Theopedia

First Epistle to the Corinthians

“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

— 1 Corinthians 13:13

Overview

First Corinthians is a letter of the apostle Paul to the church he had founded in Corinth, written to correct specific errors and abuses he had learned of and to answer questions the Corinthians had put to him in a letter of their own.1 Its problems were real and serious: factions built around rival teachers, a member’s sexual immorality the church tolerated rather than grieved, lawsuits between believers, disorder in worship, and outright denial of the resurrection.2 Calvin points to this same letter as proof that a church marked by such faults can still be a true church, so long as the word of God and the sacraments remain rightly in place among it.2

Author and Date

The letter names Paul as its author (1 Cor. 1:1), an attribution essentially unchallenged in New Testament scholarship, unlike authorship questions that genuinely divide scholars for books such as Hebrews or 2 Peter. Internal evidence places its writing during Paul’s extended stay in Ephesus, part of a roughly three-year period there recorded in Acts 19:1-10 and 20:31: he tells the Corinthians, “I will stay in Ephesus until Pentecost” (1 Cor. 16:8), and the letter appears to have been written not long before that stay ended, which Barrows dates to around AD 57.1 The letter’s attestation in the early church is correspondingly early: writing around AD 95, Clement of Rome tells the Corinthian church itself to “take up the epistle of that blessed apostle Paul… he wrote to you in the Spirit concerning himself and Cephas and Apollos,” a direct reference to the party-spirit dispute Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians 1-4.3

Historical and Literary Context

Paul had founded the Corinthian church on his second missionary journey (Acts 18:1-11), laboring there about eighteen months among a body drawn mostly from Gentile converts.1 Corinth itself was the capital of the Roman province of Achaia, a city Barrows describes as “distinguished for its wealth and progress in the arts, and for its luxury and dissoluteness of morals” on account of its two harbors and its position on the isthmus connecting the Greek mainland to the Peloponnese.1 Barrows traces the letter’s occasion directly to that setting: converts newly out of Gentile idolatry, living amid a “dissolute community,” did not wholly escape its vices, took “a low and worldly view” of the church and its spiritual gifts, and so were drawn into the “party strifes and rivalries” of chapters 1 and 3, compounded by teachers who disparaged Paul’s own standing among them.1 Disorders in worship and a denial of the resurrection had crept in alongside these divisions, and the Corinthians had written back to Paul with further questions of their own, particularly about marriage.1

Structure

  • Introduction and thanksgiving (1:1-9)
  • Factions and the wisdom of God (1:10-4:21)
  • Church discipline and a case of sexual immorality (5:1-13)
  • Lawsuits between believers (6:1-11)
  • Sexual immorality and the body (6:12-20)
  • Marriage and singleness (7:1-40)
  • Food offered to idols and Christian liberty (8:1-11:1)
  • Head coverings and the Lord’s Supper (11:2-34)
  • Spiritual gifts and the body of Christ (12:1-31)
  • Love (13:1-13)
  • Prophecy and tongues in worship (14:1-40)
  • The resurrection of the dead (15:1-58)
  • The collection for Jerusalem and closing greetings (16:1-24)

Major Themes

The cross confounds the world’s wisdom. Paul’s argument in chapters 1-4 turns the Corinthians’ own boasting in teachers, status, and eloquence back on itself: “the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).4 The rulers of this age, taking their own wisdom as the standard, cannot grasp what God has displayed in the cross, so that only the Spirit, not human argument, discloses it (1 Cor. 2:6-8).5 Paul presses the same point against the makeup of the Corinthian church itself: “not many wise according to worldly standards… were called,” Calvin observes, so that God is shown “in the exercise of his favor” to owe nothing to the very marks of status the Corinthians prized (1 Cor. 1:26).6

Spiritual gifts are ordered by love. Paul’s argument in chapters 12-14 treats the church as one body with many members, each given a genuine spiritual gift for the good of the whole; Bavinck reads this as teaching that ministry belongs to the whole congregation, under Christ’s own governance as its head, rather than to a separate clerical class alone.7 Among these gifts, Bavinck writes, love is “the greatest… the one that must govern them all” (1 Cor. 13:13).7 Calvin reads chapter 13 the same way: having urged the Corinthians toward the gifts of greatest benefit to the church, Paul adds, “yet I will show you a still more excellent way” (1 Cor. 12:30), because every other gift, however impressive, is worthless unless it serves love and the church’s edification.8

Christ’s resurrection secures the bodily resurrection of believers. In chapter 15, Paul answers those in Corinth who denied the resurrection outright, defending both the fact of a bodily resurrection and the same continuity between the body sown and the body raised that marked Christ’s own rising.9 He distinguishes the “natural body” from the “spiritual body” it will become (1 Cor. 15:35-54); Bavinck reads this as teaching the resurrection of the body, not of the flesh as such, so that the spiritual body is a transformed continuation of the present one, no longer bound to flesh and blood, rather than an entirely different one.9

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 30, “The Epistles of Paul,” §§7-12. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), bk. 4, chap. 1, §14. ↩ ↩2

  3. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 6, “The Corporate Reception of the Canon: The Emergence of a Canonical Core.” ↩

  4. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1932), sec. 2: “the word of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us who are saved it is the power of God,” 1 Cor. 1:18. ↩

  5. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 2, “Preparation for the School of Grace,” 78-79. ↩

  6. Calvin, Institutes, bk. 3, chap. 23, §11: “not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called… so far is God in the exercise of his favor from showing any respect to persons.” ↩

  7. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩2

  8. Calvin, Institutes, bk. 3, chap. 2, §9, 477. ↩

  9. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 25, “The Consummation.” ↩ ↩2