Ethics and Eschatology in 1 Corinthians

Apologies for the slow rate of production on this blog of late. I think this has been my least productive period blog-wise in five years or so! Partly it is because I am writing furiously in other places (Anglican Media Sydney for example) and partly because ... well every blogger tends to have doubts about the value of the medium from time to time, right? Anyhow, here's a draft intro to my paper for this year's Moore College School of Theology on 1 Corinthians. My brief is to write about Ethics in 1 Corinthians. Here's what I have so far:

...for the present form of the world is passing away.

(1 Cor 7:31)

It would be not unreasonable to suspect that the Paul’s ethical teaching in 1 Corinthians is more ad hoc than integrated. After all, isn’t it the case that the pressure of living in the latter days means that Paul’s ethical teaching orients the person away from the present world which is fading - to the point of denigrating it? Although Paul claims that ‘your labour in the Lord is not vain’ (1 Cor 15:58), he has been suspected of preaching a gospel which debases life in the present because ‘the time is short’ – and so the ethical material of the letter is merely a series of improvisations, a matter of staving off the trouble and chaos of to schema. This particular epistle appears to offer support for a long-standing critique of Christian (and specifically Pauline) ethical thought by which it has been charged with having an other-worldly eschatological vision to the end that this-worldly activity is greatly diminished and even deprecated. The claim is that, at its worst, Christian ethical teaching instructs believers in a kind of destructive apocalyptic hatred of the world in favour of the longed-for glorious future. For Paul, Christian ethical action is merely a staving off of the problems of this life, not a taking of it seriously on its own terms. ‘Better by far’, he says to the Philippians, ‘to die and be with Christ’.

This essay will examine the claims of two very different modern thinkers who have attacked Pauline Christianity on this front. Hannah Arendt claims that the triumph of Christian eschatology over the world of the Greeks and the Romans inevitably meant that the vita contemplativa was preferred to the vita activa. For his part, Friedrich Nietzsche argues vehemently that Paul’s eschatology laid the foundation of a life-denial that had kept a (European) civilisation in servility for centuries and had crushed the human spirit. What I shall argue in response is that Paul’s apocalyptic vision in 1 Corinthians describes not the worthlessness of the present order of things compared to the priceless world to come but rather (following J. L. Martyn) the invasion of the present world by that world such that the two coalesce. The ethics that derives from this eschatological vision is not then an avoidance or a disparagement of the sphere of present human living but in fact involves its affirmation and transformation. How this is so I will demonstrate in particular from a reading of the passage which seems most counter to my case – Paul’s discussion of marriage in 1 Corinthians 7.