The pesky 1 Cor 7

Here's hoping I'm not offending everyone.

The full faculty haven’t seen my thesis proposal yet, but I did get some feedback on my draft proposal, and it was suggested that I say something about 1 Corinthians 7. If you want to read the full passage, it’s here; generally, St. Paul is in favor of celibacy, and if you’ve heard things like “priests/religious are holier because they aren’t dealing with worldly things all the time” or “marriage, by its nature, distracts you from growing in holiness,” or “married people cannot love God with an undivided heart,” or similar things, they’re likely rooted in this passage.

I’m phrasing these in deliberately blunt ways, because I think all of these readings are wrong. When it was pointed out to me that I need to say something about this passage in my thesis (because most lay adults are married, and for other reasons) I realized that I had mostly set this passage aside and had never wrestled with it intellectually. For a while I was trying to rewind the clock a year and a half so I could go back to my St. Paul class and write my paper on this passage. (It didn’t work.)

What follows is what I’ve worked out so far, and, as always, I’m interested in your thoughts (either here or in regular conversation). But before I begin, I want to express my profound gratitude to my longsuffering friends who helped me hash all this out. You know who you are, and thank you.

Setting up the problem

Here’s my point of departure: When I was in undergrad, one of my (much beloved) literature professors would frequently tell our class to run this through your experience. He would propose an idea, and seeing all of us young and inexperienced aspiring adults nodding along, would challenge us: Think about your own experience of life. Does this track? Or not? It’s some of the most intellectually formative advice I’ve ever received.

When I consider the charges against married people in these readings of 1 Cor 7, I find them to be, by and large, foreign to my experience of many of the actual married people that I know. Do married people necessarily divide their hearts between God and their families? It seems like every conversation I have with other married people is something like “How do I deal with this situation with my kids in such a way that they grow to know and love God more?” or “How do I deal with this morally confusing situation at work in a way that honors God?” or something similar. There is a drive to orient everything to God, and, especially in the nitty-gritty, it isn’t always obvious how to do that. We talk about it because we want to do it well. In fact, it is often in and through family life that people come to a deeper knowledge and love of God.¹

Secondly, consider this passage from Matthew 22:34-40:

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them [a scholar of the law tested him by asking, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

He said to him, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

and juxtapose that with the fact that marriage is a sacrament, and the Church has been explicit about it being good (not a necessary evil), and that children are good (also not a necessary evil). It seems absurd to me (is there a stronger word than absurd?) that God would institute a state of life that, by its design, distracts people from him and prevents them from loving him fully — and then, through the Church, calling it good. This doesn’t make any sense.

There’s the logic. But I want to point out something else: it’s also really insulting to married people, who make up the majority of adult Catholics. Besides that, it’s spiritually disorienting. When you want to love God with an undivided heart, following the difficult but not-at-all confusing command of Jesus in Matthew 22, and you’re left with, “well, I guess you’re just going to be distracted” or “God wants part of your life to be separate from him” and so on, what do you do? It all seems to indicate that one’s (human) love for (the infinitely loving) God is not fully requited — which is weird. “Behold this heart,” Jesus didn’t tell St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, “which is loved too much, and yet loves so little.”

What, then?

Three more pieces are important here. First, this is the Word of God, so we can’t just disregard it. Second, I want to affirm that it is okay to set aside a passage of Scripture that bothers you, although this strategy does not work well when you’re trying to write a lengthy academic paper.²

Third, there’s a lot that can be learned from putting St. Paul in his historical and linguistic context. I want to set that piece aside for now and say: I have not (yet) done the historical/linguistic research necessary to give as a good an answer as I’d like, but I’ve studied Scripture enough to have some idea of what questions could be asked and to propose a few ideas for how the passage could be read. These are hypotheses. Whether or not they pan out when I actually do the deeper research is something that, hopefully, will come later.

