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1 Corinthians 1:1–9
1. The perfect church
Before we look at Paul’s description of the church at Corinth from God’s perspective, it is worth taking a bird’s-eye view of its main characteristics as they are shown in these two letters.
It was a large church – many Corinthians were converted to Christ. It was full of cliques, each following a different personality. Many Christians were very snobbish: at fellowship meals the rich kept to themselves, and the poor were left alone. There was very little church discipline: a lot of laxity was allowed, both in morals and in doctrine – an all-too-common combination. They were unwilling to submit to authority of any kind and the integrity of Paul’s own apostleship was frequently questioned. There was a distinct lack of humility and of consideration for others, some being prepared to take fellow Christians to court and others celebrating their new-found freedom in Christ without the slightest regard for the less robust consciences of fellow believers. In general, they were very keen on the more dramatic gifts of the Spirit and were short on love rooted in the truth. This is the church Paul greets.
1. Paul’s greeting to the church at Corinth (1:1–3)
Paul describes himself in almost the same way as at the beginning of Romans, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians and Colossians: that is, as an apostle commissioned by God. Thus from the outset he makes plain his apostolic calling to those at Corinth who questioned it.
The greeting fills out the conventional Greek and Hebrew words of welcome with specifically Christian content: instead of chaire (= greetings), Paul uses charis (= Grace); and he takes the Hebrew šālôm and invests it with emphasis on Jesus Christ the Lord.
In verse 2, Paul uses a number of pungent phrases to describe the church at Corinth. On closer investigation, there seems to be a deliberate play on the root word kalein (= call) – a theme which is central to Paul’s thinking, particularly in these opening paragraphs of the letter: 1:9, ‘God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord’; 1:23–24, ‘we proclaim Christ crucified . . . to those who are the called . . . Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God’; 1:26, ‘Consider your own call, brothers and sisters; not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.’
Clearly this sense of calling is uppermost in Paul’s mind as he ponders the relationship between the Corinthian church and himself, and as he recollects the circumstances in which the Christian community came into being at Corinth. Fundamentally, he is conscious of God’s initiative in his own call and in the call of the Christians at Corinth, both individually and corporately. He seems to be saying this: ‘God called me to be an apostle, God called each one of you to be a saint, to enjoy the fellowship of his Son, Jesus.’ If God had not thus called, he would not have become an apostle and they would not have found Jesus Christ to be the wisdom and the power of God, let alone come to share in him and be his special people, his saints. This almost self-conscious harping on God’s call would indicate that Paul’s use of the word ekklēsia (literally ‘a company of those called out’) to describe the church at Corinth is also not accidental.
Thus God calls each individual by name, and a person responds by calling on the name of our Lord (cf. verse 2). The fact that these Corinthians, and countless others in every place, call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ is proof positive that God has already made his call sound clearly enough for them to hear and respond.
All those who thus hear God’s call and respond are members of the ekklēsia of God. They have been set apart by God in that call, and are reserved for Jesus Christ (sanctified in Christ Jesus). There is as close a unity between such people in every place as there is between Paul and the Christians of Corinth in that single place.
Paul does not talk of ‘my church’, but of the church of God. He was as responsible for the birth and life of that church in Corinth as it is possible for any human to be: but it was God’s church, not Paul’s. We often speak too loosely of ‘my church’ or ‘our church’. It is a healthy corrective to note Paul’s example. Many problems in a church in fact revolve around a selfish possessiveness, by pastor and congregation, towards its life and activities. It also needs to be said that no individual Christian, or group of Christians, has any special claim to Jesus: he is both their Lord and ours.
For Paul himself there was probably no distinction in time between his call to be a saint, along with every other believer, and his call to be an apostle: the one included the other, the former being a calling he shared with others and the latter being something which set him apart from others.
A concise summary of what was involved in the unique apostleship entrusted to Paul, as to the original disciples of Jesus, can be found in ‘Gospel and Spirit’, a statement first published in 1977.1 This says:
Through divine revelation and inspiration these men were authoritative spokesmen for, witnesses to and interpreters of God and his Son. Their personal authority as teachers and guides – authority bestowed and guaranteed by the risen Christ – was final, and no appeal away from what they said was allowable.
