Manna Praxis

The Book of 1 Corinthians: Christ Crucified, Christ Risen

Introduction

Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book

You are about to sit down with one of the most practical letters ever written, and also one of the most searching. Paul had spent a year and a half in Corinth on his second missionary journey, preaching in the synagogue until they threw him out, then next door in the house of a man named Titius Justus, and God gathered a church out of that noisy, restless port city. A few years later Paul is in Ephesus, across the Aegean, and news reaches him that the church he planted is coming apart. Some of it comes by word of mouth, from the household of a woman named Chloe, and it is not good news: rival factions lining up behind favorite preachers, a scandalous sin the congregation is tolerating and even boasting about, believers dragging one another into pagan courts, the rich humiliating the poor at the Lord’s own Table, worship dissolving into disorder, and some of them saying openly that there is no resurrection of the dead. Alongside that report comes a letter from the church itself, a list of questions they want settled: about marriage and singleness, about meat sold in the marketplace after it had been offered to idols, about spiritual gifts, about the collection for the poor saints in Jerusalem. So Paul writes back. And what makes this letter so remarkable is that he does not answer their many problems with many different strategies. He goes down beneath all of them to one foundation, a crucified and risen Christ, and from that foundation he rebuilds everything: their view of wisdom, of power, of the body, of freedom, of love, of death itself.

As you read, hold this: To a gifted and badly divided church in a proud, wealthy, immoral city, Paul answers every quarrel and every question the same way, by holding up Christ crucified and Christ risen as the wisdom and power of God that reorders everything.

The name and what it means

The word that governs this letter is the very first word Paul uses for these people. In Greek it is ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia), pronounced ek-klay-SEE-ah (Strong’s G1577), and it means an assembly, a gathering of those who have been called out and summoned together. In ordinary Greek life the word had nothing religious about it. It was the town meeting, the citizen body of a Greek city called out from their houses and their shops by a herald’s voice to gather in the public square and do the city’s business. The Greek translation of the Old Testament had already taken that ordinary civic word and used it for the congregation of Israel gathered before God at Sinai, the assembly called out of Egypt to hear His voice. So when Paul takes up his pen and writes to the church of God in Corinth, every syllable of it is loaded. These are not a club, a school of thought, or a following gathered around an impressive teacher. They are a summoned people. Someone called, and they came. And notice the two halves that Paul refuses to separate: the church of God, and the church in Corinth. They belong to God, holy ones, set apart, sanctified in Christ Jesus. And they live at a street address in one of the most immoral cities in the Roman world. Nearly everything hard in this letter grows out of holding those two truths together, a called-out people who still have to buy their meat in the same market, walk the same streets, and carry the habits of that city in their bones. Paul never lets them forget either half. He will not let them pretend they are not holy, and he will not let them pretend the city has not gotten inside them.

The world of the book

Corinth was new money and old sin, and it was loud. The ancient city had been destroyed by Rome in 146 BC and left in ruins for a century, then refounded by Julius Caesar in 44 BC as a Roman colony and settled largely with freedmen, former slaves given a fresh start. By Paul’s day it had exploded into one of the wealthiest cities in Greece, and its wealth came from geography. Corinth sat on the narrow isthmus joining the Greek mainland to the Peloponnese, controlling two harbors, Lechaeum on the western gulf and Cenchreae on the eastern. Sailors dreaded the long, dangerous voyage around the southern capes, so cargo, and sometimes whole small ships hauled on a stone trackway, crossed the isthmus by land instead. That meant sailors, traders, dockworkers, merchants, and money flowing through the city day and night. Above the town rose the Acrocorinth, a great rock crowned with the temple of Aphrodite, and the city’s reputation for sexual license was so notorious across the Greek world that a verb had been coined from its name for living a debauched life. Twice every four years Corinth hosted the Isthmian games, second only to the Olympics, filling the city with athletes and crowds, which is why Paul can speak so naturally of runners in a race and the perishable wreath they compete for. Add to that a culture besotted with rhetoric, where a traveling speaker with a polished style could gather a paying following the way an entertainer does, and where status was everything: who your patron was, whose table you ate at, whose name you dropped.

Now set a young church down in the middle of that. Paul tells them plainly that not many of them were wise by human standards, not many powerful, not many of noble birth. This was a congregation of ordinary and low-status people, tradesmen and slaves and freedmen and a few wealthier householders whose homes were big enough to host the gathering. They met in those homes, and the homes themselves carried the city’s social divisions right into the meeting, the host and his friends reclining in the dining room while latecomers who had worked all day crowded into the courtyard. They had been genuinely converted and genuinely gifted; Paul says so, and he thanks God for it before he corrects a single thing. But they had brought Corinth with them. They rated their preachers the way the city rated its orators. They kept their old assumptions about power and cleverness and honor and simply applied them to church life. They were not cold, and they were not lazy. They were enthusiastic, articulate, gifted, and pulling themselves apart. That is the church Paul loves enough to write nearly sixteen chapters of hard, tender, unflinching counsel to.

The shape of the book

The one thread to carry

If you carry one thing through these sixteen chapters, carry this: the cross of Jesus Christ is not merely how a person gets saved and then moves on to weightier matters. It is the wisdom and the power of God, and it takes everything a proud city thinks it knows about greatness and quietly turns it upside down. Corinth measured worth by cleverness, wealth, connection, and eloquence. Then God saved that city’s outcasts by means of a public execution, the death of a Galilean carpenter on a Roman gibbet, the single most humiliating thing the ancient world could imagine. Paul will not apologize for it or dress it up.

"For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." 1 Corinthians 1:18 (BSB)

That is why every problem in this letter gets answered from the same place. Factions die when you see that no preacher was crucified for you. Boasting dies at the foot of a cross. Rights get laid down because Someone laid His down first. The poor are honored at the Table because the Lord of that Table gave His body for them. Paul had come into Corinth with no rhetorical fireworks at all, and it was on purpose.

"For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified." 1 Corinthians 2:2 (BSB)

And the cross is not the end of the thread. A crucified Savior who stayed dead would be, as Paul says bluntly, a pitiable hope. So the letter that begins with Christ crucified climbs to Christ risen, and Paul hands them the confession he himself received, the bedrock of the whole faith, older than any letter he ever wrote.

"For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures," 1 Corinthians 15:3–4 (BSB)

Died, buried, raised. Hold those three words and you have the spine of this letter and of the Christian hope. Everything Paul asks of this messy, gifted, quarreling church rests on them. So do not read 1 Corinthians as a list of ancient problems belonging to somebody else. Read it as the letter that shows what the cross and the empty tomb actually do when they land in a real congregation full of real people who still carry their city inside them. God did not wait for Corinth to become respectable before He called it His church, and He has not waited for us either. Praise Him for that. Learn the Word, keep your eyes on Christ crucified and Christ risen, and give thanks.