What really happened at
Corinth?
How is it then, brethren?
When ye come together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine,
hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation. Let all
things be done unto edifying (1Corinthians 14.26).
What do we make of Paul’s description
of a worship service in 1 Corinthians 14v26? This verse is pivotal
to the debate over worship. Should it be ordered and reverent?
Or should it be marked by informality, spontaneity and innovation?
Should it be ‘cerebral’, or should it be aimed at the feelings? This
crucial verse (and what follows) provides the answer.
Advocates of new-style worship
say that Paul provides here a picture of worship which is totally informal
and exuberant. Many believers contributed and many gifts were exercised.
In the light of this, new-worship
advocates are very pleased that many churches are now veering away from
the formal, predictable style which has dominated the Bible-loving scene
for centuries. The old way of worship (they say) restricted a service
to a very limited number of components, while the new is uninhibited –
just like the services at Corinth.
To whom does Paul speak?
Certainly, if one looks superficially
at the key verse it seems to speak of remarkable liberty and multiple contributions.
‘How is it then, brethren?’ says Paul, ‘when ye come together, every one
of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation,
hath an interpretation.’
Before we examine whether this
impression is right, we must just say that however we read this verse,
it hardly justifies the musical emphasis of new-style worship, as the only
music mentioned is ‘a psalm’.
That aside, there is a massive
flaw in the idea that informal and uninhibited worship is described here.
The vital question is – to whom is Paul speaking? Is he speaking
to the entire church, or only to the leaders? If he speaks to the
whole church, then he is certainly giving a picture of uninhibited, informal
worship. But if he is speaking only to the leaders of the church,
to whom the responsibility of arranging worship fell, then the scene is
quite different. To whom, then, is he speaking?
The answer lies in the words
– ‘every one of you’. Who participated? Was it all the congregation,
or just the elders?
The first clue is the vast size
of the church at Corinth. It would not have been possible for all
or even many of the people to contribute to a worship service. Paul’s
‘every one of you’ would therefore be more likely to refer to the elders.
Secondly, Paul cuts his ‘every
one of you’ approximately in half, saying (verse 34), ‘Let your women keep
silence in the churches.’ If ‘every one of you’ refers to the whole
church, it has now become – ‘half of you’.
Thirdly, ‘every one of you’
soon turns out to be only a few men. Paul puts a tight limit on the
prophets, saying, ‘Let the prophets speak two or three’ (verse 29).
Three is the maximum permitted number of prophets, and preferably only
two.
How many prophets would there
have been at Corinth? We are not told, but in Acts 13 we have a snapshot
of the church at Antioch, probably of similar size, and we find there were
only five prophets and teachers in the entire church. Even this number
was reduced when God spoke by the Holy Spirit telling them to send away
two on missionary service (Saul and Barnabas), leaving only three teachers
and prophets. We learn from this that there were not many teachers
and prophets even in those vast churches of Bible times. Furthermore,
these prophets could only contribute one after the other.
The picture of free-for-all,
open, informal worship of an exuberant kind is crumbling in the light of
these other verses.
Then Paul gives the same rule
for the tongues-speakers. ‘If any man speak in an unknown tongue,’ he says,
‘let it be by two, or at the most by three, and that by course; and let
one interpret’ (verse 27). If there was no interpreter and therefore
no authentication for the revelation given, the speaker had to be silent.
A contradiction in the Bible?
Paul’s ‘every one of you’ has
now been modified three times. But we must modify it even further.
Paul’s ‘every one of you’ must be defined in the context of his insistence
on qualified and approved pastors. From the very beginning of the
church, office bearers were appointed who had certain qualifications, and
were accepted by all the people. There was an appointed teaching
ministry. Anyone and everyone could not bring a word of instruction
into the service. Paul would therefore never have approved anyone
in the congregation bringing a doctrine.
So we still have to ask, what
does the apostle mean when he says, ‘ every one of you’? How can
it be everyone, as he makes that impossible by cutting down contributions
to a minimum? There is only one solution to Paul’s apparent self-contradiction.
At this point of his letter he is not speaking to the entire church, but
only to the leaders of the church, or the ‘platform party’. Every
one of them might be expected to participate. These were men appointed
in obedience to the standards taught by Paul (and soon enshrined in
1 Timothy 3*. If we say that Paul addressed these
words to the entire church we make him contradict himself, and we produce
a nonsensical message from the passage.
It should not surprise us to
find Paul addressing the leaders, because at the end of chapter twelve
he talks about apostles, prophets and teachers in the church. He
then digresses into the beautiful and challenging thirteenth chapter about
love. Then in chapter fourteen he logically continues to focus on
prophets, teachers and tongues-speakers. (The latter were also prophets
because they brought an inspired message.) In verse 26, therefore,
we have words addressed to the ‘platform party’. In this context
‘every one of you’ makes perfect sense.
In connection with prophets,
there is an interesting instruction in chapter 14 verse 30: ‘If any
thing be revealed to another that sitteth by, let the first hold his peace.’
The rendering chosen by the King James translators is interesting, and
very suggestive of a platform party.
Ordered and orderly
It seems that at Corinth there
was a degree of disorder on the platform. Those gifted teachers were
too willing to press forward with a contribution. To correct this,
the platform party is restricted by definite rules.
The picture of a church service
in 1 Corinthians 14, therefore, supports the traditional worship of Bible-believers,
and not the new styles.
We shall proceed to show that
Paul teaches that a worship service should be properly led, and marked
by reverence.
* Alongside
many passages of Scripture that lay down the qualifications of preachers,
there is the well-known exhortation to Timothy – ‘Till I come, give attendance
to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine (1 Timothy 4v13). The word
‘reading’ (in the Greek) refers to public reading. This shows that
preachers were the ones who read the Bible in the course of a service.
This duty is put alongside exhortation and the teaching of doctrine as
part of a preaching elder’s work.. To read the Bible in the service was
definitely Timothy’s role.
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