1 Corinthians
1 Corinthians
Following the proem, or salutation (1 Cor. 1: 1-3), and the thanksgiving for God’s enriching work in the believers of the Corinthian church (1:4-9), Paul begins the first main division of the epistle (1:10-4:21), which deals with the church’s profound internal divisions and fundamental misapprehensions as to the nature of Christian leadership.
On the basis of reports brought to Paul by "some from Chloe’s household” (1:11), Paul has learned of the party spirit by which various sectors of the church identified themselves with particular leaders, apparently boasting of the superior wisdom of their self-identification in each case (1:10-17). Paul despises such so-called wisdom: its categories are inimical to all that Paul holds dear—so much so that if its categories were to prevail, the gospel itself could be dismissed as God’s folly (1:18-25), to become a Christian would mean to become a fool (1:26-231, and to preach the gospel without manipulative and self-promoting eloquence but with simple dependence on the truthfulness and power of the message of the crucified Messiah would be the essence of ignorance (2:1-5). Conversely, if God’s folly is wiser than the world’s wisdom, if Christians rejoice that God has chosen the "foolish” in order to shame the "wise” and to make it clear that Christ alone is our "wisdom from God,” if Paul’s priorities in preaching are foundational, then the Corinthians’ pursuit of the world’s wisdom implicitly contradicts their own Christian profession.
This does not mean that there is no sense in which the Christian gospel is wise. Far from it: God’s wisdom is revealed by the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:6-16). But Paul could not address the Corinthian believers as if they were in fact spiritual, because they were not living up to their calling: they were still divided along party lines associated with well-known leaders (3:1-4) and were thus, at best, "infants.” So Paul must clarify the nature of Christian leadership. In the rest of this chapter, he removes false impressions in this regard, first by two metaphors—one agricultural (3:5-9a) and one drawn from the construction industry (3:9b-15)—in order to stress the complementary nature of the leaders’ work and their accountability to God for its quality. That leads to a warning against all who destroy the church (3:16-17). Returning to the contrast between wisdom and folly, Paul directly assaults any remaining misconceptions about Christian leadership: the Corinthians are deceiving themselves if they think their partisan spirit is a mark of wisdom, when the Scriptures promote humility and when genuine Christian maturity recognizes that in Christ all Christian leaders—and everything else—have become part of the Christians’ inheritance (3:18-23). Paul concludes by showing that Christian leaders and those who follow them must alike recognize that God alone is the One who makes the distinctions, and he alone rightly assesses performance (4:1-7). Indeed, the Corinthians should learn this lesson by the simple contrast between their own self-vaunting pretensions and the way the apostles are treated as the scum of the earth (4:8-11). They should learn to imitate the Christian conduct of their own father in Christ, the apostle Paul himself, and thus align themselves with what is normative in other churches (4:14-17). The prospect of Paul’s impending visit constitutes both a final appeal and a scarcely veiled threat (4:18-21).
Whether the further reports that Paul deals with in 1 Cor. 5-6 also came from Chloe’s people or from some other source—perhaps from Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus (16:17)—is unclear. Three issues dominate these chapters. The first is a case of incest (5:1-13), resulting in Paul’s clarifying what he had meant in an earlier letter to the Corinthians (5:9-13); the second deals with the problem of litigation between believers (6:1-11); and the third addresses some men in the Corinthian congregation who so misunderstood their supposed spirituality that they thought they were free to frequent prostitutes, presumably on the ground that this involved merely the body.
In response to a written inquiry from the Corinthians (1 Cor. 7:1), probably brought to Paul by Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus (16:17), Paul sets himself to address the topics they raise. The first has to do with marriage and related matters (7:1-40). The second, dealing with food sacrificed to idols (8:1-11:1), is sometimes alleged to include one or two excursuses, but the general line of argument is fairly clear. In 8:1-13, Paul insists that divisions of opinion as to whether it is proper to eat food that has been sacrificed to idols must be resolved on the basis of self-sacrificial love, not claims to superior knowledge. Chapter 9, cast in part as Paul’s defense of his apostolicity, shows that Paul perceives the connection between this problem and the divisiveness he treated in chapters 1-4: in both cases a raw triumphalism prevails. Paul combats this evil and addresses both problems by pointing to his own commitment to self-denial as the very hallmark of his apostolicity: despite his many rights as an apostle, he voluntarily lays them aside so as to win as many as possible to Christ. This model of self-control and self-denial must characterize all Christians (9:24-27). The negative example of Israel thus becomes directly relevant: it is all too easy to begin well but not persevere, and thus to fall under God’s judgment (10:1-13). If idolatry is to be avoided, Christians should not participate in the worship of pagan temples (10:14-22).
The next three problems that Paul treats have to do with the public meetings of the Corinthian Christians. The first deals with the relationship between men and women, especially as it was surfacing in a dispute over the issue of head covering for women (1 Cor. 11:2-16). The second addresses abuses at the Lord’s Supper (11:17-34). And the third deals with the distribution and exercise of the Spirit’s gifts (12:1-14:40), especially the relative value of prophecy and tongues (14:1-25). Here the apostle insists on the need for diversity in unity (ch. 12), the utter necessity and permanence of love, the "more excellent way” (ch. 13), the importance of intelligibility in the church (14:1-25), and the proper ordering of the church’s corporate meetings so far as the exercise of the gifts is concerned (14:26-40). In the most distinctly theological chapter, Paul deals with the resurrection of believers (ch. 15), insisting that the proper prototype is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, denying that any wedge can be driven between these two resurrections so far as kind is concerned, thereby forcing his readers to direct their gaze and their aspirations to the triumph at the end. Paul brings his handling of the Corinthians’ written agenda to a close by clearing up some questions on the collection (16:1-11) and on the coming of Apollos (16:12).
The epistle concludes with some final exhortations (1 Cor. 16:13-18) and greetings (16:19-24).