ........- get everything on track; ........- take courage from what I’ve said; ........- seek consensus; ........- live in peace."

To take just the first injunction: being perfected (ASV), putting things in order (NRSV), striving for perfection (TEV), keeping things in good order (MSG), and "getting everything on track" (LB) are not all the same thing at all.  Wright's Kingdom New Testament translates this injunction as "put everything in order."  The old J.B. Phillip's translation takes a different tack, "live in harmony."

The other injunctions are similarly variously translated or paraphrased.  Taken together, however, we come out with something like this:  (1) Paul called on the brothers and sisters in Corinth to get their act together and move from a disorderly life together to one that is more orderly.  (2) He enjoined them to pay attention to his advice to them and take comfort from his words.  (3) They were to reach a meeting of the minds on the key issues facing them in their life together.  They were to live in peace with each other.

We might call these Paul's Four Commandments for Church Life and summarize them more briefly as: [1] strive for a clean political process; [2] pay attention to scripture; [3] work for consensus; and [4] in all things behave peaceably.  Do these things, and the God of peace and love will be manifest among you.  That is, first, as a church works through differences it should do so openly and without political games, attempts to coerce members into a forced agreement, or dividing into contentious factions.  Second, just as Paul called on the Corinthians to heed his advice, which should have carried the weight of apostolic authority for them, so we should pay special attention to the Bible as our source of authoritative guidance.  Third, the goal of the members of the church is always to seek a meeting of the minds where points of difference or even conflict occur.  We can take this to mean that church members seek to understand each other's viewpoints and concerns, seek to discover consensus in their differences, and not allow differences to  destroy their deeper unity in Christ.  Finally, the fourth commandment sums up the intent of the first three: live in peace.  Where churches follow these four commandments, the Spirit will be clearly present in them.   Amen.

Wrestling with Scripture

If the Bible is a collection of human documents infused with the possibility of the Spirit but still speaking out of the human condition, it can seldom be taken at face value.  We have to discern the Word in the words.  Take, for example, II Corinthians 6:14 to 7:1, which reads in the Good News (a.k.a. Today's English Version) translation:

14 Do not try to work together as equals with unbelievers, for it cannot be done. How can right and wrong be partners? How can light and darkness live together? 15 How can Christ and the Devil agree? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? 16 How can God's temple come to terms with pagan idols? For we are the temple of the living God! As God himself has said,

“I will make my home with my people
and live among them;
I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.”
17 And so the Lord says,
“You must leave them
and separate yourselves from them.
Have nothing to do with what is unclean,
and I will accept you.
18 I will be your father,
and you shall be my sons and daughters,
says the Lord Almighty.”

7:1 All these promises are made to us, my dear friends. So then, let us purify ourselves from everything that makes body or soul unclean, and let us be completely holy by living in awe of God.

The passage advocates a radical dualism, an absolute separation of the sheep from the goats.  The Message translation (here) avoids using the words "unbeliever" and "believer," but translates "unbelievers" in verse 14 as "those who reject God" and 15 as those who "mistrust". That is, the passage enjoins those who accept and trust God (i.e. have faith) to separate themselves radically from those who reject and mistrust God (i.e. have no faith).

This may have been good advice to new Christians in the second century.  It is not good advice to mainline Christians in the 21st century.  Our spiritual struggle is, at least in important part, with dualism, absolutism, prejudice, and ideologies of exclusion.  Our calling is to love our neighbors of other faiths, persuasions, cultures, orientations, ethnicities, and beliefs as best we can—to build bridges rather than walls.  This passage seems to demand that we tear down the bridges and reinforce the walls.  What to do?

First, we would do well to acknowledge that the Spirit speaks through scripture to each generation in the language of that generation.  Separation may well have been as much good news to early generations of Christians as it is bad news for us today.  Second, however, we should consider how this passage speaks to us today.  It is a warning that there are ways of thinking and behaving that are incompatible with faith and that there are people who think and behave in those incompatible ways.  That is true enough.  But, should we refuse to work with them and separate ourselves from them?  It depends on who "they" are and what we mean by "separation".

Suppose we seek to understand this passage in a non-dualistic, pluralistic way.  "They," then, become those who behave unjustly, oppressively, and with prejudice against others.  "They," may well be taken as those who fail to display the fruits of the Spirit described in Galatians 5:22-23.  speaking honestly, we are all complicit in that failure.  "They," we must finally admit are us (thank you Pogo).  It is fair to say that we are being called by the Spirit in our age to separate ourselves from behaviors rather than people, attitudes rather than neighbors, and ideologies of separation rather than people who think differently.  Verse 7:1, then, makes a whole lot of sense for our time.  Acknowledging that we cannot be pure, we are still being called by the Spirit to purify ourselves as best we can of such things as dualism, absolutism, prejudice, and dogmas of separation—among other things such as fear and hatred.  This is a life long calling and task.

If Only

Because of what Christ has done for everyone, we are careful not to assume that people are nothing more than what our eyes and ears tell us about them. In the past we made that mistake with Christ, but we now know a lot more of him than our eyes or ears alone could detect. Whenever anyone unites themselves to Christ, something new is created. What that person was becomes a thing of the past; they get a whole new start in life! This is all God’s doing! God wants to be at peace with us, and so sent Christ to bring about reconciliation. Now God is sending us to continue this same work of reconciliation. To put it another way, what God was doing in and through Christ, was rebuilding the trust and love that are supposed to flow in both directions between the world and God. To achieve that, God agreed not to hold against us anything we had done in the past. This, then, is the extraordinary message of reconciliation which we are now given the job of sharing. We are a bit like a negotiation team who is authorised to issue the appeal on God’s behalf. We represent Christ in the world, and so on his behalf we beg you to hear this message and accept the generous peace deal that God is offering. The way of reconciliation is on the table before you: you’d be mad to turn your backs on it! Even though Christ had never been sucked into sin like us, God lumped him in with us, so as to make it possible to lump us in with him. United with him, we can become examples of all that God considers to be right and true.

II Corinthians 5:16-21 (Laughing Bird Paraphrase)

These verses are one of those places in the New Testament that articulate what Christian faith is about with particular clarity.  It reminds us that faith in Christ teaches us to see things in a new way.  That faith opens a hidden depth in life for us.  It is creative, and the thing faith creates is us.  It is about reconciliation and peacemaking, about love and trust.  Faith connects the dots between the One Who Is Beyond, the Spirit That Is Present, and us.  It inspires us to share those connections with our neighbors.  Amen.