The eCrozier

All things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial. – 1 Corinthians 6:12

The Christians in Corinth believed St Paul’s message of God’s unmerited grace in Jesus and thus they weren’t bound to keep Judaism’s food and purity laws. It was God’s grace mediated through Jesus saved them. Following such religious food and purity laws couldn’t do that. But some were using this freedom from such religious laws to rub it in the face of others. So, they’d say things like: “all things are lawful for me.” They flaunted their freedom from such religious laws to satisfy their own desires. They weren’t considering what would be beneficial for the other. They were basically saying: “I’m free do anything I please because I’m saved by grace alone.” St Paul agrees with them, but he also points out that while they’re indeed free, they have a responsibility to honor other people. He argues that even though God’s grace has given them the “right” to do something, they don’t necessarily need to exercise that right. Rather, they should consider what would be “beneficial” for the other person.

Later, St Paul uses the example of eating food sacrificed to idols to make this point. Now, that was a big deal in the polyreligious city of Corinth. There were shrines there to every imaginable god where people could bring animals to sacrifice. The best steak houses were right next door to these shrines since they got the choicest cuts of meat. So, St Paul makes it clear they have the right to eat meat sacrificed at such shrines because those gods aren’t real. But he says they shouldn’t do it because it may cause the less mature people among them to think they were really there to worship a pagan god. St Paul says that there are more important things than simply exercising one’s rights. Now that doesn’t mean we must always steer clear of any behavior that may upset others. At times that’s unavoidable. But before we engage in such behavior, we should look within ourselves to make sure that an action we contemplate is a matter of an important principle and not simply the satisfaction of a desire to exercise “our rights.”

And that brings us to the conversation many are having over the satire produced by the magazine, Charlie Hedbo. The thugs who murdered members of the magazine’s staff used their offense at the satire produced by the magazine as justification for their heinous deed. No amount of cartoon offense justifies murder. But just because the cartoonists had the right to ridicule other people’s deeply held beliefs doesn’t mean they had to do so as they regularly did. I hope we all want to uphold the right to the free expression of ideas. That doesn’t mean, however, that expressing every idea that plops into our heads is a good thing. Self-restraint is a virtue. Recognizing how expressing our ideas and exercising our rights affect others is a sign of our maturity, our respect, and it’s a way for us to honor the other, even if they don’t seem to deserve honor. For it’s not about them. It’s about us. It’s about how we conduct our lives. As Teju Cole of The New Yorker writes: “The cartoonists were not mere gadflies, not simple martyrs to the right to offend: they were ideologues. Just because one condemns their brutal murders doesn’t mean one must condone their ideology.” The cartoonists had the right to their ideology, as do we. But can’t we still show some self-restraint and honor?

+Scott