[1] 1 Corinthians 13 is a dangerous text. It is dangerous both from the perspective of Sin[1] and from the perspective of grace. From Sin\u2019s perspective, this beautiful text may be turned into what Phyllis Trible calls a text of terror. Texts of terror, according to Trible, are those texts which explicitly present stories of violence against women.[2] They are hard stories where we must \u201cwrestle with the silence, absence, and opposition of God,\u201d where there are no happy endings[3]. 1 Corinthians 13 is not in Trible\u2019s list. But, although the text does not contain explicitly violent stories against women, it is often used as an excuse to keep women in situations of violence and abuse. The text \u2013 or more accurately, its mis\/interpretation \u2013 takes us \u201cto a land of terror from whose bourn no traveler returns unscarred.\u201d[4] This widely known passage belongs to the canon of texts that is frequently used to oppress, marginalize and abuse women<\/p>\n
[2] 1 Corinthians 13 has a long history of interpretation that is plagued with prejudice, as the verbs it uses are understood as descriptive of passive agents that are traditionally associated with the subjugation of women. The vision of love this text advances is frequently identified only with women: wives, daughters and partners. The common interpretation of this text in our patriarchal society does not include men, nor does it describe men\u2019s love. If a man were to love in the way it is described in 1 Corinthians, his love would be deemed weak and inappropriate by both culture and clan. It is only a woman\u2019s love that is patient, kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant. While a man rests in his man-cave and goes from one job to another, a woman would not insist on her own way, be irritable or resentful. While men drink boastfully and are unfaithful; while men can be jealous, live as a bachelor and even kill \u201ctheir\u201d women for love, women bear all things, believe in all things, hope for all things, and endure all things.<\/p>\n
[3] If 1 Corinthians promotes an unbalanced love between men and women; between partners, where women\u2019s love must be mute and servile, while men\u2019s love can justify whims and insecurities, then this text is not God\u2019s Word. It is human word mimicking the divine. If our interpretations of this text promote this kind of unbalanced and abusive attitudes, then we are reading and interpreting it exclusively from our sinful nature. God\u2019s Word here functions, as Barbara Brown Taylor describes, as mirror of our experience of communion and alienation, of connection and disconnection with the divine[5]. In a Lutheran confessional understanding we can say that the text only shows us the second use of the law.<\/p>\n
[4] From the perspective of Sin, the text only shows us the second use of the law; from the perspective of grace, the text shows us what Bonhoeffer calls \u201ccheap grace.\u201d \u201cCheap grace\u201d is the kind of generic and formless grace that promotes blind servility and subjugation. This grace promotes \u201cself-rejection and self-hatred that leads to passive, other-centered idolatry,\u201d[6] as concrete expression of personal, social and structural Sin. The text is lived by women as salvific suffering and \u201cdolorismo\u201d[7] as if it were God\u2019s will that women remain in an abusive relationship, as her cross to bear. Agustina Luvis, a theology professor at the Seminario Evang\u00e9lico de Puerto Rico<\/em>, tells us that \u201cto hurt a woman is to hurt the very body of Christ. Violence against women is a Church issue. Therefore, it is in the Church where we share the hope of transformation for victims and where we foresee the possibility of confession and conversion for aggressors.”[8] <\/p>\n [5] Does this text have hope? Where are the Good News in these verses? Paul is writing to the troubled community at Corinth; a community plagued by division and egotism, where personal interest and class divisions have sparked conflict regarding the understanding of gifts and community. In this letter, he is telling this very community that all gifts are equal. We all have something to share with each other and offer God: some are prophets, others are teachers and others, administrators. He has presented the analogy of the human body to describe his understanding of the Church. They are all members of the body of Christ. As members of the body of Christ they all are important and indispensable. Now Paul identifies what makes all these body members function and all these gifts bear fruit:<\/p>\n \nBut strive for the greater gifts. 1 Corinthians 12:31\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n [6] It is good that we all have gifts and that we all are part of the body, however, what is most important is what makes the body function. What is this? What makes the hands, feet, eyes, and the whole body function as one? Love! Not my love, but love. Paul finishes his discourse as follows:<\/p>\n \nAnd now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; 1 Corinthian 13:13\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n [7] Is love more important than faith? Yes. Because it is not my love; egotistical, self-serving and self-promoting love. It is love. It is not my arrogant, rude, irritable or resentful love that caused all kinds of problem in Corinth. It is not the unbalanced interpretation of the text that links women to passively understood verbs and validates the abuse and laziness of men. It is not my<\/em> love as I articulate all kinds of arguments to overvalue my gifts and justify my<\/em> power and privilege. It is not my<\/em> love that imposes itself onto others as a rule of faith, an authoritarian beacon, and a semi-god that masters an abusive relationship.