Paul here addresses the danger of elevating truth above love. The Corinthians would have been raised from childhood to be superstitious and fearful of gods and demons everywhere. You had to placate the good gods and fear, avoid the bad ones.
Even after hearing the truth of the gospel, the conditioning persists. Some might be positive associations. Others might be bad, bringing up feelings of guilt surrounding other things that were connected to idolatry or false gods. This would include the meat at the temple meat market.
Meat that was purified would have been offered to the gods, with the priests using a third and generally selling it to the market. Some might not have any issues with it, being aware that the temple rituals were entirely false and empty. Others had more guilt around it, whether from false beliefs about false gods, from guilt or to avoid temptation.
But this was not a live-and-let-live situation. Those without issues were shoving it in the face of those who avoided the meat. Paul writes to address this “freedom bullying”.
These freedom bullies rested on their knowledge. “We all possess knowledge,” they write. But Paul tells them that their knowledge is incomplete, and that their surety in their knowledge in fact reveals their ignorance compared to true knowledge.
He brings it back from truth and freedom to relationships, between us and God and within the body. God affirms those who love, not those who are always right.
In verses 4-6, Paul quotes an earlier letter from these freedom bullies, which itself quotes an early creed. To emphasize their knowledge, they quote directly the theological justification for their position. Paul does not argue with the accuracy of their position.
Elsewhere, in Romans, Paul addresses this question of the “weaker brother”. Weakness is not sin – in fact, sin would be acting against their weak conscience. Weakness is not necessarily an all-encompassing characteristic. It is in regards to this specific situation. Every Christian is both weak and strong in different situations.
The word “weak” here refers to overall human limitations, from illness, to lack of physical strength, to deficiency of knowledge. All of us grow and change our knowledge and beliefs. Some of us more innately feel guilt than others. We all have deficiencies due to conditioning, illogical reactions arising out of our experiences.
Paul tells us that God understands these differences, takes them into account and wants us to take them into account in our relationships with each other. The “strong” Corinthians wanted, to some degree legitimately, to move people along out of their deficiencies. But in pushing people to do what they felt was wrong, it was pushing people to sin, and in this specific case, pressuring people back into situations where they could slip back into the life of idolatry. And that pressure itself is a sin.
In the end, it is better to love than to be right. This is a relational directive, but it is not a systemic directive. When you create a system out of these instructions, it creates a “tyranny of the weak” in which everything is a sin and those with weak consciences have full power over those without.
Fortunately for us, Christ does not wait for us to have full knowledge or lack of weakness before he enters into relationship with us. Christ’s love comes to us before Christ’s truth. We should go and do likewise.
— Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA
1 Corinthians 8
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