NOTES for Co1 10:1-13

Continuing the discussion of life in the Kingdom, Paul turns to the history of the Exodus (vv. 1-5). For him, as can be seen, this history becomes a foreshadowing of the spiritual processes taking place in the lives of individual Christians and of whole churches (vv. 6-11). This comparison is, of course, not accidental: for the apostle, the Church is nothing other than the new people of God, the very remnant spoken of by the great prophets of Israel. It is important to him that the people of God remain precisely the people of God, without spiritually degenerating and without turning either into a purely religious community, of which there have always been many, or into a peculiar kind of "table fellowship" bound not by the common life of the Kingdom but by shared views and interests. To this end it was necessary to avoid two extremes: excessive religious formalization of church life on the one hand, and spiritual slackness leading to moral permissiveness on the other.

It is in this context that Paul's warning to the Corinthian Christians about a possible fall sounds (v. 12). It was important to find the golden mean that would allow Christians to remain citizens of the Kingdom without swerving to either side. But this was not easy, because the consciousness of fallen humanity, oriented toward our world that has not yet been transformed and toward its laws, knows only one alternative: either religiosity understood as a system of rigid restrictions and regulation of all life, inner as well as outer, or what is usually called "freedom," which in the end also assumes freedom from moral norms, including the commandments given by God. It was not easy to escape this alternative, and the alternative itself became a real spiritual trial for the Corinthian church, one that could be passed only with God's help (v. 13).