IMAGINE A CHURCH wracked by divisions. Powerful leaders promote themselves against each other, each with his band of loyal followers. One of them is having an affair with his stepmother, and, instead of disciplining him, many in the church boast of his freedom in Christ to behave in such a way. Believers sue each other in secular courts; some like to visit prostitutes. As a backlash against this rampant immorality, another faction in the church is promoting celibacy—complete sexual abstinence for all believers—as the Christian ideal. Still other debates rage about how decisively new Christians should break from their pagan past. Disagreements about men’s and women’s roles in the church add to the confusion. As if all this were not enough, alleged prophecies and speaking in tongues occur regularly, but not always in constructive fashion. A significant number of these immature Christians do not even believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ!
Does this sound like anything you have ever heard of? Probably no contemporary church faces this exact cluster of issues all at once. But all of the issues remain remarkably current. The description, of course, is not of any contemporary church but of the first-century church in Corinth. Yet if we can understand the nature of these problems and the nature of Paul’s divinely inspired instruction in response to them, then we will gain great insights into numerous debates that threaten to divide today’s church and keep it from having the world-transforming impact God intends it to have.
Yet understanding Paul’s message to first-century Corinth is one thing; finding valid applications to communities in other parts of the world and periods of history is another. Paul condemns the disunity in Corinth, but must we condemn denominational divisions seemingly demanded by the heresy or apostasy of one church group? Perhaps the ideal is for believers never to sue one another, but what if they won’t submit to Christian mediation? How can churches excommunicate people today when they may turn around and win a major lawsuit against those congregations? How do we apply Paul’s apparent preference for the single life to a world in which virtually no one promotes celibacy as desirable for all believers? Should preachers today follow Paul’s model of refusing money from the churches to which they are currently ministering?
Finding valid applications, however, is not the only difficulty. Inconsistent applications also seem to abound. Third-World Christians, having just heard and responded to the gospel for the first time, often question why Western missionaries apparently find no contemporary relevance in 1 Corinthians 11:3–16 (on men’s and women’s hairstyles or head coverings) and yet earnestly stress the seriousness of the very next passage, verses 17–34 (on not profaning the Lord’s Supper). Conversely, most Westerners seem to find all kinds of applications for Paul’s teaching on eating meat sacrificed to idols, even though that is scarcely an issue in modern, secularized cultures. Yet Christian congregations are repeatedly pointed to this text as a source for instruction on the consumption of alcohol or the choice of viewing entertainment. Are such applications legitimate?
On the other hand, leaders in many of those same churches seem to feel free flagrantly to disobey Paul’s very clear teaching on an issue that is regularly a concern in our world—the manifestation of charismatic gifts. Concluding his discussion of the topic, Paul declares decisively: “Be eager to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues” (14:39). But many conservative churches do precisely that as they forbid all of the so-called “sign-gifts,” at least in public worship. Yet those churches that avoid this error often seem to repudiate Paul’s next statement: “But everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way” (v. 40) which, in context, includes such commands as, “If anyone speaks in a tongue, two—or at the most three—should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret” (v. 27). How can we account for such inconsistencies?
Hopefully no further examples are necessary to convince us of the relevance of 1 Corinthians and of the need for thinking carefully about how to apply it. But before we can begin our commentary on the letter’s original meaning and contemporary significance, we need to sketch out the circumstances that led to Paul’s writing it. The following comments do not form a comprehensive introduction; this is available in the more traditional commentaries such as those recommended in the bibliography (pp. 31–34). But they do represent the bare minimum of background information we need in order to understand the setting of the letter and to move on to the body of the commentary proper.
