Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church,

but now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

So in chapter 5, verse 6, the gloring is not good.

Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven,

that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened, for indeed Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us.

Therefore, let us keep the feast not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness,

but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

So it begins this section by saying your glorying is not good, or your boasting is not good.

What kind of boasting or glorying would St. Paul be talking about? Well, he's just talked about the fact that they have failed to discipline this member

of their community who is in this sort of gross sexual sin, unrepent sexual immorality.

So what would be the connection there?

Well, it would seem that the people have the idea, which is not only a modern idea,

though it's very plentiful in our contemporary world, that by allowing this or by not

saying anything that they were somehow perhaps not judging, that by allowing this or by not saying anything, that they were somehow

perhaps not judging, that they were somehow open-minded, that they were more broad-minded

and cosmopolitan.

Remember, Corinth is a city that is seen as a sort of social and religious and economic hub for Greece historically and for

Roman Greece at this point. This would be very much a part of their self-identification and

self-understanding that they were cosmopolitan people of this Roman metropolis, of this, of this large city. And so St. Paul is

having to attack this issue, not only because they aren't sufficiently ashamed of what's

going on in their presence, they aren't sufficiently ashamed of the fact that they've just let

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