1 Corinthians 9:19–27
Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
I HAD BETTER BEGIN by explaining what I mean by a “world Christian.”
I am certainly not referring to “worldly” Christians (3:1–4). We spent enough time on them in the third chapter of this book. By contrast, the expression world Christian has taken on quite a different and specialized meaning among missionaries and others, owing in part to the increasing globalization (another newly coined word!) of the church. Globalization is a term that includes a brace of related phenomena. Missionaries are no longer going in only one direction, from the so-called First World to the so-called Third World, but are moving from many parts of the world to many other parts. Communications facilities are enabling believers all over the world to work together on concrete projects and forms of outreach. Increasingly, the church in any one part of the world is pulled into the orbit of what takes place in many other parts of the world. Theological reflection and patterns of biblical and theological training are no longer exclusively tied to the models created in the West and exported to other parts of the globe. Global movements of money and personnel change many priorities—both within the church and outside it.
Almost in reaction against such globalization, many people are responding with increasing nationalism, sometimes with almost frightening ethnocentrism. Christians are not immune to these sweeping currents of thought. They, too, can be caught up in flag-waving nationalism that puts the interests of my nation or my class or my race or my tribe or my heritage above the demands of the kingdom of God. Instead of feeling that their most important citizenship is in heaven, and that they are just passing through down here on their way “home” to the heavenly Jerusalem (Heb. 12:22–23), they become embroiled with petty priorities that constitute an implicit denial of the lordship of Christ.
What we need, then, are world Christians—not simply American Christians or British Christians or Kenyan Christians, but world Christians. By “world Christians,” I am referring to Christians, genuine believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the following things are true:
Their allegiance to Jesus Christ and his kingdom is self-consciously set above all national, cultural, linguistic, and racial allegiances.
Their commitment to the church, Jesus’s messianic community, is to the church everywhere, wherever the church is truly manifest, and not only to its manifestation on home turf.
They see themselves first and foremost as citizens of the heavenly kingdom and therefore consider all other citizenship a secondary matter.
As a result, they are single-minded and sacrificial when it comes to the paramount mandate to evangelize and make disciples.
The church, of course, is the only institution with eternal significance. If anyone ought to transcend the limitations of merely temporal allegiances, then those who constitute the church should.
In the passage before us, Paul, the quintessential world Christian, lays out a number of convictions and priorities that we must adopt if we are to be world Christians ourselves.
We Must Know What Freedoms and Constraints Are Ours in Jesus Christ
Paul opens with what appears on first reading to be a straightforward contradiction. He is talking about how he flexes what we would today call his lifestyle as he attempts to evangelize different groups of people. “To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews” (9:20a). Then he explains what characteristic it is in the Jews that demands genuine flexibility on his part: “To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law” (9:20b, emphasis added). On the other hand, Paul behaved rather differently among the Gentiles: “To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law” (9:21, emphasis added). So is Paul under the law, or not?
The meaning of the passage is much disputed. I shall try to circle in on it by a number of steps.
1. It is clear that Paul sees himself in what might be called a third position. He does not see himself as a Christian Jew, someone who normally obeys the Mosaic law and who has to flex in order to win Gentiles.15 Nor does he see himself as a Gentile, someone who has to take on the burden of the law afresh in order to win the Jews. He sees himself, rather, in a third position, from which he has to flex to win Jews on the one hand and Gentiles on the other. “To those under the law I became like one under the law. . . . To those not having the law I became like one not having the law” (emphasis added). Paul occupies a third position.
2. When Paul says that he bends to “become” like a Jew or to “become” like a Gentile, he immediately introduces a parenthetical remark that establishes the limitations on his flexibility. It is these parenthetical remarks that are so difficult. On the one hand, to those under the law he becomes like one under the law—which presumably means he scrupulously observes kosher laws and other points that would enable him to move freely in the Jewish communities and gain a hearing—even though, he parenthetically insists, he is not himself under the law. On the other hand, to those without the law he becomes like one not having the law—which presumably means he ignores the legal constraints that set Jews off from Gentiles and lives freely among the Gentiles as one of them—even though, he parenthetically insists, he is not free to do anything whatsoever; he is not free from “God’s law” but is “under Christ’s law.” Unless Paul is simply contradicting himself, he cannot mean by “God’s law” in the second case exactly what he means by “the law” in the first.
Still, whatever he means by saying he is not free from God’s law, there is something intuitively obvious about it. We can easily hear Paul saying, “To the Jew I became a Jew,” and “To the Gentile I became a Gentile”; we cannot imagine him saying, “To the gossip I became a gossip,” and “To the adulterer I became an adulterer.” In other words, while saying he is not under the law as other Jews were, he certainly does not mean to suggest he is an utter antinomian (someone who feels completely free from all of God’s demands and commands).
