The letter the Corinthians wrote to Paul had a lot of questions. Among them was the issue of food offered to idols. We sense that Paul is quoting their comments in that letter, but it’s hard to be sure without quotation marks.
Just 50 miles from Athens, Corinth boasted a lot of highly rational thinkers who prided themselves on being less superstitious than their fellow Greeks. Sure, we recognize that our brains are capable of grasping factual information. Sadly, the more factual knowledge you think you possess, the less moral truth you can see. The fallen flesh takes great pride in its own talents, inflating your opinion of yourself. What really matters is not your erudition, but your submission — to Christ.
It can be taken as fact that there is only one God. All those pagan idols really mean nothing. Most of humanity seems to defer to about as many false deities as they do human rulers. But it’s not enough to adhere to the one true God as a fact; you must know Him and recognize His mastery over our human existence.
Not everyone has that sense of assurance. They instinctively worry that our Father is as venal as the pagan deities of mythology. And they reflexively worry that those other gods might somehow still be real, and that the Father is as easily provoked to jealousy as any human lord. Then again, there were also Jewish Christians who suffered a similar overly sensitive conscience about such things. We could say that Talmudism is little more than superstition, since it obscured Jehovah’s personality and true nature.
In a place like Corinth, it was common for pagans to support their favorite deities by cooking fancy dishes and bringing them as offerings to the temples. What the temple staff didn’t eat was sold in some kind of open market, with accommodations to eat on site. It was as close to fast food as the ancients ever got. It had the effect of making meat a lot easier to include in your diet in a society that seldom offered meat in small portions already cooked.
Some of the Corinthian Christians were intellectuals who never took seriously the pagan associations. They had no conscience about eating in the temple bazaars. They were elitist about it, snickering at those who still labored under the burden of superstition. Should the elitists prod someone with a weaker conscience into eating the temple cuisine, it could destroy the latter’s faith. The internal battle was not healthy; they still needed time with the Lord to get used that level of freedom.
Paul agreed that eating such food made no real difference to our souls. Despite Jewish obsessions about it, Jesus and His disciples had taught that Jews were missing the point about kosher, and Paul understood this very clearly. The real sin here was the arrogant elitism that snickered at overly sensitive consciences. Paul’s attitude was to seek awareness of where his companions stood on things. If they had a weak conscience, it was a lot easier to avoid meat altogether and just eat what was safe.
God does not promote smug elitism.
