A great deal of confusion about the relative value of “virginity” and marriage can be avoided if one pays careful attention to the text of Paul’s advice in 1 Corinthians 7. The two most important observations are: 1) that Paul’s specific recommendations are made because of the “impending crisis” (v. 26), and 2) that Paul wants both the unmarried and the married to be free from the anxieties that attend their particular estates.
First, the “impending distress” is the result of the huge change that was taking place between A.D. 30 and 70. The “appointed time has grown very short” (v. 29, ESV). The old “world/age” was under judgment and was “passing away” (v. 31). And although people still had to live in that old world (v. 30, 31), they needed to be careful about the “fleshy tribulations” that were coming (v. 28). Charles Hodge writes:
The awful desolation that was soon to fall upon Jerusalem and on the whole Jewish race, and which could not but involve more or less the Christians also, and the inevitable struggles and persecutions, which according to our Lord’s predictions, his followers were to encounter, were surely enough to create a deep impression on the apostles mind, and to make him solicitous to prepare his brethren for the coming storm.
In the light of this, then, secondly, Paul wants everyone to be free from anxiety. Everyone. This portion of the passage has been greatly misunderstood. Paul wants them to be free from anxiety—the anxieties that attend marriage and the anxieties that are peculiar to the single state. Paul says that the unmarried man or woman is unnecessarily anxious about “how he may please the Lord” (vss. 32, 33). That’s not a good thing. He’s not presenting some ideal celibate state where someone might direct all of his attention toward religious matters and not worry about the problems associated with marriage. He is warning single people that they should not be anxious about pleasing the Lord. Paul wants them all to be free from anxieties.
With that little introduction here’s my “interpretive translation” of 1 Corinthians 7:25-40.
25. Now concerning the special case of virgins [that is, unmarried and unmarried betrothed men and women]: I have no direct commandment from the Lord [Jesus regarding this special situation]; yet I will give you my judgement as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy.
26. Because of the present crisis [—you understand my meaning here: the great turmoil and distress surrounding the dissolution of the old world as prophesied by our Lord, a tribulation that will also spill over into the entire inhabited world and produce, among other horrors, great persecution for the Church of Jesus Christ—] I think that it is good for a man to remain as he is. [Haven’t I already urged you to accept this? Permit me now to apply this general principle to your present concern about unmarried men and women.]
27. Are you married [or under the obligations of betrothal to a woman]? Do not seek a divorce [or seek to be loosed from your betrothal obligations]. Are you unmarried [or free from a wedding engagement]? Do not seek a wife. [Just as I have been saying, don’t be anxious to alter your current marital status].
28. But if you do marry, you have not sinned [contrary to what your misguided leadership says, marriage will not drop you down into a second-class spiritual state; and so there is no religious reason why you should not marry]; and likewise if a young woman marries, she has not sinned. Nevertheless, [as a faithful pastor I must advise you that] those who are married will have tribulation in the flesh, and I want to spare you this. [Please notice, dear Corinthians, that my reasons for advising you against marriage now are strictly pastoral; they arise out of my evaluation of our own present crisis situation. Unlike your reasons for preferring singleness, spirituality does not enter at all into the rationale for my advice. The old humanity (“the flesh”) is passing away and is being replaced by a new world. That process will bring tribulation, as our Lord promised.]
29-31. Let me explain myself more fully, brethren: the time is short [—we are in the “last days,” the transition from the old to the new world—], so that from now on even those who have wives should live as though they had none, those who weep as though they did not, those who rejoice as thought they did not, those who buy as though they did not possess, and those who use the things of this world as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form [that is, the entire old world economy with Israel and Rome at the religious and political center of the world] is passing away.
32. Now, I want you to be free from an anxiety-ridden existence [Gk: ‘amérimnos*]. The man who is unmarried [in the Corinthian community] is unnecessarily fretful* about the things of the Lord—how he may please the Lord. And the man who is married is anxiety-ridden* over the cares of the world—how he may please his wife [both kinds of anxiety are unhealthy and to be avoided].
