1 Corinthians

Purpose & theme

First Corinthians is Paul’s pastoral letter to a church he loved and had founded, but which had become a tangle of problems — a congregation rich in spiritual gifts yet immature, divided, and worldly. Corinth was a bustling, cosmopolitan port city, proud of its wisdom and notorious for its immorality, and the church had allowed the surrounding culture to seep into its life. Paul writes to address a series of specific issues, some reported to him by “Chloe’s people” and some raised in a letter from the church itself: factions and personality cults, a case of gross immorality, lawsuits between believers, questions about marriage and singleness, food offered to idols, disorder at the Lord’s Supper, the use and abuse of spiritual gifts, and doubts about the resurrection. Through it all, Paul brings the gospel to bear on the everyday life of the church, showing that Christ crucified and risen must shape everything.

The unifying theme is that the cross of Christ overturns the world’s wisdom and creates a new kind of community. Against the Corinthians’ boasting in human wisdom and eloquence, Paul insists, “we preach Christ crucified” — “folly” to the world but “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1:23-24). This cross-shaped wisdom reorders everything: it humbles factions, cleanses immorality, governs the use of freedom, and above all exalts love as the greatest of all things, without which even the most spectacular gifts are nothing (chapter 13). The letter climaxes in the magnificent chapter 15, the fullest treatment of the resurrection in the New Testament, where Paul grounds the whole faith in the historical fact that “Christ died for our sins... was buried... was raised on the third day,” and promises that because He rose, believers too will be raised. First Corinthians thus remains a manual for the church in every age, calling God’s people to holiness, unity, love, and hope.