3. There are other passages, even within 1 Corinthians, where God’s “law” or God’s “commands” cannot be reduced to the Mosaic code. The most discussed, I imagine, is 1 Corinthians 7:19: “Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Keeping God’s commands is what counts.” Some Christians who make much of the law love to cite the second part of this verse, “Keeping God’s commands is what counts.” What has to be remembered, of course, is that the average first-century Jew would have said, “Wait a minute! Circumcision is one of God’s commands. How can you say that circumcision is nothing, and then immediately comment, ‘Keeping God’s commands is what counts’?” The only answer is that, for Paul, the commands of God that he finds operative for the Christian cannot be equated with the Mosaic code.
4. If I understand 1 Corinthians 9:19–23 correctly, what Paul says is that he is not under the (Mosaic) law-covenant (a common meaning of nomos, the NIV’s “law”). It is no longer the law-covenant that binds him to the God of his fathers. In order to win his fellow Jews, he is happy to live under the stipulations of that law-covenant and not be unnecessarily offensive to them, but he insists that the law-covenant no longer binds him. It cannot; he is under a new covenant (cf. 1 Cor. 11:25). On the other side, to win those not having the law of God expressed in the old covenant—namely, Gentiles—he is prepared to live like those without any of the constraints of the law-covenant upon them; but there are constraints beyond which he cannot go. He is not infinitely flexible; he is not “free from God’s law.” This cannot mean he is not free from the (Mosaic) law-covenant, for he has just said he is. Rather, he means, I think, that he is not free from God’s demands, God’s requirements. And then he stipulates exactly where those requirements lie: “I am not free from God’s law,” he writes, “but am under Christ’s law” (emphasis added). The expression is a peculiar one, but the heart of the idea is clear enough. All of God’s demands upon him are mediated through Christ. Whatever God demands of him as a new-covenant believer, a Christian, binds him; he cannot step outside those constraints. There is a rigid limit to his flexibility as he seeks to win the lost from different cultural and religious groups: he must not do anything that is forbidden to the Christian, and he must do everything mandated of the Christian. He is not free from God’s law; he is under Christ’s law.
Thus, although this passage is sometimes interpreted to mean that we should feel free to reshape the gospel when we move from culture to culture, that is exactly what Paul does not mean. Paul is prepared to be extraordinarily flexible wherever the law of God, mediated through Christ, does not impinge on him. But he himself is under “Christ’s law,” which in this epistle is clearly bound up with the gospel itself, the gospel of the crucified Messiah.
5. The obvious question, at this point, is how Christ’s law, which Paul says binds him, is related to the Mosaic law-covenant, which Paul says does not bind him. It is one thing for Paul to say he is not under covenant A but under covenant B. It would be quite another thing to say that the commands and the prohibitions of the two covenants are completely disjunctive so that they have nothing in common. They cannot be precisely the same in their commands, or it is difficult to see how one could speak of two covenants. But granted the God of the Bible, it is unthinkable to suppose that the two covenants are completely disjunctive in their respective commands. So that raises the legitimate question, How are the commands, the “laws” in the modern sense of that word, of the new covenant related to the commands, the “laws,” of the old?
Although that question is important and has a long and tangled history of interpretation, I am not going to broach it here, as it would take us too far away from the point toward which I am moving. At that point Paul will not budge.
6. The purpose of this rather complex discussion should now be clear. Although Paul was an extraordinarily flexible apostle and evangelist, he had sorted through elemental Christianity in a profound and nuanced way so that he knew when he could be flexible and when he should not bend. In other words, his grasp of theology enabled him to know who he was, what was expected of him, what he was free to do, and what he should not consider doing under any circumstances.
In short, we must also know what freedoms and constraints are ours in Jesus Christ. The only way to achieve this maturity is to think through Scripture again and again to try to grasp the system of its thought—how the parts cohere and combine to make sense.
Of course, this is not the only passage that is very important to help Christians come to grips with who they are. There are many, many others. Christians are those who have been justified by faith in Christ Jesus and, in consequence, have peace with God (Rom. 5:1). Christians are those who call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 1:2). Christians are those who pray that the power of God may so rest on them that Christ dwells in their hearts through faith, while they themselves increasingly grasp the limitless dimensions of God’s love for them in Christ Jesus (Eph. 3:14–21). It is immensely important that Christians know who they are as children of the living God, what is expected of them, where they may be flexible, and where they must be as rigid as tensile steel.
