GALATIA VS. CORINTH

My article from this week's edition of the Rockford Squire:

Among present-day churches, one can find plenty of contentious topics.  No need to list them now, but I often hear from pastors who are being criticized for being too lenient about a certain teaching or practice or too strict about another.  This isn’t a problem unique to our present experience, though.  It was found even in the early Church while the New Testament was still being written. 

Two of St. Paul’s letters actually address each end of this spectrum.  At the Church of Galatia, Paul had proclaimed the Gospel, and a congregation arose.  However, after Paul’s departure, other teachers followed him in and deceived the people.  He had proclaimed that Christ died for the sins of the world and forgives sins by grace—as a free gift.  The false teachers attempted to convince the people that to be “real Christians,” they needed to also follow the Old Testament law.

In Corinth, the trouble wasn’t with too many laws, but with disregard for the law.  The Corinthians didn’t just experience the struggle common to all Christians to overcome sin, but they went above and beyond in order to find new and creative ways to break God’s law.  Paul had proclaimed the same Gospel here, but the people of that congregation chose to use it as an excuse to disregard the law entirely. 

One congregation added to God’s command and burdened the conscience of Christians with laws God Himself never imposed on them.  The other ignored or defended behavior that was clearly immoral even apart from Scripture, using grace as an excuse to follow their own desires.  Paul demonstrated to both churches that they had been deceived and were following something other than the truth.  He admonished the Corinthians to correct their excesses, while encouraging the Galatians to throw off the excesses that had been imposed upon them. 

The appropriateness of St. Paul’s correction did not flow from being a middle way between the extremes, but instead from the fact that it was objectively true and both extremes had departed in opposite directions from what was written in Scripture and what was proclaimed to them.  When the Apostles held a council about many of these controversial matters (Acts 15), they did not seek to satisfy one side or the other, or even to compromise between the two, but only to be faithful to what they had received from Christ.  Likewise, the resolution of present-day controversy is not in appeasing one extreme or the other, or even finding a compromise between them, but rather in proclaiming no more and no less than the words of our Lord given through His Apostles in Scripture.