Gordon Clark: The Drunkards at Corinth (The Southern Presbyterian Journal)

1957. The Drunkards at Corinth. The Southern Presbyterian Journal. 3–4. Jan 30

The Drunkards at Corinth

Yesterday I conducted the communion service. In the sermon I referred to the irreverent participants at Corinth who came to the Lord's table drunk. The Corinthians were pretty wicked. There was also fornication among them such as is not so much as named among the Gentiles.

Of course people today still come to the Lord's Supper thoughtlessly and irreverently. This too is sin. But by and large our sins are not so gross as those of the early Corinthians. When has any one of us seen a drunk at the Lord's table? Fornicators? Well, we like to believe the best.

And yet, is all this respectability pure gain? Or does the absence of wicked people in the church indicate that the church is failing to reach the wicked people?

There are today, as well as in the first century, victims of gross immorality. Yesterday I administered a respectable communion service. This morning I learned of a teenage girl who for five years had been forced into incest both by her brother and her father. Our respectability therefore has not been gained by a higher level of morality in the whole community, but rather by a failure to reach these degraded people.

If we could convert a group of modern Corinthians, no doubt our churches would be troubled by disciplinary problems. Respectable people, both in the church and out of the church, would be scandalized. And yet, such disorder would not be all loss, would it?

— G.H.C.