PAUL’S FIRST LETTER TO THE Corinthians might well be entitled “Christian Hot Potatoes” in today’s culture. So many of the controversies that divide the contemporary church are addressed in detail in this letter—most notably, sexual immorality, marriage and divorce, women in ministry, and spiritual gifts. Although most of my previously published work has focused on the Gospels, I have regularly taught Paul’s two letters to the Corinthians at the seminary and college levels, as well as to laypersons in a variety of contexts. Passages from 1 Corinthians have formed the basis for several recent sermon series I have had the opportunity to preach. It was with great delight, therefore, that I accepted the invitation to contribute to the NIV Application Commentary Series by writing a commentary on one of my favorite biblical books. It is my hope that the format of this series will uniquely enhance the discussion of the relevance of this letter for today’s world.
The Series Introduction lays out the overall goals of these commentaries and explains their distinctive format. Each individual author, however, will no doubt interpret the guidelines given there somewhat differently. I have tried to keep the discussion in the sections labeled Original Meaning to a bare minimum. There I include a brief overview of the structure of each unit of Paul’s letter, discuss the narrative flow of the author’s thought, give insights into significant words and expressions, and make paraphrases and summaries of the main points of the text. I also include remarks on the first-century setting of the passage and occasional, short comments on key interpretive or theological issues.
Under the Bridging Contexts sections, I include information I believe is necessary to help the reader move from first-century Corinth to a different time or culture. Depending on the particular text, I may talk about its interpretation at some other period in history, compare it to other biblical teaching on the topic, raise key interpretive issues that valid applications must take into account, or comment on the form of the passage and how that helps us understand what Paul is emphasizing. My main goal is to formulate the timeless principles that transcend the original situation of the given passage. This section encompasses any material that does not narrowly focus on first-century meaning or twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century application.
The final section, Contemporary Significance, comments on the relevance of the text for the church and our world at the end of the second millennium of the Christian era. I have tried to avoid narrowly parochial concerns in order to address issues that are relevant to a wide cross-section of the church of Jesus Christ, particularly in the Western world, but by no means limited to it. Nevertheless, any commentator’s experience of the world is limited. So I do not doubt that readers will be able to reconstruct a lot of my life from my comments, recognize recurring themes of concern, and probably think of many important applications that I have not even considered.
In short, I have tried to follow Jack Kuhatschek’s three-step model for applying the Bible: understanding the original situation, determining the broader principles that the biblical application reflects, and applying those general principles to situations we face.1 Inevitably, there is overlap in the process. I am aware of a number of places where a good case could be made for placing certain comments in a different section, but for a variety of reasons I have felt they belong best where they are. Readers of the commentary should feel free to dip into it anywhere they like, but to get a complete understanding of a particular passage, they should at least consult all three of the sections on that passage. I have tried to provide ample footnotes to allow the reader to follow up numerous comments with more extensive treatments of the topics at hand, while not including so many as to appear cumbersome or overly “scholarly.” But scholarly study does indeed lie behind the commentary, for I have worked through the entire text of 1 Corinthians in the Greek, translating and diagramming it, and engaging in an inductive study of my own reflections on each passage before turning in detail to read what others have had to say.
I am grateful to many people who have made this work better than it would have been without their help. Each person on my editorial committee read the entire manuscript and most of them commented on it in detail: Terry Muck, Jack Kuhatschek, Scot McKnight, Marianne Meye Thompson, and Klyne Snodgrass. The students of my July term class at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where I taught 1 and 2 Corinthians as a visiting professor in 1993, interacted with much of the material in lecture and discussion form and sharpened my thinking in a variety of ways. Smaller portions of this material have been intensively reviewed by three years of “Tensions in Contemporary Exegesis” classes at Denver Seminary. I am grateful, too, to the faculty and Board of Trustees of the seminary for granting me a sabbatical term during the Winter Quarter of 1994 to help me to complete this project. At the last minute, I received Ben Witherington’s manuscript on the Corinthian correspondence in prepublication form. As my bibliography indicates, I believe this commentary will immediately become one of the most valuable on both of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. Unfortunately, I was unable to incorporate formal references to the work in the body of my text, but I was greatly encouraged to see how regularly we agree, with important, occasional exceptions, on difficult interpretive problems.
Two other works have crossed my desk more recently still. Again, I can commend them only by last-minute additions to my bibliography: Kevin Quast’s short but reliable commentary and Duane Litfin’s helpful study of ancient rhetoric with special reference to 1 Corinthians 1–4. Otherwise the books reflects literature known to me by May of 1994.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1993, my father, John W. Blomberg, suddenly passed away of a heart attack at age 75. His lifelong passion was education: a public school teacher for thirty-five years and a Christian day-school teacher for ten more, most of them spent in instructing high school students in Spanish. He was an avid fan of my own educational career and, in more recent years, looked forward to each new book of mine. He had read and commented in detail on my previous three manuscripts and would have doubtless done the same for this one. He epitomized the “educated layperson” that Christian publishers so regularly seek to attract for books that bridge the gap between weighty academic tomes and popular paperbacks. He kept me focused on the practical without ever playing down the importance of rigorous scholarship. I would like to think that this book reflects that balance more than anything else I have written. It is to my dad, therefore, that I dedicate this commentary. He is enjoying wonderful happiness with our Lord and the company of the redeemed. If this work can help others gain greater understanding and assurance of their own salvation and live the Christian life in such a way as to attract others to faith, it will prove a fitting tribute to his life. But to God be all the glory!