*See Matt. 6: 25, 27, 28, 31, 34; 10:19; Lk. 10: 41; 21:34; Phil. 4:6; 1 Pet. 5:7;
34. Now consider the difference between a wife and a unmarried woman [in the Corinthian community dominated by your false view of spirituality. Your legalistic pestering has insured that] the unmarried woman is anxious* about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and spirit [and so she has gotten herself all worked up over whether getting married or staying single is more spiritual]. And she who is married is anxious* about the things of the world—how she may please her husband. [Why? Because the teachings that are circulating among you make her anxious about all this “secular” time she supposedly wastes on pleasing her husband. Again, both forms of anxiety are unspiritual and dangerous.]
35. I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord [or as some have translated it: that you may serve the Lord without distraction—the distractions of these unspiritual anxieties].
36. Now if any one thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes: let them marry — it is no sin.
37. Nevertheless, he who stands steadfast in his heart, who is under no compulsion but has control over his own will, and has determined in his heart that he will not marry—this man also does the right thing.
38. So then, he who marries his betrothed does right, but he who does not marry does even better [because of the present crisis and the trouble that the church will experience].
39-40. A wife is bound to her husband as long as he lives. If the husband dies, she is free to be married to whom she wishes, only in the Lord. But blessed is she who remains as she is—that is my judgment [given the coming crisis that will spare none of us], and I think that I have the Spirit of God.
Jeff,
Two questions. First, do you know of any Church Fathers who understood this passage in this way, as though for St. Paul every manner of ‘concern’ [‘amérimnos] among the Corinthian believers was intrinsically evil?
Second, if the patristic understanding of this passage were correct, and your interpretation incorrect, how would you know?
In the peace of Christ,
– Bryan
Bryan,
Good questions. First, I didn’t say anything about “intrinsic evil.” These are pastoral concerns for Paul. He is not laying out timeless truths about intrinsic evil. But perhaps I’m being too picky about your terminology.
Second, in v. 35 Paul states explicitly that he wants them to be “free from anxieties [merimnous; masc acc pl of the verb merimnao].” He then immediately identifies the “anxiety” of the unmarried in Corinth: “The unmarried is anxious [merimnao] about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord.” Then he goes on to talk about the anxiety of the married. Then back to the anxieties of the unmarried and the married again. Paul desires to free them from all these “anxieties.” Freedom from unnecessary worries that relate to one’s married state would “promote good order and secure their devotion to the Lord without distractions” (v. 35).
Third, I don’t know if any of the “church fathers” interpreted this passage in this way. What church fathers actually commented on 1 Corinthians 7? We have such a scanty collection of extant texts from the “church fathers” that I don’t see how they can be the standard for all future biblical interpretation.
The very notion that there is a “patristic understanding of this passage” is incredible. If there was such a thing, how would you know? If you searched Migne and found every reference to 1 Cor. 7:32-35 and then analyzed what was common to all of them, would that be the “patristic understanding of his passage”? And would that then be the gold standard against which all future interpretation be judged?
Jeff,
All the Fathers I mentioned in my latest comment on the “Concerning BMEV” thread referred to this passage, and they all treated concern for the things of the Lord, and how to be holy in body and spirit, as a *good* thing. None of them treated concern for the things of the Lord as a bad thing or as something that St. Paul was here condemning. For one example, see St. Ambrose’s work titled “Concerning Virgins,” since today is his feast day.
How can we know that there is a patristic understanding of a passage? We can know this when the Fathers share a moral consensus regarding how to understand that passage. And that seems to be the case with respect to 1 Cor 7:25-40 regarding whether undivided concern for the things of the Lord is something good and noble.
It shouldn’t be incredible that all the Church Fathers would be agreed in many ways in their understanding of Scripture, if they received the deposit of faith organically from a common origin in the Apostles, and received a shared interpretive paradigm that was handed down from the Apostles first by word of mouth and then also by written commentaries.
As for a patristic concensus being a ‘gold standard,’ the reason it carries authoritative weight is because of its greater proximity to the Apostles, and also because ecclesial deism is not true. That’s why going against a patristic consensus should give us pause, because doing so is not theologically neutral; it presupposes a deistic conception of Christ’s relation to His Church.
In the peace of Christ,
– Bryan
Bryan,
The “fathers” that interpreted the “anxiety” Paul critiques in I Cor. 7:32 as a “good” thing were wrong. They misinterpreted the passage. They failed to understand the context.
