Now concerning food sacrificed to idols, we know that ‘All of us possess knowledge.’ Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.

Those are the well-trod words of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 8:1-3 (NRSV). He’s writing to an adolescent Corinthian Church beset by an impressive range of troubles, of which the question to occasion this passage (should believers eat meat that has been offered to idols?) is but one. The issue may feel a little foreign to most Western Christians today, but in an ancient Mediterranean city like Corinth, it’s important to remember that almost all meat would have been idol meat.¹ Meat wasn’t nearly as common a staple in ancient diets as it is in modern ones, but rather something saved to be offered to the gods on special occasions and at festivals, or maybe when you were planning a major journey or new business venture. The worshipper would bring the sacrificial animal to the priest who would perform the necessary rites, slaughter, and cook it. The priest would then take his share of the cooked meat and offer the rest to the worshipper and his/her family. Whenever there was meat left over (as tended to be the case with, say, large festivals), it would be sold in the marketplace where anybody, worshipper or not, could buy it.

This created a problem for the burgeoning Christian community in Corinth, and elsewhere. Could (should?) a formerly-pagan Christian convert buy and eat such meat, simply to enjoy it as food? Could they separate the physical nature of the beef (or whatever) from the spiritual reality of why it was available in the first place? Some said yes, others no.

One group argued that, seeing as they now no longer worshipped the gods (realizing they were nothing but empty idols) but rather the one true creator God, they could eat and enjoy whatever was available to them with all the fullness a rich creational monotheism afforded. They had grasped the truth of which the psalmists sang, “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof.”² It was all God’s anyway, and so long as the believer gave thanks, he or she could partake of it with a clear conscience. This is the knowledge Paul is referring to in the passage above, and it seems to be the theological position with which he himself most closely identified (1 Cor. 8:4-7). He even goes so far as to label it the “strong” position in a different scenario (Rom. 14:1-15:13).

On the other side of the question, however, were those “weaker” members of the community who still felt lured by their old life of worshipping the idols so keenly that to even smell the meat which was once on offer in their temples brought the whole seedy business back in ways they weren’t sure if they could resist. They too had tasted and seen that the Lord was good, believed in Jesus as Messiah and God as the one Creator, but transitions of worldview (particularly religious ones) take time. Engrained practices sometimes take years to buff out. They had firmly decided (as a matter of conscience) not to go anywhere near the meat, because for them it marked the start of a slippery slope back into idolatry.

What was the growing Corinthian community to do? If the strong position people had it their way, it seems that they would be happy to apply this sturdy knowledge of the creator God’s gift of all things to all situations of life, eating what they liked, pulling the weaker brethren up with them (by the ears, if necessary). Paul sees in such an approach the inherent risk to the already fractious nature of this church. If the strong go on railroading the weak, the weaker community members’ consciences may be defiled and, as a result they may simply end up worshipping idols all over again.³ Their new life in Christ could be destroyed, their last condition worse than the first,⁴ all as a result of the strong believer’s brash application of ‘knowledge.’

The answer Paul proposes to this dilemma is not to jettison or relativize the true content of this theological knowledge for the sake of something which might then tenuously be called “unity.” Rather, it is to reframe the way the Corinthians understand knowledge itself through the lens of the Messiah’s cross-shaped, self-sacrificial love. He is calling on the strong not to simply abandon the real truth which they have come to know because of the weaker community member, but rather to embrace a different sort of knowing altogether, wherein it is love (Jesus’ formula of love for God issuing in sacrificial love for neighbor)⁵ which governs, and perhaps even creates, all true knowledge. It is only in the light of this true knowledge created by love, that the Church (comprised of strong and weak together) may be able to form real and lasting communities.

When we talk about how we know what we know, we are discussing epistemology. Three questions are basic to defining any epistemology: 1. What are the categories which govern true knowledge? 2. What separates real knowing from mere opinion? And 3. What justifies making the latter claim? What Paul proposes is an epistemology of love, a term coined by Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904 – 1984) which he deemed the highest mode of all knowing.⁶ For Paul, it is love which must govern what true knowing really is. It is love which separates what a Corinthian Christian really knows from what they may merely opine. It is love which justifies defining knowledge as knowledge on love’s basis and opinion as opinion on the same basis. Most importantly, it is knowing through love which keeps one from becoming “puffed up,” and unfeeling towards the conscience of a fellow believer. Why? Because (following Lonergan’s lead) real love reconciles the supposed “great epistemic divide” between subjectivity and objectivity.

