I’ve been slowly reading through the letters of Paul this summer as part of my daily devotions, and was struck again just how much of a mess the church was from day one. These letters that make up so much of the New Testament are nearly all addressed to churches with issues that would make us all blanch were they our own congregations. Infighting over which apostle was better, class conflict, sexual misbehavior to make even a Slate columnist blush, ethnic conflict: you name it, it’s there.

(Paul himself was quite the interesting person, as is evident if you “read between the lines” at all, indeed sometimes if you just read the lines themselves at all — something that is hard to do as a Christian long immersed in these texts and committed to regarding them as both human and divine speech! But profitable to do. More on this some other time.)

The first and second letters to the church in Corinth are particularly eye-opening on this front. They have their share of “high theology”, as you find in 1 Corinthians’ ode to love and exclamatory section on the resurrection. But an awful lot of the text is Paul getting into a long-distance argument with the people in this church he planted, and for good reason. To offer just one example: Most churches (including Anglicans in the Eucharistic service) quote Paul’s description of the institution of the Lord’s Supper as part of the invitation to the Table. That description is offered as the ground for Paul’s telling off the church at Corinth about how they’ve been getting this act of communion completely backwards by making it an occasion for showing off wealth and indulging in factionalism! And while the church at Corinth was obviously extra messy, every one of the letters in the New Testament indicates a church that was in need of serious correction.

That is, in a strange way, deeply encouraging. The church around us is a mess, and Christians are deeply self-critical about it, and neither of those things is new. The church has always been a mess, and Christians who rightly hear the word of God have always been rightly self-critical about it. And in the end, the church is not its own creature but the creation of God, who judges the wickedness and folly of his people so that we will be turned away from them and toward what is good for us and for the world — turned, ultimately, toward God himself.¹ That is sometimes hard news, but it is always good news.