Ambrose’s little tract about virgins is dreadful. If that is the model of biblical interpretation, then why bother with learning languages, context, and all the rest?
I don’t find it incredible that early church pastors were agreed about so many things. I find it incredible that we should be able to find a consensus on the true interpretation of minor passages like this. My incredulity has to do also with the paucity of extant material from this time period. I don’t even find it incredible that they were agreed on so many things that were wrong. That they all shared a common weakness in that they were inexorably enmeshed in an alien philosophical environment is understandable. That they would be apt to make mistakes about the relative value of virginity and the “higher calling” of those who eschew sex is not hard to understand given the spirit of their age. Of course, they rose above these influences in many ways when they were faithful to the Scriptures and critical of their own world. But they could not possibly see through it all. They made mistakes. Big mistakes. This is one of them.
By the way, who’s to say that the Roman church is not ecclesiastically deistic? It’s Rome that wants to freeze history and refuses to acknowledge that the Lord continues to guide his church through repentance for earlier mistakes and fresh appropriations of the rich, authoritative sufficiency of Word.
Jeff,
What I’m trying to understand is how you know that the Church Fathers “failed to understand the context” of the Corinthian church and that it is not you who are falsely inferring from the context that the “concern for the things of the Lord” of which St. Paul speaks in verses 32-24 was bad. In other words, if the Fathers were right, and in verses 32-24 St. Paul is actually affirming and not condemning a [consecrated] virgin’s undivided concern for the things of the Lord, how would you know? What exactly about the context rules out the possibility that the Fathers were right in their understanding of verses 32-34, and necessitates your take on these verses?
You seem to be merely asserting that the Church Fathers were wrong here and that you are right. And if I had to choose between taking your word, and taking that of the Fathers, I’d stick with the Fathers every time, because of their greater proximity to the Apostles, and because the Holy Spirit was guiding that pillar and bulwark of truth (1 Tim 3:15) which is the Church, into all truth (John 16:13).
You claim that the Church Fathers were wrong on many things, because they were “inexorably enmeshed in an alien philosophical environment.” But that just begs the question. How do you know that what they were believing and teaching on this point (i.e. consecrated virginity) was not what the Apostles had handed down from Christ (cf. Matt 19:12)? You [seemingly] assume that if a belief or practice in the Church had a pagan parallel, then the Church’s belief or practice couldn’t be authentic or apostolic. But that’s not a safe assumption. St. Justin Martyr tells us in the middle of the second century, for example, that the pagan worshipers of Mithras imitated the Catholic Eucharist, “commanding the same thing to be done.” In other words, we can’t assume that if certain beliefs and practices in the Church have parallels in the pagans, therefore those beliefs and practices in the Church are the result of syncretism or accretion. That would be an unjustified assumption. (In relation to this subject, it is my understanding that lifelong consecrated virginity was not a pagan practice; it was a practice that the Church brought into the world.)
As for your last comments about Rome wanting to “freeze history and refusing to acknowledging that the Lord continues to guide His Church,” I agree that that would be wrong. But the Catholic Church does not believe or teach that the Holy Spirit is no longer guiding Christ’s Church. However, unless there is a principled way of distinguishing between what the Holy Spirit has already settled, and what remains open, one cannot know whether one is moving forward with the Holy Spirit, or rejecting what the Holy Spirit has already done. Growth is impossible without building on what has already been laid down. As best as I can tell, in your position the Spirit has settled nothing definitively and irrevocably. But in the Catholic conception, to reject the unanimous teaching of the Fathers would be to reject what the Holy Spirit has already laid down in the growth and development of the Church. Authentic growth requires precisely this kind of principled distinction between what has been laid down and what has not. It further requires humble deference to what was already settled in the Church by the Spirit. Given the distinction between what the Spirit has irrevocably settled and what remains open, we can know that authentic growth cannot retract or deny what the Holy Spirit has already done in guiding the universal Church in her deepening understanding of the faith once for all entrusted to the saints.