It is only the person who gains this knowledge who can join Paul in saying, without compromise, “I have become all things to all men” (9:22). Today that expression, “all things to all men,” is often used as a form of derision. He (or she) has no backbone, we say; he is two-faced; he is “all things to all men.” But Paul wears the label as a witness to his evangelistic commitment. Even so, he could not do this if he did not know who he was as a Christian. The person who lives by endless rules and who forms his or her self-identity by conforming to them simply cannot flex at all. By contrast, the person without roots, heritage, self-identity, and nonnegotiable values is not really flexing, but is simply being driven hither and yon by the vagaries of every whimsical opinion that passes by. Such people may “fit in,” but they cannot win anyone. They hold to nothing stable or solid enough to win others to it! Thus the end of Paul’s statement in verse 22 is critical: “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some” (9:22, emphasis added). This perspective is so important that I shall return to it.
When in the last century Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission (now the Overseas Missionary Fellowship), started to wear his hair long and braided like Chinese men of the time and to put on their clothes and to eat their food, many of his fellow missionaries derided him. But Hudson Taylor had thought through what was essential to the gospel (and was therefore nonnegotiable) and what was a cultural form that was neither here nor there, and might in fact be an unnecessary barrier to the effective proclamation of the gospel.
To be a world Christian, then, it is important to grow in your grasp of Scripture and in your exposure to other cultures so that you do not tie your cultural preferences to the gospel and invest the former with the authority of the latter. This is not to say that all cultural elements are morally neutral. Far from it. Every culture has good and bad elements in it. Wicked people can manipulate the appeal to culture to persecute Christians (as is done, for instance, in Acts 16:20–21). Yet in every culture it is important for the evangelist, church planter, and witnessing Christian to flex as far as possible so that the gospel will not be made to appear unnecessarily alien at the merely cultural level. But it is also important to recognize evil elements in culture when they appear and to understand how biblical norms assess them. There will be times when it is necessary to confront culture. After all, simply to appeal to current cultural norms, all the while demanding more flexibility from the Christian, is simply a way of saying that the gospel does not have the right to stand in judgment over culture—and that will not do.
Even to begin to assess such matters aright, we must know what freedoms and constraints are ours in Christ Jesus. We must develop a firm grasp of biblical theology.
We Must Not Stand On Our “Rights”
This part of Paul’s argument becomes very clear if we trace his thought from 1 Corinthians 8:1 to 11:1, a passage that hangs together as a unit controlled by two or three themes. We cannot pause now to follow the fine points of his argument, but there are some elements of it that can be quickly summarized and that neatly establish the point: we must not stand on our “rights.”
First Corinthians 8 is largely given over to a discussion of whether or not Christians should eat meat that has been offered to idols. It appears that most meat was butchered in connection with a temple guild and sold just outside the temple doors. Christians recently converted out of raw paganism tended to think that the purchase and eating of such meat was a dangerous compromise. It flagged an interest in the old pagan gods, and therefore involved the Christian in idolatry. Other Christians, more mature, felt that slapping a piece of meat down in front of a stone idol did not affect the meat; it was still meat, nothing more, and could be purchased and eaten with a clear conscience. Just because the pagans thought the idol represented a god did not mean that Christians had to indulge in such superstitions. And so the Corinthian church was divided.
Paul’s handling of the matter is instructive. In the tenth chapter of his epistle, he absolutely prohibits any involvement in the worship conducted in the pagan temple. Behind the idols are demonic forces too dangerous to play with. Besides, you cannot participate in cultic rituals without aligning yourself with the fellowship of idol worshipers. Stay away!
Back in chapter 8, however, Paul’s line of thought is more nuanced. On the one hand, he agrees that buying meat that had been slaughtered in front of an idol is no compromise in and of itself. The meat is not affected. On the other hand, those who think this is a compromise and whose consciences Paul labels “weak” (because they think something is evil that is not really evil) should not buy and eat such meat. They would be wounding their weak consciences. Paul judges it dangerous for Christians to defy their consciences, because if they get in the habit of ignoring the voice of conscience, they may ignore that voice even when the conscience is well informed and is warning them off something that is positively evil. Doubtless, on the long haul Paul would like these weak Christians to grow in their knowledge of the Scriptures and the gospel so that they will not think something is evil that is not (like eating meat that had been offered to idols); but until they have reached such maturity, they must not defy their own consciences.
Meanwhile, Paul tells those with “strong” consciences (strong because they are sufficiently informed that on this issue at least they do not label anything evil that is not really evil) that they are right on the issue of meat offered to idols, but that the discussion must not end there. They should also feel an obligation toward their “weaker” brothers and sisters in Christ. If those with a weak conscience should spot another, older, allegedly wiser, believer eating meat that had been offered to idols, they might be emboldened to do the same thing—in defiance of their own consciences and therefore to their own spiritual detriment. For the strong believers to insist on their rights would be heartless. “When you sin against your brothers in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall” (8:12–13).
