1 Corinthians 10:28-29

A pagan host might warn his Christian guest that the food before him had been offered in an idol temple. The context (1 Corinthians 10:27) and the terminology (Gr. hierothyton, "sacrificial meat," rather than eidolothyton, "idol meat," the standard Jewish and Christian designation) present a situation in which a Christian is eating privately with a pagan, not in a temple, as in 1 Corinthians 8:10. Only in 1 Corinthians 10:32 does the broader principle of not giving offense to fellow believers arise. The pagan’s conscience is not a reference to his convictions about what is right and wrong for himself but his moral consciousness. [Note: Fee, The First . . ., p. 485.] He does not want his Christian guest to be unaware that he is being served food that the Christian might object to and might want to abstain from eating. Another view is that the pagan host is trying to test his commitment to Christ, but this seems less probable. Pagans often associated Christians with Jews at this stage of church history, and many pagans would have assumed that Christians observed the same dietary restrictions as the Jews.

We might think that in such a situation Paul would have advocated exercising Christian liberty to eat the meat, but he did not. He advocated abstaining, not because such meat was out of bounds for believers. It was not out of bounds; Christians could eat such meat. He advocated abstaining for the sake of the pagan’s moral consciousness. Specifically, if the Christian ate the meat, the pagan might conclude that his guest was doing something Christians should not do. He would be wrong, of course. Yet Paul advocated not violating the pagan’s understanding of what Christians should or should not do rather than instructing him about Christian freedom at the table.

"A present-day analogy may be imagined if someone with strong principles on total abstention from alcohol were the guest of friends who did not share these principles. He would be well advised not to enquire too carefully about the ingredients of some specially palatable sauce or trifle, but if someone said to him pointedly, ’There is alcohol in this, you know’, he might feel that he was being put on the spot and could reasonably ask to be excused from having any of it." [Note: Bruce, 1 and 2 Corinthians, p. 100.]