The City of Corinth
ANCIENT CORINTH1 HAD become a prominent city-state in the southern Greek province known as Achaia several centuries before the time of Christ. Already in this era, it had eclipsed Athens in prominence. But the Roman military attacked and destroyed major sections of the city in 146 B.C., leaving it a relatively insignificant, small community until Julius Caesar rebuilt it and established it as a Roman colony in 44 B.C. Roman Corinth had roughly eighty thousand people with an additional twenty thousand in nearby rural areas.2 Because of its strategic location near an isthmus, which enabled sailors to drag boats across a small strip of land rather than sailing a considerable extra distance around the dangerous coastline of southern Greece, it quickly regained its prominence. In Paul’s day, it was probably the wealthiest city in Greece and a major, multicultural urban center. Every two years Corinth played host in its massive stadium to the Isthmian games, competition which was second only to the Olympics in prominence. A large theater seating eighteen thousand and a concert hall which could hold three thousand regularly brought drama and musical entertainment of many forms. Nearby farmers could find a large market for their produce in town, and the city in turn could provide necessary services for the countryside.
The massive hill overlooking the town, somewhat reminiscent of Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, or to a lesser extent Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, housed on its summit a temple to Aphrodite, goddess of love. The temple in Paul’s day was smaller than it had been before Roman destruction, and even the earlier temple does not seem to have been big enough to house the one thousand cult prostitutes that the ancient Greek geographer Strabo claimed once worked there. But other writers attest to a sizable contingent within the city itself, so that it is understandable how the Greek word meaning “Corinthian girl” came to be a slang term for a loose woman. Corinth housed other religious shrines too, most notably a temple to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, as well as sites for worshiping Isis, the Egyptian goddess of seafarers, and her Greek male counterpart Poseidon. Less directly religious in nature but even more pervasive were the Greek ideals of individualism, equality, freedom, and distrust of authority.
Ruins of a Jewish synagogue remain too, with a fragmentary inscription proving its identity. Although these finds probably do not date back quite to Paul’s day,3 there is no reason to doubt a small, earlier Jewish presence in Corinth in the mid-first century, as described in Acts 18:1–6. But the majority of the church, like the majority of the community, would have come from Gentile and pagan backgrounds of numerous cultures (cf. vv. 7–17). The majority too came not from the small, wealthy, and powerful segment of ancient Roman society that tended to proliferate in Corinth but from the ranks of ordinary tradesmen and workers (1 Cor. 1:26). But the fact that Paul could command everyone in the church to give generously toward his collection for the needy in Jerusalem (16:1–2) suggests that not many were from the poorest classes either. Corinth may have been one of the few predominantly middle-class churches of the ancient world, but we must remember that “middle-class” was still a far lower standard of living than what we generally associate with that label today.
The few wealthy members of the Corinthian congregation, however, seemed to exercise an influence all out of proportion to their numbers. Corinth was well known for its many “patrons,” a Roman designation for well-to-do, influential persons who took on individuals, families, and entire associations of people as their “clients.” Patrons provided land, jobs, money, and legal protection for the less well-off, while their clients were expected to reciprocate with various services, including political support, and positive public relations, not too unlike the political nepotism of corrupt governments in many major cities of the world today. There is a fair amount of evidence to suggest that the divisions in the Corinthian church, the neglect of the poor by the rich in celebrating the Lord’s Supper, the reaction to Paul’s refusal to accept money for his ministry, and perhaps even the proliferation of litigation and sexual immorality had a lot to do with these patrons’ reluctance to break from the social conventions of their community which well served their own interests and reputations.4 Each local house church in Corinth may have been led by one or more of these patrons. Their competing allegiances to Christian leaders like Paul, Peter, and Apollos (1:12) may well have exacerbated the conflicts already present due to class division. At any rate, it is likely that the minority of social elite in the Corinthian church were behind a large percentage of the problems Paul addresses, whether or not they were formal patrons.5 Little wonder, in light of the accumulation of worldliness in Corinth, that one commentator likens this city to “at once the New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas of the ancient world”!6 And another finds Paul’s principles in addressing the Corinthian church as a paradigm for how to do urban ministry in the modern world. 7
The Circumstances of the Letter
PAUL PLANTED THE CHURCH in Corinth during his second missionary journey, soon after preaching up the coast a bit at Athens (Acts 18:1–17). To support himself he worked as a tentmaker, a trade he shared with fellow Jews Aquila and Priscilla, whom he had met in Corinth (vv. 2–3). As was his custom, he began by preaching Christ to local Jews in their synagogue, but upon receiving repeated rebuffs he moved to a nearby Gentile home and ministered predominantly to the non-Jewish peoples of the town (vv. 4–7). Still, the synagogue ruler (the lay leader who aided the rabbi in conducting services and functioned as a kind of “chairman of the elder board”) was converted and joined the fledgling church with his family (v. 8).