<\/p>\n [8] Paul is not speaking of my<\/em> love here. He is presenting love; the kind of love that is above faith. What kind of love is above faith? Christ\u2019s love; which is the foundation of faith. Where do we find God\u2019s love as the foundation of our faith and blueprint of our love? At the cross of Christ.<\/p>\n [9] The interpretive key to understand 1 Corinthians 13 is Christ\u2019s love at the cross. At the cross, God\u2019s love in Christ is patient and kind; is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude; does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. At the cross, Jesus Christ, the visible Word of the invisible God, in whom the fullness of God dwelled bodily, yes, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. At the cross, love never ends because this love is not the volatile will of a vengeful God punishing the Son. This love is not the servile and subordinated love of the Son suppressed by God. The cross is God\u2019s shouting Word, which claims justice and dignity before the social, political and economic structures that nailed Jesus to the cross in the first place. At the cross the second person of the Holy Trinity – in humanity and divinity – is shouting alongside all women who suffer abuse and oppression because of docile and conveniently misogynic and androcentric biblical interpretations of 1 Corinthians 13.<\/p>\n [10] Our gifts will come to an end. Our prophesies, tongues and knowledge will cease. But God\u2019s love will last forever. This love is the force that can make Corinth a community again. This love nourishes and sustains all Christian communities. God\u2019s love shapes our love as 1 Corinthians 13 becomes the poetry and prayer that \u201cput us in touch with what we now are not and remind us of who and what we were meant to be\u201d[9].<\/p>\n [11] Now, because God\u2019s very being is love, which radiates the universe with grace, human love is not vulnerable. Rather, it is compassionate[10] to others\u2019 needs and stations of life. Human love is full of the empathy, blessings and dilemmas we have with our friends, daughters, wives and partners. The love that beats in our hearts is not servile. It is attentive, caring, and willing to invest its gifts and to claim the help of the whole body of Christ to address the needs of the world. This love is devoted to sharing responsibilities and to dreaming new dreams that give dignity and new opportunities to girls, women and grandmothers; to boys, husbands and grandfathers. It is a cross-shaped love, willing to empty itself on behalf of others; a grace-filled, compassionate and daring love.<\/p>\n [12] Martin Luther expresses this kind of love ethically in the famous axioms of his treatise The Freedom of a Christian<\/em>. \u201cWe are perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.\u201d God\u2019s love is the foundation of our liberty that allows us to establish and maintain our relationships. But we are also \u201cperfectly dutiful servants of all, subject to all.\u201d[11] We are free and dutiful to live caring and compassionate lives promoting dignity and justice for all, especially for the neighbor in need. In this case, we live caring and compassionate lives for and with our spouses, as our relationships become gifts of love to society. By doing so, we live into the imago dei<\/em> of a new humanity, as Rosemary Radford Ruether, articulates it: we recover, \u201cnot only\u2026aspects of our full psychic potential that have been repressed by cultural gender stereotypes\u2026transforming the way these capacities have been made to function socially\u2026(We recover) our capacity for relationality, (for) being with and for others, but in a way that is no longer a tool of manipulation or of self-abnegation\u2026(which) opens up an ongoing vision of transformed, redeemed, or converted persons and society, no longer alienated from self, from others, from the body, from the cosmos, from the Divine\u201d[12]. <\/p>\n \u200b[13] This is the kind of love Paul is speaking about in 1 Corinthians 13. This is the hermeneutical framework we need to emphasize and recover to safeguard our interpretations from idolatry and irrelevance[13]. This is the love which energizes our spiritual gifts; which moves the Church toward the kingdom. This is the love that sustains our relationships and that wipes away our tears. The backbone of the body of Christ is the love we share in the midst of grace-filling spaces as the Word is present in our ordinary reality. Because faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.<\/em> [1] Sin, with capital \u2018S\u2019, refers to the human condition as it is presented in article III of the Augsburg Confession: our incapacity to love God over all things and concupiscence. This understanding of \u2018Sin\u2019 is the motivation, explanation and energy of our sins; concrete historical actions that promotes our agendas of self-satisfaction, greed and egotism. <\/p>\n
\nAnd I will show you a still more excellent way. <\/p>\n
\nand the greatest of these is love. <\/p>\n
\n\u200b
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\nNOTES<\/p>\n