Catholic Commentary
The Deeper Failure: Injustice Among Brothers
7Therefore it is already altogether a defect in you that you have lawsuits one with another. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded?8No, but you yourselves do wrong and defraud, and that against your brothers.
First Corinthians 6:7–8 criticizes Corinthian Christians for taking lawsuits against fellow believers before pagan courts, arguing that the existence of such disputes already constitutes a spiritual defeat. Paul exhorts them to accept wrongdoing rather than retaliate, yet concludes they have instead become perpetrators themselves, fraudulently wronging their own brothers.
The lawsuit itself is already the defeat—because suing a brother exposes a family wound to strangers and denies Christ's lordship over the church's own disputes.
1 Corinthians 6:7 — "It is already altogether a defect in you"
The Greek word Paul uses here is hēttēma (ἥττημα), rendered "defect" or "defeat" — a term drawn from the language of contests and warfare, meaning a loss or a failure to achieve what one ought. Paul's logic is arresting: even before the verdict is rendered, the fact that the lawsuit exists at all is itself the defeat. The Corinthians have already lost something more precious than whatever property or honor is at stake — they have lost the witness of Christian brotherhood.
Paul then poses two rhetorical questions in rapid succession: "Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded?" The Greek verbs adikeisthai (to be wronged) and apostereisthai (to be defrauded) are passive forms — Paul is asking why they cannot simply absorb the injury rather than escalate it. This is not a counsel of passivity for its own sake; it is a deliberate echo of the Sermon on the Mount and of Christ's own passion, where the innocent one accepts suffering rather than retaliate. The willingness to suffer injustice quietly is, in Paul's vision, a mark of the eschatological community — people who know that ultimate justice belongs to God and whose identity is not threatened by earthly loss.
The phrase "one with another" (pros allelous) is emphatic. The scandal is not merely that Christians litigate; it is that they do so against fellow members of the one Body. For Paul, the Body of Christ is an organic unity (cf. 1 Cor 12), and to drag a member of that body before a pagan tribunal is to expose a family wound to strangers, to implicitly deny the sufficiency of the community's own wisdom and the lordship of Christ over all disputes.
1 Corinthians 6:8 — "You yourselves do wrong and defraud, and that against your brothers"
Paul now tightens the noose. He shifts from the passive (be wronged) to the active: you are doing the wronging and defrauding. The conjunction "No, but" (alla) signals a sharp contrast and a biting irony — rather than choosing the noble path of accepting loss, the Corinthians have gone in the opposite direction. They are not merely failing to suffer injustice with patience; they are themselves the perpetrators.
The repetition of the same verbs — adikeō (wrong) and apostereō (defraud) — from verse 7 is deliberate and devastating. The very injuries Paul suggested they should be willing to absorb, they are in fact inflicting. And the phrase "against your brothers" (kai touto adelphous) lands with maximum rhetorical force. Kai touto — "and this, of all things" — expresses moral outrage. The victim is not a stranger or an enemy but a brother, one united by baptism, by the Eucharist, by the very Spirit of God. To defraud a brother is, in Paul's sacramental logic, to defraud Christ himself.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
Typologically, the fraternal betrayal here echoes the primal pattern of brother wronging brother in Genesis — Cain against Abel, Joseph's brothers against Joseph. In each case, the sin against a brother is also a sin against God's design for human community. Paul sees the Church as the new family, the new humanity in which these fractures are to be healed, not replicated. To persist in defrauding a brother is to refuse the grace of the new creation.
At the anagogical level, Paul's counsel to accept being wronged points toward the paschal mystery. Christ, the perfectly innocent one, was the most defrauded person in history — stripped of honor, possessions, and life — and he accepted it for the sake of reconciliation. The Christian who can absorb injustice without retaliating participates, however dimly, in that same paschal pattern.
Catholic tradition reads this passage against the backdrop of its rich theology of the Church as the Corpus Christi — the Body of Christ — and of justice as a cardinal virtue inseparable from charity.
The Church Fathers were unequivocal. St. John Chrysostom, in his Homilies on First Corinthians (Homily 16), writes with characteristic vehemence: "It is not the man who suffers wrong that is disgraced, but he who commits it... To be wronged and bear it is the mark of a great and philosophic soul." He sees Paul's counsel not as weakness but as the highest form of moral courage. St. Augustine (City of God, XIX.17) draws on this passage to distinguish the peace of the earthly city — secured by coercive legal mechanisms — from the peace of the City of God, secured by mutual charity and the voluntary acceptance of suffering.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church is directly pertinent here. CCC 1807 defines justice as "the moral virtue that consists in the constant and firm will to give their due to God and neighbor," but CCC 1889 warns that "without a conversion of heart, there can be no renewal of social life" — structures of justice cannot substitute for interior transformation. Paul's point is precisely that the Corinthians are seeking legal structures to compensate for a failure of the heart.
CCC 2538–2540 treats envy and the disordered desire for earthly goods, which often underlies the kind of fraudulent litigation Paul condemns. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (§§ 201–208) affirms that justice among persons must always be animated by charity — "charity goes beyond justice" — which is precisely Paul's argument here.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 58, a. 12) notes that while litigation is not intrinsically wrong, it becomes sinful when motivated by avarice, hatred, or a desire to harm rather than to restore genuine rights. The Corinthians fail on all counts.
Finally, the passage has an implicit ecclesiological dimension that resonates with Vatican II's Lumen Gentium (§§ 9–13): the Church is a community of fraternal communion, a "holy people," and whatever scandalizes or fractures that communion strikes at the Church's very nature and mission.
Contemporary Catholics encounter this passage most sharply not in formal lawsuits — though such cases do arise in parish and diocesan life — but in the everyday landscape of family disputes over inheritances, business disagreements between Catholic partners, and the corrosive habit of nursing grievances, seeking vindication on social media, or pursuing reputational "wins" against fellow parishioners.
Paul's hēttēma — the defeat that precedes any verdict — is a useful diagnostic. Before asking "Am I right?" the Catholic is invited to ask: "Has the way I am handling this already injured the Body of Christ?" The willingness to absorb a financial or reputational loss rather than escalate is not naive; it is an act of trust in Divine Providence and a concrete participation in the cross.
Practically, parishes and dioceses would do well to develop robust internal mediation and reconciliation processes — a model that Paul himself envisions in vv. 1–6. Catholics involved in conflict might seek counsel from a trusted priest, deacon, or lay ecclesial minister before reaching for legal remedies. The examination of conscience here is pointed: Am I the one doing the wronging? Am I defrauding a brother or sister, even subtly, to protect my interests? This passage demands not only patience under injury but the hard work of honest self-examination.
Commentary