1 Corinthians

Each faction gloried in its teacher, and Paul answers with the cross. “The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified” (1:22–23), a stumblingblock to the one and foolishness to the other, but to the called “Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1:24). God chose the foolish, the weak and the base “that no flesh should glory in his presence” (1:29), and made Christ “unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption” (1:30). This wisdom is not reached by the natural man but revealed by God’s Spirit (2:10–14). So the teachers they set against each other are servants: Paul planted, Apollos watered, “but God gave the increase” (3:6). “Therefore let no man glory in men” (3:21).

Four different matters are answered from one word. The believer’s body is “the temple of the Holy Ghost” and is “bought with a price” (6:19–20), so fornication is a sin against it. Of the bread Paul asks, “is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” and adds, “we being many are one bread, and one body” (10:16–17); whoever eats unworthily eats “not discerning the Lord’s body” (11:29). The church is that body: “by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body” (12:13), and the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of thee” (12:21). And the body laid in the grave is raised: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (15:44).

The Corinthians came behind in no gift (1:7), yet some were puffed up (4:18; 5:2). Charity “is not puffed up” (13:4), and without it the tongues of men and of angels are “as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” (13:1). Prophecies fail and tongues cease, but “Charity never faileth” (13:8). Methodius took “that which is perfect” (13:10) to be the kingdom of heaven and the resurrection. Some Christians hold that prophecy and tongues continue until then. Others hold that they ceased with the apostles, whose word such signs confirmed (Hebrews 2:3–4), and Chrysostom wrote of gifts such as then used to occur but now no longer take place. Charity outlasts the gifts and abides with faith and hope: “the greatest of these is charity” (13:13).

Some at Corinth said “there is no resurrection of the dead” (15:12). Paul begins from the gospel he received: “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures”, was buried, and “rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (15:3–4), and was seen of above five hundred brethren at once, most of them still living (15:6). If the dead rise not, Christ is not raised: “your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (15:17). But Christ is “the firstfruits of them that slept” (15:20), like the first sheaf of the harvest waved before the LORD (Leviticus 23:10–11), and the harvest follows in order: “afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming” (15:23). The body is sown like seed and raised changed, and then “Death is swallowed up in victory” (15:54).