Commonly we divide what can be known into objective and subjective elements. The former are objective scientific facts, properties which may be known absolutely and cross-personally. Subjective elements such as emotion, hunches, and even spirituality are themselves untestable. They cannot be measured or quantified objectively, and thus are unable to be truly known. This view was enshrined in European thought by German philosopher Gotthold Lessing, who typified the divide as a nasty great ditch between history (objective) and faith (subjective).⁷ Anything known must be known in objective fact. It is this kind of knowledge which the strong Corinthian believed they held. They knew, for a fact, that God was God and the idols were not, therefore they could eat idol meat with a clear conscience. The weak, they might have said, were holding onto subjective fears over that which did not really exist, making those fears doubly unfounded.

But does such a firm divide hold true, taken to its natural end? As for Lonergan so for Paul, the answer is: no. Rather than seeing objectivity and subjectivity as mutually exclusive epistemological categories, Lonergan recognized in them the characteristic traits of a household divided⁸ and in need of reconciliation. The necessary agent of that reconciliation, is love.

Put abstractly, if I love X I am completely, personally (read subjectively) involved with X.  However, if it is to be genuinely X that I love, X must be allowed to be as freely X as it can be. X must be objectively itself. Otherwise, it is no longer really X which I love, but rather an idea of X, some permutation of myself as the lover rather than the beloved itself. Transferred into the realm of knowledge, love is the only epistemological reality which creates true objectivity of knowing precisely because of the demand posed by one’s subjective involvement with the beloved. Whatever you wish to fully know, you must know it as purely itself. If one wants to be sure of the objective truth about something, you cannot get there without the dangerously subjective (the frighteningly relational) reality of loving (and so freeing) that which you wish to know.

It is precisely this kind of relationally epistemic love, which frees the other to be totally the other, that Paul is calling the strong believers in Corinth to embrace. Here, however, he creates a divot in the argument’s logic which would give his readers then (and interpreters now!) reason to pause. Because what Paul advocates in 1 Cor. 8:3 is not directly for the strong to love their weaker neighbor, but rather to love God, finding their love for neighbor in God’s knowledge of themselves.

The point Paul is trying to make here is rich and dense: What ultimately matters is not our knowledge of God (that which the Corinthian strong prided themselves on) but rather God’s knowledge of us. Paul makes it clear later in the letter (13:9-12) that what we know now as finite human beings is severely limited, subject to sin and so to pride. But we are here and hereafter fully known by God in his love for us.⁹ In other words, in God’s free and perfect love we are created, sustained, and allowed to be completely and objectively ourselves before him (he is the God who says, “Let there be…”). In God’s love, which brings us into being, humans are set free to truly live.

But here we encounter a problem, for a human being totally free before a holy God is revealed as a broken human being, one who freely chooses to preclude themselves from full and open relationship to God because of failure to fully love, what we call Sin. God knows this about us. He knows our weakness and how it damages relationship. But precisely because it is a knowing-in-love, the subsequent action taken by God to reconcile the human/divine relationship is driven by that love: the self-sacrificial love of the cross which graciously frees sinners. Because he knows us, he also knows what we need him to do for us. This love humbles us by its self-sacrificing nature.

If it is to be this God whom the Corinthians truly love in return they must, in their own minds and hearts, “free” God from the constraints of their finite and prideful epistemologies so that he may be God as God truly is. Only when they have done that, and recognized him as the God revealed in Jesus Christ (8:6b), the God who gave up his rights to all things for the sake of weak and broken human sinners (Phil. 2:5-11), indeed who in all love and knowing¹⁰ became subject himself to weakened humanity and laid down his life for them, can they clearly and objectively know how they must interact with their own weaker brothers and sisters.

In loving God to freely know God (as he loves and so fully knows them) and being humbled by God’s sacrificial love, they turn to love their weaker neighbor, freeing them from the bonds of their callous application of “knowledge.” By freeing them with the gift of their own sacrificial love (in this case refusing the right to eat idol meat if it will cause their brother or sister to stumble [8:8-13]) the strong will manifest Christ’s self-offering love to the weak. When that happens, the weaker community member will in turn come to “know” God more fully in their strong brother or sister’s loving example, being strengthened in conscience and the reality of their faith. This will create a truly knowledgeable and united community in which weak and strong together are moving away from the idols and toward God. A community in which all  will, “grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.”¹¹