Thanks to everyone who contributed comments in answer to the question that I raised in my previous post about Paul and his fellow apostles in 1 Corinthians 4 and the woman described in Proverbs 31. The particular, concrete detail that I zeroed in on was the contrast between how they dress (“poorly dressed” versus “fine linen and purple”), but I also had in mind the broader contrast between how they live and how they are seen by others (“held in disrepute” versus “praised in the gates”).

I promised in the earlier post that I had “a few thoughts coming together”, which I would share, so here they are. I'm very conscious as I do this that many of you have far, far more experience than I do in reading the Bible and thinking through how to apply it in the details of life. Please don't think for a moment that I'm offering up these few quick thoughts as the last word in the conversation!

1. As I said in my first post, I don't have the option of ignoring either passage in the way I live my life. Both are Scripture, both are breathed out by God, both are “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness”. Not only that, both are, in their own way, descriptions that are held out as exemplary in some way. One is a kind of identikit picture of “the woman who fears the Lord”; she lives a life that is to be admired and praised and (presumably, as far as one is able) imitated. The other is a real life, unique, flesh-and-blood individual—an apostle, no less, but still one who holds himself out explicitly as an example to be imitated.
2. As a number of people have said, there are some important differences between the times and the places in which the Proverbs 31 woman and the Apostle Paul lived:
   • The city that gives the Proverbs 31 woman and her husband all that respect at the gate is (I think!) the city of the people of God, and possibly an idealized people of God at that, behaving as they ought to behave. (Notice the shift from the description in verse 23 (“her husband is known in the gates ...”) to the command in verse 31 (“Let her works praise her in the gates”). The city that holds the Corinthians in honour and despises people like Paul is the pagan city of Corinth.
   • The time in which the Proverbs 31 woman lives is one in which the people of God are still a nation, called to live out before a watching world the blessedness and the wisdom of fearing the Lord. The time that Paul lived in is one in which the gospel of Jesus was going out with urgency and costly sacrifice into a world hostile to God: as several people pointed out, the time Paul describes is a ‘wartime’ setting. (I wonder whether it is significant, by way of contrast, that the whole exercise of wisdom-collection in the Old Testament is associated with the time of Solomon, when Israel enjoyed “rest from all their enemies” and the king could spend his days entertaining the Queen of Sheba and swapping proverbs.)
   In both of these respects, of course, it is Paul and the Corinthians that I have more in common with than the Proverbs 31 woman: my time is the last days and my city is Corinth (well, Sydney, but there's not a lot of difference!).
3. But the differences are not so absolute that I should ignore Proverbs 31 altogether. I may live in a different time and a different city, but I still live in the same creation, and I fear the same God. So I should still be wise enough to see that forethought and prudence and family and faithfulness and productiveness are deeply respect-worthy, compared with the selfish, individualistic, short-term, wasteful fads and fashions of the world. It's not a bad thing to aspire to all the virtues of the wonder-woman of Proverbs 31, even if my own frailty and folly and the unfairness of a sinful world mean I probably won't always get the sort of success and respect that she gets. (Compare the way that Proverbs-style wisdom works—kinda!—for Joseph in Egypt and Daniel in Babylon, and the way that the wisdom of Proverbs and the lifestyle of the last days are put together in 1 Peter 3-4.)
4. Nor am I to imitate every single detail of 1 Corinthians 4. When Paul tells the Corinthians to imitate him, the details do matter, otherwise he wouldn't have bothered putting them in. He doesn't just give them an abstract principle, he gives them a real, tangible example of a lifestyle, and how it is seen and responded to by the world. But the details of how that lifestyle worked out in Paul's life may well be different, in some respects, from the details of how it works out for the people in Corinth. When he holds out himself as an example to them, he still tells them to take into account the various life situations that they were in when God called them to follow Christ (cf. 1 Cor 7:17). So, for example, while the description of Paul in 1 Corinthians 4 is of a ‘homeless’, itinerant missionary, he knows that imitating him won't mean suddenly abandoning home and family, and becoming similarly homeless. (In fact, when he writes to Timothy, even his advice to young widows is not a blanket command to head off and become cross-cultural missionaries, but a very Proverbs 31-ish word about “marrying, bearing children and managing a household”[1 Tim 5:14].)
5. The core of what I am to imitate in Paul's example is his devotion to humble service rather than the competitive pursuit of worldly status (1 Cor 3-4), his other-person-centred love that seeks the good of others and their salvation (1 Cor 10:33—11:1), and, underneath all that, his fear of God rather than the opinions of people (cf. Proverbs 31:30!), and his desire for God's glory rather than his own (1 Cor 10:31).

Will that make a difference to how I live the details of my life—including how I dress—in this wartime context—in this pagan, greedy, fashion-obsessed city? Surely it has to—not in an artificial, attention-seeking, ‘Gibeonite’ kind of way, as if Paul ‘muddied his suit’ to cultivate an appearance of being poorly dressed—not in a self-righteous, superior, legalistic kind of way, inwardly glorying in how much daggier I am than my more materialistic Christian brothers and sisters—not in a foolish, short-term, wasteful kind of way, buying stuff that falls apart after a few weeks, just because it was cheaper at the checkout—but in a real, practical, sacrificial, deliberate way that often (but not always) makes a visible difference in how I and my family look—in a thousand decisions to keep and mend rather than throw away and replace; to choose Op Shops over fashion shops; to cultivate “strength and dignity” and the “fear of the Lord” over deceptive, fleeting outward appearance; to save more money and give more away, instead of hoarding it and spending it; to take more risks for the gospel in my school-gate conversations, rather than staying trapped in my self-protective anxieties about how I am perceived.

It seems to me that I have some changes to work on!

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