Paul had grown up upper-middle class in Tarsus, a center of tent-making, where he learned that trade. He also studied religious law under Gameliel and was a Roman citizen, so this gave him notable status in the community. He was among the many Jewish leaders concerned about the followers of this Jesus – from his perspective, one in a long line of false messiahs who was twisting the scriptures and putting all of God’s people at risk.
So he became essentially a bounty hunter, tracking down and capturing Christians for execution. At one point he asks for dispensation from the high priest to go up to Damascus and bring the Christians back to Jerusalem to face justice. On the way, he is confronted with the living Christ and blinded. When he is healed, he becomes a zealous follower of Christ, and his preaching causes a riot. From there he went briefly to Jerusalem, where he causes trouble once again, and has to be smuggled out. He returns to Taursus and spends ten years there. We don’t know exactly what happened in those years, but presumably they were spent largely in contemplation of the implications of Christ’s coming. Eventually, a man named Barnabas is sent out to find Paul. Paul comes back to Jerusalem, meets with the apostles, and is sent out again, becoming a missionary for the church.
Eventually, he comes to Corinth, where he partners with Priscilla and Aquila and eventually shifts his focus from preaching to the Jews to preaching up the gentiles. He spent a year and a half there building the church, which he then left in the hands of co-pastors Priscilla and Aquila. This letter was written a number of years later to that church.
Corinth was a center of trade, located on an isthmus where ships went overland rather than sailing around Asia is. It was a center of entertainment, hosting the Isthmian Games every two years. It was a center of religion and sex, as the temple of Aphrodite also served as a city-wide prostitution business. The city naturally had a pretty significant underbelly, and had become a Roman byword for debauchery and dissolution. So the church in Corinth had a lot of baked-in issues, issues Paul would not have been able to deal with in his short time there. This meant that the church there was probably the most dysfunctional church that Paul wrote to, riven by factions, infighting, selfishness, and not a little of its own debauchery and dissolution.
Because of these issues, people were actively leaving the faith. The central message of this book, then, was the reminder that a diverse church can only survive and thrive when it is centered around the simplicity of Christ. The thinking of the people of Corinth is remarkably parallel to that of the average Seattleite, so we have much to learn from this book. (It does mean that going through it is not going to push against legalism, but against license).
Like Seattle, Corinth was regionally proud and technologically advanced – they had Corinthian bronze, we have Amazon and Microsoft. They took pride in their sports and sports culture. They were proud of their intelligence and education. They were proud of their wealth and strong economy. They overall felt superior to the rest of the Greco-Roman world. Aristotle himself wrote about this superiority complex. There are a few similarities here.
And when this sort of superiority complex enters the church, we get significant problems. Factions, boasting, judgmentalism – even judging Paul (who, naturally, responded with great heaping piles of sarcasm). This intellectual elitism led to an elevation of their own reason over the truth of scripture. Paul continually has to remind them that the message of Christ was specifically built to be foolishness when looked at with cold reason. Corinth also had an overall distrust of authority, including church leaders, leading to treating of Paul with extreme disrespect, because he’s not treating others with enough respect.
Corinth was more concerned with individual rights than with love. They were more concerned with spiritual experience than with sound teaching and doctrine. They preferred Greek rhetoric to preaching (TED Talks vs. sermons). They preferred unfettered tolerance to holiness and gospel. All these issues are mirrored in Seattle and constantly validated by everyone around us. Rather than self-righteousness and hypocrisy growing out of legalism, we get self-righteousness and hypocrisy growing out of license. Paul usually writes against legalism, but here he writes against license.
There are a number of controversies in this book, mostly stemming from the existence of another letter sent before this one that we do not have (called “Corinthians A”), and another one after this one but before 2nd Corinthians (called “Corinthians B”). These letters are not included in the canon and were clearly not inspired or meant by the Holy Spirit to be passed down. It does help explain some of the very specific-seeming instructions Paul gives.
Overall, the letter is a call to incarnational unity, shedding the divisions and factions created by intellectual elitism and pride in favor of the unity that Christ calls us to and gives us the power to attain.
–Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA
1 Corinthians 1:1-3
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