I’m enjoying the way that some of my favorite passages from the Bible have been making the news lately. Isaiah 1 has been making headlines for weeks. The story of Philip the Evangelist and the Ethiopian eunuch from Acts 8 has been referenced in wire stories.
And now 1 Corinthians 13 is having a moment, popping up in the news in at least two recent stories.
Here’s the first one. This starts with a Fox News headline that suggests a Democratic candidate in Iowa is sinking due to scandal: “Lutheran minister and House candidate under fire after recounting her part in satanist couple’s wedding.”
That sounds bad. She’s “under fire,” so it must be very serious.
What happened? Some horrific involvement with “Satanism”? Some disqualifying lack of judgement? Some glib comment on religious faith that was sure to alienate potential voters?
Well, no. The story that Sarah Trone Garriott tells is sweet and charming and is likely to charm Iowa voters.
It’s about when she was a young minister in training and was called on to officiate one of those phone-call weddings. This is a thing that happens. The pastor who was supposed to conduct my wedding had to cancel on us the day before due to a death in his family. And we were getting married down the shore, hours away from all of the clergy we knew who would have otherwise been happy to step in and step up for us. So we started calling numbers in the Sea Isle phone book until we found an eccentric, but enthusiastic, old Unitarian hippie who was able to help us on short notice.
This is a thing that clergy learn to do. They marry and bury the faithful from their own faith community, but sometimes they also are called on to marry or to bury people from the larger community who do not share their faith — even people like this “satanist” couple (the guy had a Pentagram tattoo on his face) who may be openly hostile to that faith. You can learn a lot about a minister from the way they handle such occasions, where they’re called upon to act as a kind of chaplain for those outside their own sectarian flock.
As a young minister, Trone Garriott wasn’t sure what to do with this couple or for this couple. So she fell back on the classic core of her faith — reciting 1 Corinthians 13 at this wedding for “Satanists.”
“If you have ever been to a Christian wedding, you’ve probably heard this Scripture. All they would get from me was [a] basic Lutheran wedding.”
“When the Apostle Paul wrote these words, he certainly never had in mind a small town in West Virginia, two satanists and a Lutheran pastor in training,” Trone Garriott said. “But Paul knew people, and people haven’t changed that much over the centuries. It is hard to love one another. We often need to be reminded how.”
This famous passage is often read at weddings because its lovely discussion of love seems like practical and necessary advice for any couple getting married. But it was also a good choice because as a young minister she wasn’t sure what to do and this is a passage explicitly about what you can be sure of when you cannot be sure of anything else.
Paul’s great “love chapter” is also the thesis statement of Paul’s epistemology — an argument that there is one and only one thing we can be certain about. We perceive the world “through a glass, darkly” and cannot trust our perceptions or intuitions about anything except one thing, the only thing of which and about which we can be sure: love.
The way she handled this “Satanist” couple’s wedding reminds me of Father Mulcahy, the chaplain from the 4077th on MASH. Mulcahy was a Catholic priest who never stopped being a Catholic priest and never wavered from his commitment to his particular form of faith. But his context was a community full of people who did not share that particular faith and his job, as part of that larger community, was to minister to those people as well — to address their spiritual needs in ways appropriate to them but still faithful to his own core principles.
Hawkeye and Honeycutt and Col. Potter and all the rest of them always admired Father Mulcahy for that, and I did too growing up watching that show. I suspect voters in Iowa’s 30th District — about an hour’s drive from Radar O’Reilly’s hometown of Ottumwa — would admire him too.
1 Corinthians 13 is a great passage for anyone in Father Mulcahy’s position — needing to serve and to minister in a non-sectarian way. It does not proselytize. It laments human finitude and fallibility rather than any specific sectarian notion of human sinfulness. It does not advocate a particular christological claim or, really, any explicit theology at all. (I suppose that’s why even people who usually can’t stand Paul tend to make an exception for this passage.)
I get that Fox News is worried about the midterm elections this fall and is willing to do whatever they can to work against Democratic candidates, but if they want to manufacture a hit piece they’re going to have to find better material than this.
“Democrat ‘under fire’ for reciting 1 Corinthians 13 and reminding voters of Father Mulcahy” just isn’t going to be the damaging “scandal” they hope it will be.
I suspect Fox’s editors realize this, too, since the link above takes you to a substantial rewrite of the story that expands on the much-shorter initial report, but still struggles to find any reason that someone should be “under fire” for reading 1 Corinthians 13 to Satanists. They seem confused that their accusation — “She doesn’t just love her neighbors, she’s even kind to her ‘enemies’!” — isn’t the campaign-ending scandal they imagined it would be.
