Main news for 20 April 2015

King James Version (en)

1 Corinthians, Chapter 11, verse 19

¹⁷ and because generally their meetings were not for the better but for the worse

¹⁹For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.

NOTES

The apostle Paul warns us against a very serious danger: confusing concepts. He says that the Corinthians...

For Paul, as for all Christians, the breaking of bread and the gatherings connected with it were the center of church life. The Church, properly speaking, exists as a gathering in which the breaking of bread is performed in Christ's name. This has been so in every age, from the very beginning of church history. But "in the name" does not mean only "in memory," at least not in the sense in which we use that expression today. In the Bible we often meet expressions such as "God remembered" or "God forgot," although it is perfectly clear that, in our human sense, God forgets no one and nothing, and does not remember in that sense either; He simply knows all His creation as a whole and each of the people He created specifically.

But God is not an impersonal Absolute. He is a Person, and like every Person He can turn His face toward someone or turn away. This is what the language of the Bible calls "remembering" or "forgetting." And during the Christian breaking of bread, we Christians remember Christ, and He remembers us. Then the bread and wine again become His body and His blood, in the same sense in which this happened at the Last Supper. But for this to happen, He Himself must be at the center of the gathering.

And the issue is not only that He should come, but also that communion with Him should become the center and meaning of the whole gathering. In the Corinthian church, judging by the apostle's words, there were problems with this. The breaking of bread there sometimes turned simply into a noisy feast, and it often turned out that some ate and drank to excess while others remained hungry. The feast as such came to the fore, pushing communion with the Risen One into second place. The sacred act turned into profanation, not because there were food and wine on the table, but because behind them one could no longer see the One for whom and around whom they had gathered.

It is precisely against this, and not against the meal as such, that the apostle protests when he says that those who perform the breaking of bread in this way are not thinking at all about the body of Christ, not only in the sense of the bread they break, but also in the sense of the spiritual reality that is called the Church with a capital letter. This is no longer Christianity, but the same old paganism under the guise of Christianity, which cannot and must not exist in the Church.

These words of the apostle of Paul are astoundingly of current interest now, as they were in the middle of the 50s of the 1st century. In this part of the chapter, Apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians about liturgical life and underlines that, if heresies are necessary, divisions because of them, are on the contrary inadmissible. Forgetting these words of the apostle, we think often instinctively and we act exactly on the contrary: we think that the heresies are inadmissible, but that the divisions with dissentients are necessary.

This sentence of the apostle sounds strangely in Greek as in English as well, especially on the background of the Christian history. Greek indeed contains as English the word "aeresis" - heresy. This word was used in three close, but not identical meanings: a) choice, the freedom of choice; b) elections, the elected persons; c) aptitudes, courses, directions, schools. At the Cathedral period, the first two meanings withdrew to the second plan for Christians, but they were still quite used in the 1st century. This word bears in itself no negative tinge, thus why the apostle speaks about these "aeresis" as something necessary (and we can translate as "desirable"). We cannot however exclude the possibility that the apostle speaks about elections of the public servants in the Corinthian community, entailing division between the partisans of various persons.

Somehow or other, it is fundamental for us that the apostle characterizes personal preferences and\or difference of opinions as being a normal phenomenon for Christians. He explains that it is necessary so that the tempted and the approved may be made manifest among us. We think humanly that if the approved manifest themselves, then, consistently the rest is considered as not having passed the test, which means useless, with corresponding "organized conclusions ". It is in no way what the apostle wants to say, for it is important for him to see the tempted and approved so that, by keeping the unity as a great jewel, we can follow their example and their choice.

Besides, for us, particularly for those who grew in the period of the Bolsheviks, it is important to understand that heresies are admitted necessary only in a unique religious community, the unique Eucharist of which Paul calls to observe, that is - within the framework of Christianity. It usually seems to us that, Christianity is a doctrine or an ideology, where there cannot be differences of opinions. But now they can’t only be, but they are even necessary. It is very clear in reality: God planted the Church in a changeable world, and which varies itself, and under the gracious action of the Creator. And it comes to choose every day in it the way of a Christian life.

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