There are two elements in this spiritual counsel that must be understood.
First, the kind of situation Paul is facing here must not be confused with quite a different one. Suppose you are a Christian who, owing to your cultural background, has always engaged in social drinking. Now you move into a circle that is more socially conservative. Some senior saint comes up to you and says, “I have to tell you that I am offended by your drinking. Paul tells us that if anyone is offended by what you do, you must stop it. I’m offended; you must therefore stop your drinking.” How would you respond?
This senior saint is simply manipulating you. He (or she) is not a person with a weak conscience who is in danger of tippling on the side because of your example, and thus wounding his weak conscience. Far from it. If he sees you drinking again he will likely denounce you in the most unrestrained terms. In his eyes, he is the stronger person, not the weaker. In other words, this case is not at all like the one the apostle had to deal with. Indeed, it might be wise to tell him, “I’m sorry to hear that you have such a weak conscience.” He will probably be so unclear as to what you mean that he may actually leave you alone for a couple of weeks. To develop a modern example somewhat akin to what Paul faces, we would have to change the story somewhat. Now you have become a youth sponsor in a church. Some of the young people from socially conservative homes see you drinking and, against the conscience they have developed over such matters, follow suit; in time they become sloppy about all kinds of serious moral issues. You have thus become party to their substantial destruction.
The point to observe is that in Paul’s case the believer with the strong conscience is not manipulated into conformity by a bludgeoning from a senior saint who wants everyone to obey the same rules. Rather, the strong believer is exhorted to give up his rights for the sake of others. The appeal, finally, is love for brothers and sisters in Christ. Strong Christians may be right on a theological issue, but unless they voluntarily abandon what is in fact their right they will do damage to the church and thus “sin against Christ” (8:12). To stand on your rights may thus involve you in sin after all—not the sin connected with your rights (there, after all, you are right!), but the sin of lovelessness, the sin of being unwilling to forgo your rights for the spiritual and eternal good of others. How can Christians stand beside the cross and insist on their rights?
Second, Paul cannot be written off as an utterly dispassionate and merely academic theologian. He dares offer himself as an example of what strong Christians should imitate: “Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall” (8:13).
This verse serves as a transition to 1 Corinthians 9, which Paul devotes to explaining his own motives and self-discipline. In fact, Paul is accomplishing two things in this chapter. On the one hand, he is simply showing on how many fronts he practices what he preaches: in addition to other things, he cheerfully gives up his rights for the spiritual good of others. At the same time, it seems clear that at least some in the Corinthian church did not hold him in very high regard, precisely because in their view he did not stand up for himself. He did not throw his authority around and make people respect him. They were so attuned to the forms of leadership in first-century pagan Corinth, especially those of the sophists and other traveling teachers, that they simply did not understand a preacher like Paul. In part, therefore, Paul is here offering a defense of his priorities: “This is my defense to those who sit in judgment on me” (9:3). What Paul provides us with is a deeply Christian explanation of his principled self-denial.
Paul begins his defense by insisting that he is an apostle. He saw the risen Lord and received his commission directly from him. In a gentle dig, Paul suggests that even if others find grounds to doubt the legitimacy of his apostleship, the Corinthians themselves have little excuse. They exist as Christians because they are the fruit of his apostolic ministry (9:1–2)!
The nub of the charge against Paul, it appears, is that he refuses support (“the right to food and drink,” 9:4) from the Corinthians and that he does not travel in his itinerant ministry with the kinds of comfort and support that senior leaders should expect—such as bringing along a spouse on an expense-paid trip. It may be hard for us at first to understand why this should be thought so serious a charge. But in much of the first-century Hellenistic world, traveling teachers were assessed, in part, by the amount of money they could take in. People wanted to brag about how much money they had paid to Professor So-and-So for a course of lectures—just as there are some people today who boast, in a complaining sort of way, about how much it is costing them to send their son or daughter to Harvard. If Paul would not accept money from the Corinthians, who wanted to lavish it on him so they could feel good about how important their guru was, many felt it proved he did not really understand the rules of the game, and so he could not amount to much. From the Corinthian perspective, Paul denigrated himself yet further by doing manual labor—something no respectable Hellenistic teacher would have dreamed of doing! The problem of the Corinthian attitude toward money and teaching surfaces even more poignantly in 2 Corinthians 11:7ff.16
Paul begins to address this problem by insisting that he has the right to support. It is silly to imagine that only he and Barnabas have to work for a living (9:6). Soldiers serve and are paid by those whom they serve; vinedressers and shepherds are supported out of the profits gained from their toil. Should we not expect those who teach the Word to be supported out of the fruit of their toil—the converts they have won (9:7)? Scripture itself gives ample precedent for the principle that workers—animals or people—should be supported out of their labor (9:8–10). If Paul has sown “spiritual seed” among the Corinthians, surely it is not too much to expect that he would reap a “material harvest” from them (9:11)! And after all, the Corinthian believers have supported other Christian leaders. Does not Paul have the right to expect the same (9:12a)?