One night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision and encouraged him to stay on in Corinth, because many would come to the Lord. So Paul remained a year and a half, substantially longer than he had in any of the other communities he had evangelized to date (vv. 9–11). How many joined the church we do not know. Any given house church could probably accommodate a maximum of fifty people, but we do not know how many separate gatherings there may have been.
During this time, some of the Jews who had rejected Paul tried to get him imprisoned by Gallio, the Roman governor of the province. Gallio recognized that Paul and his message posed no legal threat to Rome and so refused to take action. Gentile anti-Semitism, never far from the surface in the ancient world, swelled up in response, as some in the crowds used Gallio’s acquittal as a pretext to attack the Jewish authorities who had harassed Paul (vv. 12–17). Because Gallio served in this particular role only for about a year, most likely from summer of A.D. 51 to summer of A.D. 52, we can date Paul’s stay in Corinth fairly precisely to include this time period. It is also possible that these dates should be reduced by one year, putting Gallio in Corinth from A.D. 50–51, but this seems less likely.8
First Corinthians was written approximately three years later, probably in the spring of A.D. 55 (or 54, if we date Gallio’s stay a year earlier), since Paul’s next major stopping point for any considerable period of time was Ephesus, near the outset of his third missionary journey. And Acts 19:10–22 suggests that Paul stayed there for between two and three years, while 1 Corinthians 16:5–9 reads as if Paul wrote to Corinth during the last few weeks or months of his time in Ephesus, prior to the Jewish festival of Pentecost, usually held in what we would call May. This makes 1 Corinthians the fourth letter Paul penned, after Galatians and 1 and 2 Thessalonians. But several important developments occurred between Paul’s initial trip to Corinth and his writing of this letter.
To begin with, 1 Corinthians is not really the first letter Paul wrote to Corinth. First Corinthians 5:9 alludes to a previous letter which the Corinthians had misunderstood. We know nothing of its contents except that Paul must have told the church not to associate with immoral people. The Corinthians had taken him to be referring to non-Christians when in fact he had meant flagrantly immoral and unrepentant believers (vv. 10–11).
Why was this letter not preserved? Presumably it did not have sufficient instruction on enough topics of abiding significance to be sufficiently valuable to the broader Christian community. We must remember that the biblical writers were inspired only when they wrote what now forms Scripture and not in everything they ever spoke or wrote.
Second, Paul received an oral report from certain unnamed members of the household of a Corinthian woman named Chloe (1:11a). It is possible that these individuals were Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus, three men whom Paul says arrived with encouragement from the church in Corinth (16:17), but then again they may not have been. Either way Paul learned of several distressing aspects of life in that congregation, most notably the divisions within their fellowship (1:11b–12). Since these divisions included factions aligning themselves with both Paul and Apollos, and since Apollos had ministered in Corinth after Paul had (Acts 18:27–19:1), it is possible that the third Christian leader named—Cephas (or Peter)—had come to town too. Or perhaps some Judaizers, who preached that Gentile Christians still had to keep Jewish laws, had come to town claiming to represent Peter and the Jerusalem apostles. From his visitors, Paul presumably also learned of the problems of sexual immorality and litigation, which he addresses in chapters 5–6.
