When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? 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? To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud—even your own brothers!
1 Corinthians 6:1-8
Wood: There are two ways that people tend to apply this passage in a wooden way. First, when they come to a passage like this they read it totally literally so that they understand that no Christian should take any other Christian to court. The emphasis being court. So, the wooden Christian understands this passage to have nothing whatever to do with newspapers, or blogging, or any other sort of public broadcasting.
The other wooden way that people tend to take this passage is to say that no Christian should take another Christian who is a member of my church to court. Of course if the Christian is not a member of my church, or if I am simply not a member of his church, I can take him to court and sue his socks off.
There are other ways to take this passage woodenly (e.g. we don’t live in Corinth therefore it doesn’t apply to me.) but for now I’ll only point out these two.
Principles: The Bible is written primarily in story or narrative form. This means that in order to know what God is telling us, instead of looking at the surface of a story, we must go below that to the principles being taught in the story. This passage appears to come from a didactic letter, but it is a letter written to someone else. This means that it is part of the story and is actually a piece of teaching that comes from a narrative text. The point being that the argument that it was written to Corinthians has valid weight against those who want to make it didactic only. But it doesn’t carry any weight at all when you realize that it is a text of teaching inside a narrative context.
What this means is that instead of reading the text woodenly, we must read it like any other story and ask ourselves, “What is the principle being taught? In this particular passage the main principle is that Christians must not blaspheme Christ by airing their dirty laundry in front of the non-Christian world. The issue is Christ and his glory. It has nothing to do with which church you are a member. If you are a Christian, you are a member of Christ. The point is that Christ is being slandered amongst the pagans because you are taking your problems to them instead of dealing with them in the church. In Corinth the place not to air it was the courtroom. In our day, it includes the courtrooms, but because of electronics there are lots of other places we are not deny the one who died in our place (i.e. blogs, internet web sites, newspapers, TV, etc.).
Some like to think they are better Christians than the folks in Corinth. Who would ever think of getting drunk at the Lord’s Supper or having our father’s wife. But do you take your brothers and sisters in Christ to the court of the pagans in the form of your internet sites? Once you do this, it is amazing how many new friends you suddenly pick up. You may lose most of your Christian friends but a whole new ministry of evangelism opens up. Suddenly the enemies of Christ are your best buddies. You think we are so very godly because the non-Christians around you tolerate you and hang out with you; just like they did with Jesus. But here’s a test of your godliness, oh proud and arrogant man, how many of your pagan friends would hang with you if you told them that if they want to follow Jesus they have to deny themselves and follow him? How many of your non-Christian friends would be your friends if you stood for Biblical righteousness instead of pretending that God condones things he explicitly calls people out of (cf. 1 Co. 6:11)?
It is true that Jesus hung out with sinners, but he never left them in their sin. He didn’t allow them to continue in their sin. And, it was because of his hard line against sin that they came to him—for forgiveness and cleansing. Are the non-Christians that you’ve gathered around you there because you offer forgiveness through Christ? Or are they there because you the things they and stand for the things they stand for?
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