In the peace of Christ,
– Bryan
Bryan,
First, you wrote: “As best I can tell, in your position the Spirit has settled nothing definitively and irrevocably.” You say this because I reject what some of the church “fathers” say about virginity being a higher calling? What’s the logic here? On the contrary, I believe that the Spirit has settled a great deal and has led the church to confess that which is foundational. I confess the Nicene Creed. But I don’t confess Ambrose’s silliness about virginity.
Second, anyone who wants to judge this matter ought to take an hour or two to read Ambrose and Jerome on virginity. Don’t read what Roman apologists say about what they say. Read the originals. Judge for yourself whether they do justice to the text of 1 Corinthians 7. I know that Ambrose and Jerome are wrong about what they teach on virginity because I can read the plain text of Scripture and see that it contradicts what they say. It’s really not too difficult.
Jeff,
I didn’t draw my inference about nothing being settled definitively and irrevocably from what you said about the Church Fathers on consecrated virginity, but from what you’ve said elsewhere about creeds and confessions. If I’m mistaken about that, then I’m glad that we agree that some things have been definitively and irrevocably settled by the Spirit in the Church.
As for it being “not too difficult” to see that the Church Fathers contradicted the plain text of 1 Corinthians 7, which patristic claims are you referring to? Your claim implies that they were either ignorant (unable to see the plain meaning of Scripture) or malicious (intentionally twisting Scripture to make it seem to say something other than what they saw it to say). That’s a serious accusation, especially against our Fathers in the faith, the same ones the Spirit guided to determine the canon and the creed. So, precisely which of their claims regarding 1 Corinthians 7 contradict the plain meaning of the passage?
In the peace of Christ,
– Bryan
It’s not simply that they contradicted the plain text of 1 Corinthians 7. They go way beyond anything said in the Scriptures about virginity. That was why I challenged people to read the text of Ambrose and Jerome.
Hey, they made some mistakes. I’m not saying they were malicious, Scripture twisters. And “ignorant” is a bit harsh. They just erred on this. The “fathers” were wrong on a host of different issues. They were not infallible. They are not the gold standard for all future generations. They are the first in a long line of men and women that the Spirit will use to guide the church into the fulness of truth. They don’t have to get everything right. All is not lost when we confess they made mistakes. Relax. Have some chips and dip. The cosmos will not deconstruct if we find that the “fathers” have erred.
“That’s a serious accusation, especially against our Fathers in the faith, the same ones the Spirit guided to determine the canon and the creed.”
It’s an accusation to say someone is ignorant of some facts? That’s not necessarily a moral failing.
” What exactly about the context rules out the possibility that the Fathers were right in their understanding of verses 32-34, and necessitates your take on these verses?
You seem to be merely asserting that the Church Fathers were wrong here and that you are right.”
“So, precisely which of their claims regarding 1 Corinthians 7 contradict the plain meaning of the passage?”
I think Jeff already answered this question when he said this:
“Second, in v. 35 Paul states explicitly that he wants them to be “free from anxieties [merimnous; masc acc pl of the verb merimnao].” He then immediately identifies the “anxiety” of the unmarried in Corinth: “The unmarried is anxious [merimnao] about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord.” Then he goes on to talk about the anxiety of the married. Then back to the anxieties of the unmarried and the married again. Paul desires to free them from all these “anxieties.” Freedom from unnecessary worries that relate to one’s married state would “promote good order and secure their devotion to the Lord without distractions” (v. 35).”
The Church Fathers are Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah, Jesus, Paul, etc. The men called “Church Fathers” are in reality Church Babies. The notion that they were close to the apostles and understood more is clearly wrong. Just read Barnabas, which is full of nonsense.
“Consecrated virginity” is unknown in the Bible, either old or new “testaments.” It comes from Roman religion. After all, the Romans had vestals, so it becomes reasonable for us to have some also. All Paul is talking about is not marrying at the present time. There is no “vow” of celibacy in this passage.
The early church did not determine the canon. She recognized it and was created by it. The apostles determined the canon and it was fixed by AD 70. It was only later, when questions arose, that the church had to act.
Finally, even if this rubbish about 1 Cor were correct, it would not apply to Mary, because she lived under the Old Covenant, before Pentecost. She was blessed with lots of kids from her marriage to Joseph.