Then the punch line: “But we did not use this right. On the contrary, we put up with anything rather than hinder the gospel of Christ” (9:12b). From Paul’s perspective, accepting money from these people while he was planting a church among them might prove detrimental to the integrity of his witness and the credibility of the gospel, so he voluntarily gave up his right to support. This does not mean that he thinks all Christian leaders, or all church planters, ought to adopt the same policy. Far from it. He insists that in the normal way of things those who work in the religious arena should be supported out of the fruit of their work; “those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel” (9:13–14). Then the point: “But I have not used any of these rights” (9:15). Nor is Paul now stooping to a tactic used in some missionary prayer letters, where by protesting how they do not ask, the writers are in fact asking! Not so with Paul, for he adds, “And I am not writing this in the hope that you will do such things for me. I would rather die than have anyone deprive me of this boast [that is, that he has abandoned the right to be supported by those to whom he ministers]” (9:15).
This seems at first to be rather extreme, even shocking, language. But in a few lines that are often misunderstood, Paul explains why he adopts this stance. In his case, he says, he really has no choice as to whether he will preach the gospel. The other apostles were in some sense volunteers. At least two or three of them sought Jesus out while they were still disciples of John the Baptist (John 1:35–41). All of them were invited by Jesus to join his band and grew in their understanding and faith throughout Jesus’s ministry, crowning their ups and downs with the conviction that became theirs in the wake of the resurrection and Pentecost. Not so Paul. The resurrected Jesus appeared to him in brilliant light on the Damascus road and effected his salvation and his call to ministry in one searing revelation. Paul cannot abandon his preaching without abandoning his salvation; to him, the two are of a piece. Thus Paul never volunteered. He was simply captured by Christ for salvation and apostolic ministry in one blinding act of self-disclosure by the glorified Christ. Others may have been volunteers. “Yet when I preach the gospel, I cannot boast, for I am compelled to preach. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! If I preach voluntarily, I have a reward; if not voluntarily, I am simply discharging the trust committed to me” (9:16–17). In other words, although many preachers feel some form of divine compulsion, Paul’s sense of divine compulsion is unique. It is bound up with the uniqueness of his conversion.
“What then is my reward?” Paul asks (9:18). If his preaching does not prove his wholehearted, voluntary commitment to the task (since he really has no choice in the matter, short of trying to walk away from the gospel altogether), how can he show that his heart and soul are in this ministry? What element in his ministry proves that the grace of God has captured his heart and will, and that his actions bring the rewards of God with them? “Just this: that in preaching the gospel I may offer it free of charge, and so not make use of my rights in preaching it” (9:18).
This is staggering. Paul is so concerned to prove his own wholehearted, enthusiastic, voluntary commitment to the task of apostolic preaching to which he has been called, that he chooses to abandon one of his rights. He turns his back on his right to be supported, knowing that this decision will cost him an enormous amount of additional time, effort, labor, and misunderstanding. But it will enable him to preach the gospel “free of charge” and thus model the freedom of grace by the way he serves. It will also enable him to show that he serves, not merely out of compulsion but out of a transformed mind and will, so that by God’s grace he is in fact laying up treasure in heaven.
What a refreshing attitude! What a deeply Christian perspective! Many ministers of the gospel today are very concerned about salary levels and benefits packages. Certainly such matters have to be sorted out. But Paul is more concerned to demonstrate that he ministers out of a transformed will—out of a passion to serve, not out of a begrudging compulsion. And if the only way he can demonstrate this commitment is by abandoning some of his rights, so be it; Paul will cheerfully abandon them.
This is the point where Paul begins the first paragraph I cited at the head of this chapter: “Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible” (9:19). While the Corinthians were despising Paul for his failure to charge a good fee, Paul was delighting in his principled self-denial. In fact, he says, this approach to his ministry affects far more than finance. It touches all his decisions. Because he knows who he is as a Christian, he is free and belongs to no one; at the same time, he voluntarily chooses to make himself a slave of everyone.