Here are some possible historical pieces that came up in my reading, but which I didn’t (yet) explore in great depth:

• Did St. Paul believe the end times were very near? If you think the world will end in the next little while, you’re going to make different decisions about your life. Even if you have a well-ordered life, you would probably quit your longer-term projects if you thought you were going to die in a week.

• Were the Christian Corinthians primarily married to other Christians or to pagans? Was it reasonable to expect that one’s spouse would support one’s Christianity?

• How much control did St. Paul’s audience have over their marital status? Were marriages arranged? By whom?

• What was marriage in that culture? What rights and obligations would the spouses be taking on? How possible was it to fulfill those obligations and also live a Christian life?

• What was Corinth like? (I believe it was kind of a seedy place.) Would St. Paul have given different advice to a different audience? (This is largely a matter of reading his other letters; I might start with Ephesians 5.)

As I said, I can’t answer all these questions right now, but they would be important in framing our reading of this passage.

My current thinking

That was a lot of preface. I’m going to try to get to the heart of the matter now, without accidentally writing a lot more preface.

Let’s start with this, from St. Paul:

I should like you to be free of anxieties.

An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But a married man is anxious about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and he is divided. An unmarried woman or a virgin is anxious about the things of the Lord, so that she may be holy in both body and spirit. A married woman, on the other hand, is anxious about the things of the world, how she may please her husband.

I am telling you this for your own benefit, not to impose a restraint upon you, but for the sake of propriety and adherence to the Lord without distraction. (v. 32-35)

The surface-level reading of this says that being married is kind of a bummer if you’re trying to pursue a life of holiness, because you’re going to be distracted — but it’s totally okay to get married, if that’s what you really want to do.

As I said above, I object to this reading because it doesn’t make sense. Most married people I know (and it’s admittedly a selective group) are quite “anxious about the things of the Lord,” and it seems bizarre to believe that God, who wants our love, would make this divided-heart institution elevate it to the status of sacrament.

We could ask here: What is St. Paul actually saying? Does he mean that every married person is necessarily, by virtue of being married, distracted from God? What other options are there?

One of my longsuffering interlocutors suggested imagining the laments we make today and putting St. Paul’s “Wouldn’t it be great if everyone was celibate!” in that context. “Wouldn’t it be great if everyone lived walking distance from a church! If everyone lived walking distance from family! If there were church bells and it was culturally normal to drop your work at noon to say the Angelus!” We can see obvious benefits for people’s spiritual lives — but at the same time, it doesn’t really make sense to ask everyone to order their lives around these things. There are other considerations, and anyway, we have to respect the workings of Providence. God will accompany us and help us grow in his love in whatever circumstances he has placed us.³

I once heard someone say that most of us aren’t really trying to please God; we’re trying to please ourselves without displeasing God.⁴ Maybe St. Paul observed something similar in Corinth. It seems, based on my own experience/observation, that once you give up a lot for God, there’s a kind of point-of-no-return where there isn’t a way to make sense of your life except in the context of God. When “pleasing ourselves” isn’t really an option anymore, then it’s easier to to make the shift to “trying to please God.”

Giving up marriage and family, a normal place in the community’s social structure, the normal means of social support, the freedom to decide where to live and what professional work to pursue, and so on (some of these things are more applicable to St. Paul’s time, and others more to religious life in our own) could push someone past that point-of-no-return very effectively. I think a religious conversion can do the same, as it often complicates family relationships. I think that unexpected suffering and unexpected twists and turns of life can often do the same, but those aren’t things we decide for ourselves. I can imagine St. Paul saying, “It’s not great to be focused on enjoying life as much as possible while staying out of hell. It’s better to put God first. I wish you would all get yourself to a place where your life doesn’t make sense without God, because you would know his grace and mercy like I do. Celibacy is an obvious way to do that. I’m doing it, and it’s great.”