When God called Paul from his bitter persecution of the Christian church, he called him into his apostolic ministry. That vocation was not a second call after the initial call. Each Christian is similarly called: our appointed ministry is part of what it means to be saved. It may take some time to discover it, certainly to slot into it; but nevertheless each Christian is called to serve.2
Of course, Paul’s call to be an apostle, though admittedly in many ways very different from that of the other apostles,3 was crucial in establishing his credentials in front of the Corinthian church when it was being harassed by others who styled themselves not merely apostles, but far more authoritative and effective apostles than Paul.4 Paul found it necessary to ask himself searching and painful questions about his call to be an apostle. We may not have that particular struggle to face, but we need to remind ourselves that a call to salvation is necessarily a call to service.
Paul does not refer to the community of God’s people at Corinth as part of the church, but as the church of God as it is at Corinth. Equally, in a letter almost certainly written later at Corinth, he talks of the church as it is in the house of Aquila and Priscilla (Rom. 16:5). In other words, whether we are thinking of the Christians gathered in a geographical area or in someone’s home, there is nothing lacking except numbers. The church as a whole is present, in microcosm. Indeed, there is good scriptural justification for seeing the church in someone’s home as primary and working out from that basic unit.5
The presence of a person by the name of Sosthenes as co-writer with Paul of 1 Corinthians is intriguing. Although by no means an unknown name at the time, it is sufficiently uncommon for us to assume that this is the same Sosthenes who replaced Crispus as ruler of the synagogue in Corinth when the latter turned to Christ.6 The fact that Paul included Sosthenes without comment indicates that he was well known to the Christians at Corinth. The conversion to Christ of two leading officials in the Jewish community one after the other must have thrown them all into some disarray. A parallel situation emerged at Oxford University in the early 1960s in the heyday of the Humanist Society. Its president was converted to Christ, which led to an extraordinary general meeting of the Society. The person then elected was himself converted within a few weeks, thus necessitating another extraordinary general meeting. The Sosthenes affair should spur our faith in presenting the claim of Jesus Christ to those who seem most entrenched in the official opposition.
2. Paul’s confidence in the church at Corinth (1:4–9)
The one fact most people have at their fingertips concerning the Corinthian church is that it was a mess – full of problems, sins, division, heresy. It was, in this sense, no different from any modern church. The church is a fellowship of sinners before it is a fellowship of saints. Even those churches which have glowing reputations are known all too well by their members and pastors to be full of weaknesses and sins. The sad thing is that dissatisfied church members will often naively think that another church in the area will somehow be better than the one they now attend. From this restlessness comes the common habit of church-swapping. Perhaps one of the best antidotes for this kind of malaise is to look again at what Paul says in 1:4–9 about the notoriously messy church at Corinth.
We need to register this primary truth – Paul looks at the Corinthian church as it is in Christ before he looks at anything else that is true of the church. That disciplined statement of faith is rarely made in local churches. The warts are examined and lamented, but often there is no vision of what God has already done in Christ. If the first nine verses of this letter were excised from the text, it would be impossible for any reader to come to anything but a fairly pessimistic view of the church at Corinth. The statements of faith, hope and love that occur at frequent intervals in the text would have no context; they would degenerate into pious dreams. For lack of the kind of vision spelt out in verses 4–9, the people of God today are, in many places, perishing: either going through the motions of being the church with no real expectation of significant growth into maturity, or desperately urging one another to more effort, more prayer, more faith and more activity – because those seem to be the right things.
If it is true that the church in the home or in a given area lacks nothing except numbers, then what Paul says of the church at Corinth in Christ is an accurate description of every church of God. His confidence in the church at Corinth is based on God’s generosity and faithfulness.
a. The church is fully endowed with all the gifts of God’s grace (1:4–7)
The grace of God that has been given you . . . in every way you have been enriched in him . . . you are not lacking in any spiritual gift – three statements which speak of the lavish generosity of God towards these redeemed sinners at Corinth. It is important immediately to point out that these statements are about the church of God at Corinth, not about individual believers. If we are to know the fullness of God’s blessing, if we are to experience all the gifts of his grace which are ours in Christ, it has to be together in fellowship. No individual Christian can claim to be ‘not lacking in any spiritual gift’ – as chapters 12 and 14 of 1 Corinthians make abundantly plain.
But the local church potentially does have every spiritual gift within its corporate life, and should prayerfully expect God to bring them into mature expression. In giving us his Son Jesus, God has given us all he has; he can give us no more; we have everything in him. If we are gradually to make these gifts a reality in...