Thus Paul’s personal example has an enormous bearing on the relatively minor question raised in 1 Corinthians 8, the question as to whether Christians should eat meat that had been offered to idols. That is probably why, in this paragraph, Paul not only says things like “To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews,” and “To those not having the law I became like one not having the law,” but also “To the weak I became weak, to win the weak” (9:20–22). He is harking back to his earlier discussion about weak Christians. But the fact of the matter is that Paul’s example extends far beyond the issue of meat offered to idols. It has become his lifestyle; it is the working out in one extraordinary life of what it means to take up your cross and follow Jesus. It is a demonstration of what it means to be a world Christian.
We must not stand on our rights. As long as defending our rights remains the lodestar that orders our priorities, we cannot follow the way of the cross.
This sort of self-denial is easy enough to admire in other believers. One can formulate all sorts of interesting theological lessons deriving from Paul’s treatment of what to do about meat that has been offered to idols. But the power of this position of principle becomes obvious only when we are called upon to abandon our rights.
Even in the home, many arguments are nourished because neither side wants to give up a point. We fight to protect our rights. But I suspect that some of the most trying tests of our preparedness to give up our rights occur when we are thrust into multicultural circumstances for a while. Little things can prove very irritating. When I have chaired seminars that include Christian thinkers from around the world, not a little of my energy has been devoted to trying to read the different cultural signals. From the moment participants first enter the room, the cultural differences are apparent. Our Italian colleague arrives, and there are kisses all around. A German shows up, and he has to shake everyone’s hand. Some people are comfortable standing about eighteen inches from you when you converse together; others, like the British scholar, prefer something closer to a yard. The close-talkers appear pushy and rude; the scholar, who is constantly backing up, looks like he’s distant and unfriendly. The Japanese attendees enter and bow. An American member saunters in and remarks loudly, “Hi, everybody. Sorry I’m late!” He is late—by about ten minutes. But he will not understand what “late” really looks like until our colleague from Nigeria arrives.
It’s all great fun when it only lasts for a few days. But months and months of a new culture can be very wearing. And in a sense, that is what is going on even within America, or any other Western industrialized country. The pace of change is so fast that different generations are clashing with each other almost like competing cultures. For example, the radically different tastes in music that divide many congregations at the moment are, in part, culture clashes. And it is not easy to be wise. Some wag has said that the last seven words of the church will be, “We’ve always done it this way before.” On the other hand, I have some sympathy for the position of C. S. Lewis, who maintained that he could put up with almost any pattern of corporate worship, so long as it did not change too often. His point is that mere novelty is in fact distracting. The deepest and best corporate worship takes place when the forms are so familiar you never see them and can penetrate the reality. But try explaining that at your next church meeting.
Ultimately, there can never be peace and progress on these and many related matters unless all sides carefully listen to the others and humbly resolve, while making a case, never to stand on their own rights. That is the way of the cross. It is the very lifeblood of those involved in cross-cultural outreach—and increasingly, that means all of us!
We Must Adopt as Our Aim the Salvation of Men and Women
Paul repeatedly makes this point. “I make myself a slave to everyone,” he writes, “to win as many as possible” (9:19). “To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews” (9:20, emphasis added). “To the weak I became weak, to win the weak” (9:22, emphasis added). And this: “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some” (9:22, emphasis added). At the end of the entire section, the same thought is still on Paul’s mind: “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks, or the church of God—even as I try to please everybody in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved. Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ” (10:31–11:1, emphasis added).
This aim, repeated by the apostle in order to underline its importance, has the effect of focusing and even limiting some of the other principles he articulates. I shall sketch two areas where this is so.
First, although under the last point I summarized much of Paul’s thought in these chapters under the slogan, “We must not stand on our rights,” in fact that slogan needs qualifying. I thought it best to set the words out in stark power first; the fact remains that the slogan is slightly misleading. If the aim of the exercise were merely not to stand on our rights, then it would always be mandated of us not to stand on our rights. We would become the most amazing conglomeration of wimps. But in fact Paul himself, who could talk so much about self-denial and about not insisting on his rights, sometimes made much of them. On more than one occasion, for instance, he appealed to his Roman citizenship to escape a beating. Was he not simply standing on his rights?
But Paul is not interested in setting aside his rights as an end in itself. “I make myself a slave to everyone,” he points out, “to win as many as possible” (9:19, emphasis added). If no one’s spiritual well-being will be threatened if he eats meat, doubtless he will order a steak. Paul takes his beatings from the Jewish synagogue; in some instances where he is about to be beaten by the Romans, however, Paul raises before the Roman authorities the question of his legal standing as a Roman citizen. He does so precisely because he is interested in establishing legal precedents that will protect the church. Certainly that is Luke’s reading of events in the book of Acts. Luke carefully records decision after decision issued in favor of the nascent Christian movement. He wants this accumulation of legal precedents to help protect the church. In other words, Paul is still acting out of a deep principle: he wants to win as many as possible. In some instances, standing on one’s rights may be exactly what is called for. Yet one should always be ready to abandon the appeal to one’s rights. Precisely which is the wisest course of action in a particular crisis may largely be determined by this question about the aim and effect of the options: How will this course of action contribute to, or hinder, the work of the gospel?
