Canter Bridge

For partisans of language practice that erases the gendered aspects of the way people speak and write, the apostle Paul’s vocabulary as he wraps up his first letter to the Corinthians could be embarrassing.

Be courageous, he tells them. His word is andrizesthe, a verb associated with the noun aner, for ‘man/male’. A less circumspect translation in times before such matters had become part of our consciousness might have rendered this ‘Be men!’, or ‘Play the man!’. Readers female and male would have known what he meant and felt themselves called to a common response.

The exhortation is part of a wider summons to heroic exertion:

Keep alert, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.

My point in introducing this string of imperatives in this way is not to enter into questions of language use, but rather to draw attention to the juxtaposition—quite natural in Paul—of heroic exertion on the one hand and the language of love, on the other.

Keep alert … Stand firm in your faith … Be courageous! The language is almost bellicose, though that is hardly its intention. Writing to both men and women, Paul is calling them to a war footing of sorts. The context in which Paul envisages the Corinthians working out their redemptive calling is not one for softies. It is perilous, it is challenging, it is capable of crushing the innocents.

Yet with hardly a breath drawn between the two statements, he urges them to let all that you do be done in love.

Some might understand such a rhetorical shift to move from masculine qualities to feminine ones, from hard virtues to soft. Paul does not.

For him love’s heroism is made concrete in struggle. Sometimes the fight involves real, human adversaries. Often it does not for, as Paul has famously counseled elsewhere, ‘our struggle is not against flesh and blood but rather against principalities and powers …’

It is an odd world for readers of his words who have grown accustomed to ease or enamored with warfare in all its pious variants. It calls for a war footing by men and women whose hearts are shaped, nourished, directed, and empowered by love.