Third, Paul received a letter from some or all of the church asking questions about specific issues which were dividing that congregation. This too could have been brought by Stephanas and company, but again we have no way of knowing for sure. The way Paul introduces his reference to this letter suggests that chapters 7–16 deal, in turn, with each of the issues it raised (“Now for the matters you wrote about”—7:1).9 It is likely that we can deduce the positions of various groups within the Corinthian church on most of these issues, because Paul often begins by stating a perspective which he then substantially qualifies. This is why, for example, the NIV footnote offers alternative renderings of 7:1 and 8:1, which put part of Paul’s words in quotations. Presumably he is quoting a Corinthian slogan and then proceeding to critique it. This strategy is even clearer in 6:12 and 13, in which Paul is responding to oral reports, and in which the NIV inserts the quotation marks into the text itself and not just the footnotes.10
The Heart of the Corinthians’ Problems
AT FIRST GLANCE, it seems improbable that all of the Corinthians’ disparate problems could have had one underlying cause. But a closer look suggests several ways in which their divisions probably sprang from a common source. Certainly their disunity was marked by a recurring arrogance and immaturity. As is so often the case, the most immature often think they are quite mature. In a passage dripping with sarcasm, Paul exclaims, “Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! You have become kings—and that without us!” (4:8a). And lest anyone not catch the tone of his words, he goes on to add more sorrowfully, “How I wish that you really had become kings so that we might be kings with you!” (v. 8b). At the very least, then, we can say the Corinthians had a misguided view of their own maturity. “They simply considered themselves to have reached the heights of human potential.”11 Related to this is the natural tendency of humanity “to play down the challenge of the gospel and over-emphasize its comfort.”12
This arrogance may have been tied in with the popularity of lofty and flowery rhetoric among Greek philosophers, especially those known as Sophists, who often valued form above content. Much of chapters 1–4 makes good sense as Paul’s response to a church that had become overly impressed with the sophistry of its culture.13 At other times, their rhetoric was less lofty, but the Sophists still valued social status and privilege in ways that perpetuated class distinctions.
The role of patrons as the power-brokers of the Corinthian church points out another contributing factor to the cluster of its problems. Principles of secular leadership carried over into the church, as the wealthy continued to try to buy the friendship of the lower classes, enhance their reputation through litigation, and seek the acclamation of the non-Christian world around them. All of these and other practices relied on models that permeated Roman society but were inconsistent with a cross-centered gospel. Paul must thus avoid the entangling relationships of patronage and insist on models of servant leadership.14
In fact, fresh from their immersion in the many pagan religions of the community, most of the Corinthian Christians had not adequately broken in numerous ways from the immorality of the prevailing culture that surrounded them. And, although this culture and these religions reflected stunning diversity, certain perspectives predominated across the board in the Greco-Roman world.
Most noteworthy, perhaps, was a dualism between the material and spiritual worlds. Deeply embedded in Greek philosophy, particularly from the days of Plato on, and eventually culminating in the decades just after Paul’s ministry in full-blown Gnosticism, this perspective drove a deep wedge between spirit and matter. Only the former was potentially good and redeemable; the latter was inherently evil. What then was to be done about bodily appetites and desires? A majority of the philosophers tried to deny them and became ascetic in their morality. A majority of the common people took the opposite tack and indulged them. If matter was by nature irredeemable, if religion was primarily or exclusively a matter of the spirit, then why not enjoy sensual pleasures while one could? Life after death, from this perspective, was limited to the immortality of the soul, not the resurrection of the body. Many commentators thus speak of the philosophical background to the Corinthians’ problems as even more deeply rooted in Hellenistic and Hellenistic-Jewish wisdom than either sophistry or patronage alone might explain.15
All of the major problems in the Corinthian church can thus be viewed as stemming from one or the other of these two outworkings of dualistic thought—either asceticism or hedonism. In the latter category naturally appear sexual immorality (chap. 5; 6:12–20), eating food sacrificed to idols (chaps. 8–10), and drunkenness at the Lord’s table (11:17–34), all of which indulge bodily appetites. Other alleged manifestations of freedom in Christ—asserting one’s own rights with little regard for others—probably belong here as well: lawsuits (6:1–11), flaunting social convention with respect to head coverings (11:2–16), and competition and chaos in the exercise of spiritual gifts (chaps. 12–14). In the former category clearly appear the promotion of celibacy behind chapter 7 and the disbelief in the bodily resurrection behind chapter 15, which both deny the potential goodness of the body and its desires. Here too probably belong the inflated claims to knowledge and wisdom, as immaterial attributes, which exacerbated the divisions addressed in chapters 1–4.16
From a theological point of view, this cluster of errors may be labeled an “overly realized eschatology.” “Realized eschatology” refers to the blessings of God’s kingdom that are available to believers in this age. Overly realized eschatology thus implies that the Corinthians saw all of the blessings of the age to come as available to them immediately, without an adequate appreciation of the gap that still remained between what they were and what they would be only after Christ’s return.17 From a behavioral point of view, we may label this phenomenon overly “triumphalist.”