Second, from the perspective of the broad theme of this chapter, it is important to recognize that becoming a world Christian cannot be an end in itself. The aim is not to become so international and culturally flexible that one does not fit in anywhere; the aim, rather, is to become so understanding and flexible that one can soon fit in and further the gospel anywhere.
That is a lesson I have had to learn the hard way. When I first returned home to Canada after an initial stint overseas of three years, I returned to the metropolitan area where I had previously served as a pastor. I brought my bride with me, a young Englishwoman who had never lived outside England. We found the church scene deeply depressing. In order to introduce her to the area, I took her to several different churches over the first few weeks we were in the country, and each exposure was worse than the previous ones. I found the people and the churches parochial, narrow, ill-informed, and so on. I provided almost no emotional support to my wife in her attempt to adapt to a new culture.
One Sunday evening, after six weeks or two months had elapsed, I said to my wife, “Come on. Tonight we’ll slip out of town, a little farther afield, to a church I know where the pastor is a serious minister of the Word. Let’s go there tonight.” But as it happened, the regular minister was not speaking that night. There was a guest preacher from New York, who thundered away about the evils of communism. His repeated line, drummed home in a high-pitched, nasal, New York twang, was (and I quote), “The fight against communism is the fight for God.” My wife and I walked out.
It took me almost six months before I could look at myself in the mirror and give myself a good scolding. “Carson, you hypocritical idiot. If the Lord called you to Jamaica or Japan, to Mauritius or Mombasa, you would cope. You would discipline yourself to understand the culture and the people and would learn to minister within that framework. Are you so arrogant that you cannot make the same adjustments when you return to your own people? Can you not see that it is not they who have changed, but you? Do you despise them because they have not enjoyed the breadth of cultural exposure in different countries that you have experienced?” So in the Lord’s mercy, I finally settled down.
Since then, I have learned that reverse culture shock is the worst culture shock. Many people who go abroad for a few years brace themselves to handle the new culture; they almost never brace themselves to handle the jarring impact of reentry into the culture they have left behind. At the seminary where I teach, we constantly warn international students of the kinds of reverse culture shock they must expect to face when they return home.
This sort of disorientation also accounts, in part, for the frequency and intensity of the criticism of Western institutions and churches uttered by many “Third World” leaders. God knows there is enough to criticize in the West. Nevertheless, in my experience, very few “Third World” leaders spend much time criticizing the West and stressing the need for properly contextualized theology until they have spent a few years studying in the West. Many, many of them no longer quite fit back home. Meanwhile, where have they learned their criticisms of the West? In the West, of course! To criticize the West is an extremely Western thing to do. In fact, to criticize wherever we are is an extremely Western thing to do. Very few of these leaders, for whatever reason, actually engage in much contextualized theology. Instead, they make their reputations criticizing the West.
Of course, I have met some wonderful exceptions to all these generalities. But the generalities ring true to many who have traveled in Christian circles in different parts of the world.
All of this criticism would change its face considerably if the aim were always “to win as many as possible.” So much of the awkwardness of not quite fitting in anywhere would disappear, if we simply chose to act in such a way as to accomplish this aim. The more that a gap opens up between the culture of the church and the culture of the surrounding society, the more important it is to know how to bridge that gap. But the concern must never be to prove how cosmopolitan and sophisticated and flexible we are. The aim must always be “to win as many as possible.”
Certainly it is easy to recall instances where that was not the aim! A friend of mine, a minister at a church in England, was asked to go up to Scotland and speak at a mission sponsored by a Christian group in a Scottish university. Astonishingly, though they had been expecting about 75 people to show up the first night, 150 turned out—half of them Muslims who had decided to come as a group to find out for themselves what Christians thought. The Christians in the university thought they needed to “warm up” the crowd, so they produced a singing group that went through a number of Scottish ballads. Since half of those ballads took potshots at the English, this went down very well, especially with my friend sitting there. Then this musical group, bright eyed and bushy tailed, announced they would like to sing some Christian songs. They began with (Can you believe it?) “Awake! Awake! O Zion/Come clothe yourself with strength”—and 75 Muslims walked out.
One must not be too hard on those young Scottish Christians. They simply did not think. But that is a tragedy in itself. They never carefully asked the question, “What should I do to win as many as possible?” At least they did not call their mission a crusade! That word does not fly very high in Muslim circles.
