Did Paul Blast the Corinthians in Front of the Whole World?

In a recent episode of the Unbelievable? podcast from Premier Christianity, Alex O’Connor hosted a conversation between Krish Kandiah and Megan Basham about Basham’s recent book Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda.

A bit after the 1:04:10 mark, Kandiah mentions that he wishes the points raised by Basham in her book had been an in-house discussion among Christians, including the individuals Basham cites as moving toward the left, before taking it before the wider world the way she did by writing and publishing the book. Kandiah wonders out loud whether a conversation between Basham and Karen Swallow Prior, or himself and Russell Moore, might have led to a way to find some common ground and a different way forward, rather than the online conflagration that has ensued the book’s release.

Basham responded that by that measure, we should be asking the Apostle Paul why he didn’t confront the Corinthians directly rather than in a letter that has been made available for the whole world to see.

This shows a serious ignorance about the biblical canon on Basham’s part. One of the major criticisms leveled against Basham’s work is that there aren’t really any substantive references to Scripture, outside of a few verses quoted at the beginning of the chapters. She makes no real biblical argument to substantiate her claims, but seems to be more focused on left/right political talking points rather than on what the Bible says (or doesn’t say, in some cases) about the issues she claims some Christian leaders have “gone liberal” on.

The Apostle Paul couldn’t just pick up the phone and call the elders of the churches in Corinth to address the problems that had been brought to his attention. He couldn’t send an email to the Corinthian church leadership team. He couldn’t Skype or Facetime them, or call a private meeting on Teams. Leaving his current ministry location to go deal with the issues in person, then come back to where he was ministering, would have taken many days and interrupted his evangelistic work where he was at.

So Paul used the communication technology that was available to him, which was a letter carried by a trusted courier (possibly the same person the leadership in Corinth had sent to Paul with a list of questions), to be read to the leaders and congregation upon the courier’s arrival in Corinth. Paul didn’t publish a publicly available book, airing the Corinthians’ dirty laundry to the world, much less do so with a commercial publishing company selling copies for $32.99 (or whatever the equivalent would be in first century denarii in the Roman Empire). In God’s providence, the church in Corinth preserved the letter they received from the Apostle who founded the work in Corinth (not some outsider journalist who had no personal relationship with them), and it ended up being copied and circulated among the Christian churches in the Roman Empire because they found it to be useful instruction from an Apostle on how to handle church matters, as well as instructive in Christian doctrine.

So Basham’s attempt to equate what she has done with Shepherds for Sale with the way an Apostle of Christ wrote to correct problems in one of the churches he had planted falls flat on its face. And the gross lack of knowledge about the circumstances of Paul’s letters to Corinth, the historical context concerning communication in that time period, and the canonization of the New Testament, demonstrate that she is out of her depth in trying to defend her own writing by appealing to the Apostle Paul.

Since we’re on the subject of Basham’s book, I want to dive a bit into one of the areas in which Basham accuses evangelical leaders of bowing to a liberal agenda. One of the first push-backs to Shepherds for Sale came from Dr. Gavin Ortlund, whom Basham takes to task specifically for a video he had made about climate change. Just a couple of days ago, I was listening to a podcast interview with Old Testament scholar Dr. Sandra Richter, whose book Stewards of Eden: What Scripture Says About the Environment and Why It Matters deals with the topic of creation care from a biblical perspective.

Dr. Richter mentions that once, when she was going to be traveling to the UK to speak about the subject of Stewards of Eden, she mentioned that it might be controversial. The UK person who was spearheading her upcoming visit told here that in England, they have evangelical Christians in all the major parties, and the parties there are all fighting to see who is greener. Environmental issues such as climate change or global warming simply aren’t considered to be conservative/liberal dividing lines in British Christianity.

In the introduction to Stewards of Eden, Richter writes:

One reason is certainly politics. Not kingdom politics, but American and international politics. I think that most would concur that the traditional political allies of the church are not the traditional political allies of environmental concern. If you are pro-life, it is assumed that you cannot also be pro-environment. If you are a patriot, you supposedly cannot also be a conservationist. Or to be more forthright: in the United States, if you are an environmentalist, it is assumed that you are a Democrat—and Democrats, supposedly, are not pro-life. If you are a Republican, it is assumed that you cannot also be pro-environment. In other words, somehow environmental advocacy has been pigeonholed into a particular political profile and has become guilty by association. But of course, Christians are first the citizens of heaven, and therefore our alliances and our value system are not defined by American politics. Rather, our value system (aka “holiness”) is defined by the Holy One.

As many other observers have pointed out, Basham seems to conflate political conservatism with theological conservatism, assuming that faithful Christianity will always align with the right wing of the political spectrum. But the Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God, not a partisan political tract. It speaks with equal authority (and criticism) to both political  conservatives and progressives. It is not to be co-opted into the service of any earthly agenda.