Greeting, Thanksgiving: 1 Corinthians 1:1–9✞
It’s been a while since I was in the New Testament so I need to get back into the swing of things, but this passage kicks off Paul’s first canonical letter to the church in Corinth. By “canonical,” I mean the first of two of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians that were included in the Bible; scholars believe there were at least four letters from Paul to the Corinthians:
- An initial letter, lost to time, but which is referenced in this letter (in 5:9✞ he says talks about things he had written to the Corinthians earlier)
- The letter we now call 1 Corinthians, which we’re currently looking at
- A third, “severe” or “sorrowful” letter, also lost to time, in which Paul sternly rebukes the Corinthians
- The letter we now call 2 Corinthians
I think a lot of Christians, when we find this out, get very curious about those other two letters. What did Paul say? We have an idea about some of the things he said, but what else are we missing, for not having read those letters? But I don’t think we should worry about it. If God had wanted us to have those letters we’d have them. I’m not saying there was anything wrong in them, just that God didn’t think they were necessary for Christians throughout the ages to have.
But enough about that! Let’s get into the letter itself! And I’ll just say, before I do, that I sometimes talk about Paul talking to “the Corinthians,” but what I mean is that he’s talking to the people who are part of the church in Corinth – he’s talking to the Corinthian Christians. I don’t bother to say that every time, because it would be too wordy, but Paul isn’t writing to non-Christians in Corinth, only those who are part of the church.
Passage
I’ll go through it bit-by-bit; if you want to read it all in one block you can click this link to do so✞.
1 Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes,
Paul starts his letter affirming that he is an Apostle, specifically called to his ministry by Jesus Himself. I think this is important because one of the issues Paul will be dealing with in this letter is divisions in the church, caused at least in part by un-biblical teaching. (There are other issues, too; we’ll get to them all, unless I’m called away first!) If the people at Corinth are going to have to “choose sides” when it comes to what teachings to follow/believe, it helps to know that Paul’s teachings come from an Apostle.
That being said, as we’ll see in the next passage, Paul is also not going to say, “because I’m an Apostle you have to listen to me and everyone else should be quiet.” He’s calling out his credentials, but the Corinthians are still expected to use their heads, and the Spirit, and discern what is right.
But I’m getting ahead of myself…
As a side note, I’ll just say that I don’t know anything about Sosthenes. S/he was obviously a fellow Christian, but that’s about it. The only other Sosthenes I see in the Scriptures is a synagogue ruler who got beaten in Acts 18; the text isn’t clear on why he was beaten, it may be that he had converted to Christianity, so maybe that’s the same Sosthenes mentioned here. Or maybe not.
2 To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus,
To a certain extent this is just normal letter writing; Paul stated in verse 1 that he’s the one who’s writing the letter and now he’s saying who the letter is to.
It is worth noting, however, that Paul doesn’t just say, “To the church that is in Corinth,” he says, “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus.” Paul is going to have some rebukes to give to these people, there are clearly issues in this church that need addressing, but Paul never casts doubt as to whether the Corinthians are actually saved. They are; they’re Christians. They’re Christians who have to deal with some sins—some of which are quite serious!—and they’re Christians who aren’t doing everything equally well, but they’re Christians.
He continues in the same vein:
called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:
The people Paul is writing to in Corinth are Christians, alongside Christians everywhere else. (See below for more on the word “saints,” but for now I’ll just say “saints” in the New Testament means “Christians.”) This is partially a furthering of the previous point: the people at the church in Corinth are Christians, real Christians, just like all of the other Christians in all the other church – every place where people call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is the God of all of these people, including the Corinthians.
Maybe it’s overly obvious, but Paul is also saying, by inference, that Christians are Christians, regardless of where they are. Christianity isn’t a religion that works differently for different people; regardless of where you sit in time or geography, if you’re a Christian you were saved by the work of Jesus Christ. This is important because Christianity is one of the few religions that has truly gone worldwide; it’s not mainly situated in one particular place, it’s everywhere. And all of those Christians, in Europe, in North America, in Africa, in Asia, in South America… all of us, are saved by the work of Jesus Christ. We all have different approaches to how we worship, our cultures are incorporated into our religion in different ways, but Christianity was always intended to be a worldwide religion for all to believe.
3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I don’t actually have anything to say about this phrase. It feels like a normal thing a Christian would write in a letter! I’m not saying he doesn’t mean it, I’m sure Paul does mean it.
I gave the link a couple of times to the entire passage before going through it bit-by-bit, but now we have one of Paul’s typical long sentences, so I’ll quote it in one block before going through bit-by-bit:
I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge—even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you—so that you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
verses 4–9✞, verse numbers elided
Let’s break that down!
4 I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus,
Again, we’re going to see a lot of correction in this letter; Paul has a lot of things to say about how the Corinthians should be doing better. But Paul is correcting them out of love – he has genuine affection for the people in the church in Corinth! There may be ways they need to improve, but they’re Christians now; through God’s Grace, they are so much better than they were before they were saved!
And this isn’t just a passing thought; Paul thanks God “always” for the church in Corinth! Does that mean he mentions the Corinthians every single time he prays, at all times? No, probably not. He means “always” in a general sense, just like we do when we use that word. “I’m always thinking of you” doesn’t mean there’s never a moment in which I’m not thinking of you, it means you’re on my mind a lot. Paul prayed for the Corinthians – a lot.
