1Cor6v5-6 - legal shame
Texting One Corinthians
“..I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers, but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers?..” 1Cor6v5-6
🧑⚖️ Litigation and the church indirectly raises issues of money, class, power and education ~ all set in social rubric of propriety and discretion. Law should be the checks and balances of civic felicity, but it seems much more to be the tail wagging the dog, a legal arms race for a sanitised power grab to swindle cash in broad daylight. There is no self-limiting constraint in the counter-suing vortex of good-money-after-bad - law is an extractive industry.
😳 “..to your shame..”
🎭 Preachers, humbly, should both lambast individual christians’ moral guilt and lampoon a church community's social shames if they are to nurture social holiness as well as private piety. How to rightly preach with weaponised shame? It requires a pastor-flock contract that is unsinkably robust, a naked bullet-proof unity-as-church, on the basis of unconditional love for the person-as-person that is unambiguously given and received. It requires a license to call out. Requires a fluency with the shape of shame in a group's culture. Requires bravery and perseverance: servant leadership unto death. Requires counting the cost and paying it forward.
🤫 More Christians should be more ashamed by being shamed in such a way that leads to breaking the wall of shame. Activating shame for transformative self-awareness and collective consciousness of coherent standards of interactive open-handed behaviours. Shame to break the shame of the murky muddied taboo of don't-ask-don't-tell ~ especially with regards finance. Shame to break the shame of the shameless middle-class aloof invulnerability. And obviously, as viewed here, shame to break the shame of the legal modality of a litigious protection racket.
🤫 The introspective and self-righteous Christian community looks inward and knows that it is not guilty of clubbing baby seals. But. Their very collectivity has baked-in a more appalling crime of conspiracy to clique and conspiracy to preen. The calling-out that this needs would get more leverage by exploiting the shame dynamic of listing the banal duplicitious hypocrisies of evangelicalism’s prissy double standards, cloistered intellectualist pride, its inhuman tedium, charmless gendering, institutionally vapid privilege. Would shaming that privilege lead to change? Could we game a group ethic towards better honest vulnerability?
🤫 What am I trying to say? We conspire to form tacit religious pacts in our groups which are policed by shame. Subtle disapprovals of non-fairtrade coffee. Subtle elevations of alumni from credentialised institutions. Subtle postcode snobbery. Subtle sermon name drops. Dog whistles. Tribalism is enmoated by the shaming of an outgroup. Throw the tribe into the moat. In love.
🧠 "..wise enough to settle.."
🪤 Pauls hoists a “wise” congregation by its own petard. Their legal-wise sophistry is a fig-leaf to cover their own glaring inability to wisely judge. The thick irony of unwisely expensive public displays of a lack of judgement.. Evangelicalism is shot through with puerile virtue signals, over-extended estimations of its own wisdom, syncretised assimilations of oil-rich late-modernity and suburban inhumanity. The receding tide of Christendom's reign in the west will have a huge social cost, but there are upsides, and the lumbering beached institutions that lacked the agility to get back out to sea, now bleating a shrill white fragility, inspire little pity. These churches in need of reform are fish in a barrel for shaming ~ if you can get close enough to do so in love. Tricky, but urgent.
📚 “enough”-ness. Meant with scathing irony. Devastating. We are the religion of Solomon. God gives wisdom enough. Col1v9 Eph1v17 etc. God gives enough. Sufficient for the day. A word from the outside. Insight pertinent to the matter at hand. Why would we not?
🧑⚖️ “..go to law.. ..before unbelievers..”
🤔 I've struggled with this passage. Struggled for its emphasis and struggled for an exit strategy - several excellent sermons (eg. St Marks, eg Mars Hill) seem keen to caveat that obviously one should still go to court for criminal cases, and obviously we should all be mindful of the misuse of this passage to cover-up church abuses. But. Partly, these exceptions don't help point the way to excellence (litigation-free community), and partly, they don't help establish the principle (limit-conditions for legal action) either.