1 Corinthians 13 is also in the news thanks to the White Christian Republic of Texas, where this chapter has been included as one of the many passages from the Bible set to be included in the required reading curriculum for Texas public schools. Hemant Mehta wrote a good post about this recently, and links to this report on the plan by Isaac Yu.
The list’s genres vary, from fairy tales and nursery rhymes for younger students to historical speeches and full novels in high school. Ten excerpts from the Old and New Testaments are dispersed throughout, including “The Shepherd’s Psalm” for seventh graders and the Eight Beatitudes from the book of Matthew in the eighth grade.
Read the Beatitudes from Luke’s Gospel you cowards! “Blessed are the poor.” Period. Woe unto them who spiritualize and neutralize and euphemize to pretend this is some ethereal wisp of vibey nonsense having to do with nothing more than a proper attitude about proper attitudes.
Yu also notes that the seventh graders required to read Psalm 23 will also be required to read Richard Adams’ Watership Down. (“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For if they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you.”)
The argument for including these Bible readings in the curriculum is that students need to understand references to these passages as part of their basic cultural literacy. As this article puts it: “Stories that advocates see as really relevant to American culture and understanding symbolism and references in American life.” The idea is that students should be able to understand what someone is talking about when they reference “David and Goliath” or “Jonah and the Whale.”
That’s a challenge, given that the vast majority of Christians don’t understand what the author of Jonah is talking about in the story of “Jonah and the Whale.” (The biblical text says “fish,” not whale, but neither the fish nor the “whale” is the point of this very pointed book.) It seems that the proposed curriculum doesn’t include all six pages of the book of Jonah, just the famous bit in the middle about the fish/whale. So Jonah’s prayer for mercy and his receipt of mercy, but not the heathen sailors’ prayers for mercy or the Ninevites’ prayers for mercy.
This is an example of why I, as a believer, do not trust public schools to teach the Bible. It’s a massive distortion of the meaning of the book of Jonah. Teaching “the story of Jonah and the Whale” is like teaching the “Parable of the Forgiven Servant” from Matthew 18:23-27.
Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accountswith his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
At this the servant fell on his knees before him. “Be patient with me,” he begged, “and I will pay back everything.” The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
End of story. End of parable. End of lesson. And whatever you do, don’t read the next eight verses.
The “cultural literacy” argument doesn’t seem like a compelling argument for including 1 Corinthians 13 in this public school curriculum. I suppose that plenty of students will graduate high school without ever attending a church wedding, but in the following decade most of them will wind up going to a lot of them. Almost nobody is going to reach the age of 30 without having heard this passage read aloud multiple times. (That’s likely true for the 23rd Psalm as well, except with funerals instead of weddings.)
The Texas curriculum describes 1 Corinthians 13 as “the definition of love.” That’s not wrong, but it’s inadequate. The argument here is not an attempt to define or describe what love is, but rather the assertion that love is the only standard by which we can define or evaluate or understand or know anything. It’s Paul’s epistemology and his hermeneutic. (Did Paul always meet the standard or consistently abide by the rule he declares here? No. But I think the Paul who wrote 1 Corinthians 13 would welcome being challenged on that point on the basis of a 1 Corinthians 13 argument.)
The little snippet in the middle describing some of the attributes of love really is a gorgeous passage —
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.* Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
And I suppose I’m happy to have that bit read to anyone or read by anyone, anywhere, any time, any place — whether it be a dubiously “Satanist” couple getting married in West Virginia or a bunch of bored teenagers in Texas taking a break between Animal Farm and The Odyssey.**
But that’s a parenthetical aside to the main argument of 1 Corinthians 13. It comes after verses 1-3, arguing that nothing matters in the absence of love, and it comes just before verses 8-13 arguing that nothing is knowable or can be known for certain except for this one thing: love. And that philosophical assertion is, in its own way, just as beautiful as the description of love in verses 4 through 7.
It’s strange, but kind of wonderful, that 1 Corinthians 13 has become such a standard part of American weddings. “And now, before we get to the exchanging of rings, the bride’s favorite aunt is going to come up here and read a short essay on epistemology that posits a radical skepticism about our human capacity for knowledge.”
It’s remarkable that the idea of 1 Corinthians 13 has become a part of Texas’s curriculum debate but the substance of that passage has not. What is it that we want students to know and understand? What is it that all humans need to know and understand? And what is it that we humans are capable of knowing or understanding?
Paul’s answer to that last question was “Not much. Except for love.” It is also his answer to the first two questions.
And that’s a great answer. It’s important. More important than anything, I suspect.
But it’s also not an answer that I trust Caesar to teach public school students without distorting it into some Caesar-serving tool of empire.
* Have any of these education officials considered how obviously the line “Keeps no record of wrongs” is going to be wielded by students required to read this text in class?
** Texas’s proposed curriculum appears to refer to The Odyssey as a “novel.” You know … by the famous novelist, Homer.
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