Barriers must be overcome. Different groups have different languages, smells, tolerances, history, shared memory. Some groups deploy quite an individual sense of humor. It took me three or four days, the first time I lectured in Australia, to appreciate that the warmest introductions were the most scathing, as Australians often indulge in their national pastime of “cutting down the tall poppy.” Different financial strata must be crossed. In some countries, England for example, the gospel has moved almost entirely in middle- and upper-middle-class strata. To appreciate the historical reasons how this came about does not itself address the fact that the blue-collar worker is almost untouched by the gospel in that country.
We must adopt as our aim the salvation of men and women. That vision will enable us to avoid cloister Christianity. We need to meditate on Psalms 96 and 98; Isaiah 49:1–13; Jeremiah 12:12–33; Micah 4; Colossians 1:15–29; and Revelation 4–5. We must become global in our awareness and compassion. Cultural sensitivity and flexibility must become tools to enable us to address the challenges of cross-cultural evangelism wisely and courageously, rather than ends in themselves to create a myopic elite of lovely, flexible people.
We Must Recognize That This Stance Is Bound Up with Our Own Salvation
That is the rather staggering conclusion to which Paul arrives in verse 23: “I do all this for the sake of the gospel,” he writes, “that I may share in its blessings.” We might have expected Paul to write, “that they may share in its blessings.” But that is not what he says. Paul takes all of the steps outlined in our chapter, and commits himself to such rigorous self-denial, for the sake of the gospel, that he might share in its blessings. What does he mean?
If I understand him aright, he is saying that he cannot conceive of any other way of being a Christian. He acts this way to promote the gospel, and that surely means his actions will be for the good of his hearers. But to follow the crucified Messiah means Paul must take up his own cross daily, die to self-interest, and serve the One who bought him. One cannot properly promote the gospel any other way. To promote it this way—by dying to self-interest, giving up all insistence upon the sacredness of one’s rights, and striving to win as many as possible—is to follow Christ crucified, who died, literally, to his self-interest, gave up all insistence upon the sacredness of his very real rights, and set himself to win men and women from every people and tongue and tribe and nation. There is no other way of following Christ; there is no other way of sharing in the gospel’s blessings.
That is the point of the closing paragraph of 1 Corinthians 9. Using athletic metaphors, running and boxing, Paul exhorts the Corinthian believers to run the Christian race and to fight the Christian fight in such a way as to get the prize. That means, as it does for the Olympian, self-discipline, self-denial, and strict training. That is the kind of discipline Paul has imposed on himself; it is what he expects every Christian to adopt. Absurd shadowboxing or a pleasant meandering stroll through the meadows, while the serious people are pounding down the track, never won anyone a prize. Paul himself would be disqualified if he left the race to pick petunias. The real Christian, by definition, is one who perseveres (e.g., John 8:31; Col. 1:21–23; Heb. 3:14; 2 John 9). For Paul, such perseverance is tied to his ministry. In other words, he does all this for the sake of the gospel so that he may share in its blessings.
Of course, no one will suggest that every Christian must serve the Lord Christ exactly as Paul did. But Paul wants the Corinthian Christians to have the same self-denying attitude that he has displayed. For him, this is not an optional extra; it is bound up with what it means to be a Christian. The “strong” believer who insists on his or her rights is, finally, sinning against Christ (8:12). In principle, so also is anyone who does not grow in the commitment “to win as many as possible” by following the way of the cross.
That means, at the end of the day, that every Christian ought to be a world Christian. My introduction to this chapter was slightly misleading. It might have been taken to mean that there are two kinds of Christians: world Christians and all the others. But Paul sees anything less than a world Christian, in the sense defined in this chapter, as subnormal. Where there is a failure in discipleship, where there is sin against Christ, where there is persistent refusal to follow Paul as he follows Christ in the way of the cross, there too we find an aimless meandering. And if you meander aimlessly when you should be running for the prize, you will be disqualified.
Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. (9:24–25)
Questions for Review and Reflection
15. In some contexts, of course, that is precisely how Paul thinks of himself: a Christian Jew. That is the self-identification that makes his anguish in Romans 9:1–5 so poignant. Elsewhere he reminds his readers that he sprang from the tribe of Benjamin (Phil. 3:5). Such passages serve to make 1 Corinthians 9 the more striking. In this context, where he talks about his relation to the law, Paul does not identify himself as a Christian Jew or a Christian Gentile, but as something else.
16. Paul’s approach to support from the churches he founded is complex and cannot be fully probed here. It is quite certain that he did sometimes accept money from churches he founded, notably the Philippian church. It appears, however, that he never accepted money from them for services rendered. That is, he was not “paid” for ministry in, say, Philippi, but he would accept money from Philippi when he was serving in Corinth. There were several other subtle principles that governed his fiscal decisions as well.