🏚️ Lawsuits by Christians is a failure mode.
🏺 Greek law. I was struck by this commentary's account of ancient Greek litigious culture and the spectacle of jury duty. It has something of the Jeremy Kyle / twitter mob contemporaneity about it: "If [a private arbitrator] failed to settle the matter, there was a court know as The Forty. The Forty referred the matter to a public arbitrator and the public arbitrator consisted of all Athenian citizens in their sixtieth year; and any man chosen as an arbitrator had to act whether he liked it or not under penalty of disenfranchisement. If the matter was still not settled, it had to be referred to a jury court which consisted of two hundred and one citizens for cases involving less than about £50 and four hundred and one for cases involving more than that figure. There were indeed cases when juries could be as large as anything from one thousand to six thousand citizens." (Barclay)
"The Greeks were naturally and characteristically a litigious people. The law courts were in fact one of their chief amusements and entertainments.. In a Greek city every man was more of less a lawyer and spent a very great part of his time either deciding or listening to law cases." (Barclay/Prior)
💸 Legal industry. Lawyers are not reducible to a caricature of a vampire profession, but neither are they an impartial third party. Law's relationship with perverse incentives render it an exploitative industry by default - their existence assumes antagonism and so proliferates suspicion. This is not to be cynical about the intentions of those who would work for justice within the justice system, nor to paint heroic pro-bono work as mere CSR, but to it is to observe that law is intractably entangled in its own financiality, which affords its own existence by courting the wealthy and which has opaquely (even to itself) vested interests in protracted disputation.
🚑 Ambulance chasing. There is a ruinous cost of going to court - costs which punish the least advantaged, costs which drain the common purse, and costs which create an anxious tertiary industry of risk-consultancy and Health&Safety-gone-mad. Health and safety are commendable ambitions, but a society which hopes to use a litigious stick alone to conform behaviour will bankrupt itself through bureaucracy. A better way is possible.
👥 Low-trust society. Zoomed out to a macro/social scale - the effect of ambulance-chasing on the minutiae of life, is to create a stiflingly low-trust environment which is risk-averse, reductively transactional, prohibitively expensive, and so will eventually bankrupt itself into irrelevance by starving the body of the life blood of entrepreneurship.
📉 Presuppositional scarcity. The posture of detachment which squabbles over scarcity and argues for rights rather than responsibilities. What would you sue for if you had more than enough? You have more than enough. That is the God hypothesis.
🎪 Nihilism of spectacle. Law in ancient Greece was gossip on a civic stage. Now on a globally platformed, algorithmically amplified engine of division that is skewed to outrage ~ both seeding and milking division. Trial by social media - the medium is the message and the message is: we are amusing ourselves to death. Going to law is subsumed by the grand narrative of titilation: gladiating for the LOLs, scandal-mongering for the retweets. It is not a coverup to say, “Just don't feed the trolls..”
🙈 Hiding? Good Christians proactively live coram publico - before a watching world. So the pejorative publicness of a public trial which does damage to the community is not in the disclosure per se but in the mode of its theatre and the accompanying riot of dishonour. How to talk about this precisely? What is the alternative to public trial? The spectre occurs on the horizon of the imagination as a mafia sub-sharia court of vigilante justice issuing off-the-books punishments and laundering its dirt behind closed doors.. this? What would a good church look like that didn't go public with its disputes - and what infrastructure would it need? What is hiding for shame, what is withdrawing pearls from swine, what is profitable and what is possible?
📜 Mere law. Rm8 and what the law could not do.. what's the point of bickering ~ winning is a low good. We have better-than justice: better than the mud pies of squabbling over scarcity missing wood for trees. Imagine a community that had more healthy and more safety than health&safety,
❓ “..Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?..” (v7)
Why not?
How?
What sort of caveat-minima is doable if we go all in?