Our introduction thus ends where it began, as we become bombarded with the relevance of this letter. The church of Jesus Christ today, particularly in the West, seems overly triumphalist in so many ways. It appears outwardly strong—and is, if the sole criteria are numbers of members and value of assets and material resources. But the church in the U.S. has been said to be three thousand miles wide and yet only one-half inch deep! So few Westerners have ever experienced the severity of persecution that the early church did, or that many Christians still do in certain parts of our world, that ultimately tests if their faith is genuine or not (cf. 1 Peter 1:6–7). Polls repeatedly claim that upwards of eighty percent of Americans claim to be Christian and that between thirty to forty percent claim to have had a “born-again” experience,18 yet there is little evidence of many of the fruits of genuine conversions or of the practice of true spirituality. Instead we see much behavior that closely parallels the immorality and “I demand my rights” attitude that so characterized Corinth.
Secular standards of leadership also plague our churches. We can learn models of planning and efficiency from the business world. But we err when we leave no room for the Spirit to redirect us or when we fail to exhibit compassion and forgiveness in personal relationships. And when margins of profit or loss replace the demands of the gospel in determining our priorities of ministry, we have replaced Christianity with idolatry.
Quasi-Gnostic attitudes pervade our world today too, from their direct descendants in Christian Science, the Unity School of Christianity, and other “religious science” cults, to their pantheistic cousins, the Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, in which release from this body is the ultimate good. Still more subtle parallels emerge in a privatized form of Christianity that relegates faith to individual quiet times and insulated church activities but has little effect on the workplace, the public arena, or observable morality and holiness.
An ascetic backlash often reacts against the prevailing hedonism of our day by mandating absolute abstention from various practices and by setting up legalistic requirements as the key to a Christian lifestyle. Nor is it obvious that the average modern person, nor even the average Christian, anticipates a bodily resurrection. Popular expectation of life after death, on the upsurge in an era of numerous claims for out-of-the-body and near-death experiences, almost without exception imagines a disembodied afterlife and usually presents it as a relatively bland and unexciting prospect.
Triumphalism covers the waterfront. In some respects it has uniquely characterized the American Christian experience.19 But today it gives rise to the “health and wealth” gospel with its “name it and claim it” heresy. It appears in the more materialistic branches of the church which, since the early 1980s, have more often than not been found in the evangelical rather than the liberal wing of Christianity. It emerges in the resurgence of postmillennial eschatology—the view that Christians with the help of the Spirit can usher in the completed kingdom of God on earth this side of the return of Christ—which in turn frequently spawns an overly optimistic timetable for fulfilling the Great Commission, often complete with target dates. It results too in the more extreme forms of Reconstructionism, whose adherents believe it is both possible and desirable to create truly Christian political entities this side of the Second Coming. Triumphalism even intrudes into church growth manuals and self-help guides for our therapeutic age, explicitly or implicitly promoting the notion that spiritual success or maturity can be guaranteed and problems eliminated if only we follow the correct formulas outlined for us. But it is time to turn to the antidote for such mentalities—Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians itself. May God help us to interpret it properly so we can order our lives according to his priorities.