It doesn’t make sense to me that St. Paul is saying that every married person is necessarily unable to love God fully. But, throughout much of the history of the Church (almost all of which was in the future for St. Paul, but I think they’re building on his tradition), priests and religious have had specific supports in place that married people don’t necessarily have (or have to build for themselves). They have proximity to a chapel, obligations to specific ways of praying, an external appearance (habits, collars) that make their religiosity obvious. We make a greater effort to get to a church, and so not as often; we make prudential judgments about how and when to pray; we have to think about the occasion and the company when we decide what to wear. Loving God, for us, may just take more effort and creativity. We have to figure out how to do it without all of that chapel time, and with a lot less predictability in our lives.

So where does that leave us? It makes sense to me to say that there are ways in which, in general, the priesthood and religious life are more conducive to spiritual growth than secular life in the world. But it’s also true that God is not bound to these things, and that he doesn’t call everyone to committed celibacy. Building a life of prayer as a lay person may be harder because you have to figure out how to do it, rather than having a schedule handed to you. But God’s grace is available to you. God has no shortage of creativity; his work in our lives is limited only by our willingness to respond.

The most infuriating line from one of the commentaries was this: that those committed to celibacy have “greater availability for the service of the Lord, his people, and his kingdom, as the Christian experience of millennia has shown.”⁵ This seems to be true only if we ignore the work that lay/married people have been doing for millennia. When my kids get hurt, I drop what I’m doing and take care of them, because I am positioned to be available to the service of the Lord, his people, and his kingdom in this way.⁶ I do not call my pastor or the local religious sisters to come take care of them, because they are not available for this work. They are doing… other work, in service of the Lord, his people and his kingdom. And they are available in ways that I am not.

In sum, here’s what I’d say. I don’t think anyone’s spiritual life or love of God has any kind of limit beyond the one they choose for themselves. (If you don’t want to grow in prayer, you won’t, and there’s your limit.) It seems to me that everything (besides sin) can and should be oriented toward God, and this is the bulk of the work that lay people do. As one of my longsuffering interlocutors said, it’s easier to think about God when baptizing someone than when closing some secular business deal — but we ought to think about God in whatever we do.

There is a lot of work to be done, and God calls us to different aspects of that work. As to whether some of us have more or less important work to do, I think we all ought to mind our own business. The best possible thing you could do with your life is the thing that God is asking you to do, and any attempt to rank people in order of importance or value or some such is probably stemming from pride or insecurity. There’s a lot to be said for trusting God, who knows the big picture and loves us all more than we know.

I asked my advisor, “Is this one sentence (in my outline) enough? I don’t think I can articulate my thoughts succinctly without offending everyone.” This wasn’t succinct, and hopefully I haven’t offended everyone either. I’m open to criticism, though.

Where am I wrong? What am I missing?

Do you think I did justice to St. Paul?

Does this make sense according to your own experience of life?

1. Parents, you know the experience when Father begins his homily with something like “Jesus said we have to be like children. You know what children are like?” and you want to say, “Better than you do, Father,” but it’s the homily, so you don’t?

2. My longsuffering friends may be surprised to hear me say this, but I do believe it and I think it’s important. If there’s a passage of Scripture that bothers you, oftentimes the best thing to do is set it aside and say, “I know that God loves me, and that the truths of the faith are true, and that this is the Word of God. I also don’t understand this passage. I’m going to set it aside because it’s stressing me out, and I believe that somehow it all makes sense, and I don’t need to understand it fully right now.” That’s what I had originally done with this passage, and I had forgotten about it until just recently — and (like everything) it was providential, because I’m in a better spot to wrestle with it now than I was all those years ago.

3. Does this sound like Walter Ciszek? I confess to being extremely influenced by Walter Ciszek.

4. Fulton Sheen? I’d love a source if someone has it.

5. Reference available upon request.

6. My kids are his people; serving them is serving the Lord and building his kingdom. Disagree if you want, but you should know that I’m ready to die on this hill.