4. The occasion and purpose of 1 Corinthians
4. The occasion and purpose of 1 Corinthians
The immediate occasion of the Epistle was the letter Paul had received from the Corinthian church, for which a reply was necessary. But what mattered much more to Paul was clearly the news that had come to him independently of the letter. There were disquieting irregularities in the conduct of the believers at Corinth. Paul was troubled by the ‘tendency on the part of some members to make the break with pagan society as indefinite as possible … The Church was in the world, as it had to be, but the world was in the Church, as it ought not to be’.25 So much did this matter to Paul that he spent six chapters dealing with it before he so much as touched on the matters about which they had written to him.
Paul was troubled about the divisions within the church. Parties had been formed attaching themselves to the names of Paul, Apollos and Peter, and even that of Christ. Paul spent a lot of time dealing with this and clearly he regarded it as very serious. Then there was a case of incest, but the church had not censured the offender. ‘They found it hard to hate the sensuality which in their earlier days they had regarded as divine.’26 There was also a quarrelsome spirit. Some church members had actually gone to law with others, and Paul felt that this had to be put right. He speaks also of sexual impurity; gross sins like this must not continue. First and foremost 1 Corinthians is a letter directed at the reformation of conduct.
Having dealt with these grave evils Paul turns to the matters mentioned in the letter written to him, questions about marriage and celibacy, about food offered to idols, probably also about public worship and spiritual gifts. Paul wrote to help his friends in their difficulties. This part of his letter contains a wonderful treatment of love (1 Cor. 13) and a magnificent passage on the resurrection, this latter elicited, it would seem, by the fact that some of the Corinthians denied that the dead would rise (1 Cor. 15:12). The result of all this is ‘ “an inexhaustible mine of Christian thought and life.” Nowhere else in the NT is there a more many-sided embodiment of the imperishable principles and instincts which should inspire each member of the body of Christ for all time.’27
Paul’s purpose then is principally to set right disorders which the Corinthians took lightly, but which he saw as grave sins. Secondly, he wrote to answer some questions put to him. Thirdly, he wrote to give doctrinal teaching, particularly on the resurrection.28
Some recent scholars, notably W. Schmithals, have argued that the Epistle must be seen against a background of Gnosticism at Corinth. Gnosticism (from the Greek gnōsis, ‘knowledge’) appeared in a variety of forms, all stressing the importance of knowledge. Usually there was the idea of a high good God, infinitely removed from this evil world. From this God there were ‘emanations’ until a spirit appeared who was powerful enough to create but foolish enough not to see that matter is evil. A right ‘knowledge’ enables spiritual people to escape the bondage of evil matter and in due course to gain heavenly bliss. But Gnosticism, as a system, does not seem to be attested until well into the second century AD. It was eclectic, picking up ideas from many places, and some of these ideas existed in the first century. It may well be that the Corinthians held to some such ideas, but this does not make them Gnostics. The most we can say is that in Corinth there were some ideas which later were taken up and systematized by the Gnostics. But we do not need a knowledge of Gnosticism to make sense of the Corinthian correspondence.29
1 Corinthians is very much an occasional letter, directed to the immediate local needs of Paul’s converts.30 But it would be a mistake to regard it as on that account irrelevant to our needs. The heart of man does not change, and the principles on which Paul works are just as important to us as to the Corinthians of the first century. As Godet puts it,
the tendency to make religious truths the subjects of intellectual study rather than a work of conscience and of heart-acceptance, the disposition resulting therefrom, not always to place the moral conduct under the influence of religious conviction, and to give scope to the latter rather in oratorical discourse than in vigour of holiness,—these are defects which more than one modern nation shares in common with the Greek people.31
Not only does Paul deal with problems which have a way of recurring in other ages and regions; he gives us the principles on which to act. He deals with everyday problems ‘from a central point of view, and places everyday troubles in the light of eternity’.32