But—and this is the point Paul is making—when he’s praying about them, one of the things he’s constantly doing is thanking God for the Grace He extended to the Corinthians. There could be a sense in which the church in Corinth is a “problem church,” but if that’s the case, they’re still a “problem church” that Paul genuinely loves and cares for.
5 that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge—
I keep harping on the fact that Paul will have much to chastise the Corinthians for in this letter, but whatever their faults, the Corinthians seem to be gifted with speech and knowledge, and Paul clearly sees these as gifts from God.
6 even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you—
Now this little aside is interesting! Paul is going further: not only are the Corinthians Christians, but the fact that they are confirms the testimony of Christ! Is Jesus the Christ? Is His word true? Does He save people? Yes, yes, and yes – the Corinthians are proof of it! (As am I, for that matter…)
7 so that you are not lacking in any gift,
Does Paul mean, here, that the Corinthians have all of God’s gifts? That there are no gifts God hasn’t given them? Perhaps; they are Christians, they have the Holy Spirit. I think what Paul means, though, is that they have everything they need; if there are gifts they don’t have, they aren’t “lacking” those gifts – they are not suffering for want of those gifts.
Perhaps I’m overthinking it, and I don’t speak Greek, so let me not push this too far.
But I will say that, when Paul criticizes the Corinthians later, they will have no cause to say, “it wasn’t our fault that we did these things – we were lacking the required gifts from God!” No, they had what they needed. (As do I, for that matter…)
as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, 8 who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Because the Corinthians are Christians, they—like all of us—are awaiting Jesus’ return. In the meantime, however long that might take, Jesus Himself is sustaining them/us to the end at which point, in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Corinthians, and I, and all Christians, will be guiltless. Because we have committed no sin? No, of course not! Quite the opposite! Because Christ has taken our guilt, all of it, leaving none for us to bear. That’s what will make me guiltless.
That would be amazing enough for Christianity to be different to every other religion and worldview, but it doesn’t end there:
9 God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
I’m not just guiltless, I have fellowship with God. The same fellowship with God that Jesus has! This feels like it simply can’t be right; how can I have the same fellowship with God that Jesus has? Jesus is God! And there are ways in which, of course, the fellowship I have with God is different from the fellowship the Son has with the Father and with the Spirit.
But there are other ways in which, yes, I do have the same fellowship with the Father that the Son has. I don’t yet, but one day I will see Him face to face. I’ll be in His presence. I will be able to talk to Him. And even before that, even before the day I become sinlessly perfect, I already have the beginning of that fellowship with God, right here in this life.
Thoughts
I’m surprised I wrote so much just about the introduction to this letter! Paul hasn’t even gotten into the difficult topics he’s going to raise! (Maybe I get verbose whenever I get to a new book of the Bible – especially when I’ve switched from Old Testament to New?)
I don’t have much more to say, but it is worth talking about the word “saint,” and how it’s used in the New Testament, since it is potentially confusing to the modern-day Christian – we use the word differently than they used to use it.
“Saints”
I’ll just come out and say it: when the New Testament writers use the word “saint,” they just mean “Christian.” There’s no special meaning behind the word; it’s not a matter that some Christians are “just” Christians and some are SAINTS , it’s just a synonym for believers; for followers of Christ.
(I don’t have evidence for this, but it might even be a hesitancy to use the word “Christian,” since, early on—we saw this in Acts—it was used by non-Christians as an insult against believers. The word was later reclaimed by Christians themselves, but could it be that some of the New Testament writers were avoiding use of a word that had been used as an insult in recent memory? Perhaps it still is an insult at the time Paul is writing 1 Corinthians!)
We’re confused by the word because it has evolved over the last couple of thousands of years since the New Testament letters were written. First, in English, we often use the word “saint” to describe someone who is “good” (regardless if they’re Christian or not). To say someone is a “saint” is to say that they don’t do bad things; it can even be used in a kind of ironic/sarcastic manner, in which the word “saint” is more like “goody two shoes” – a phrase that probably doesn’t translate very well if it’s not one you grew up with.
But the other reason the word is confusing is that it’s used in a very specific way in Catholicism. Let me say off the bat that this isn’t a rant against Catholicism, I’m not even saying they’re using the word wrong, I’m just saying that they use the word “saint” to refer to particular kinds of Christian, whereas in the New Testament writings it means all Christians, and that causes confusion.
I’m sure there are Protestant Christians who would say they don’t like that Catholics have “hijacked” this word, or that their use of it is unbiblical, but personally I don’t go that far. Words and terminology change over time, and when we’re creating roles in the Church we have to use some terminology for those roles, so I don’t have issues with the Catholic church deciding to use the word “saint” in the way they use it. I definitely see no reason to fight about it.
But I do want to point out, again, that the word in the New Testament letters just means “Christian,” it doesn’t mean someone who’s beyond reproach (like we commonly and/or sarcastically use the word in English), or a special kind of Christian as we might assume from the Catholic use of the word.
When Paul tells the Corinthians they’re “saints,” he just means they’re Christians. No more, and no less; they’re Christians just like the people in every other church Paul planted or visited.
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