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1 Corinthians 1–4
Back to 1 Corinthians Overview

Divisions and Disorders in the Church

It is worth pausing on the opening of this letter before diving into the argument, because Paul's tone here is different from what follows. He gives thanks. He expresses genuine warmth for the Corinthians — for the grace given to them, for the way they have been enriched in speech and knowledge, for their spiritual gifts. The thanksgiving barely settles, though, before he turns to a painful report: people from Chloe's household have told him what is happening inside the congregation. The church has fractured into competing factions, each rallying behind a name — Paul, Apollos, Cephas, or Christ — as though the gospel were a school of philosophy and its teachers were rival sages.

This is not a small church squabble. What follows across these four chapters is one of the most sustained theological arguments in the New Testament — an argument that the cross of Christ makes nonsense of every human claim to wisdom, status, or superiority. Paul is writing to a church with serious problems, and the factional spirit is only the first of them. Before the letter ends we will encounter sexual immorality of a kind Paul says even pagans don't tolerate, lawsuits between church members in civil courts, and people getting drunk at communion while others go hungry. This is a real community in genuine disarray. Paul loves them and refuses to look away.

Main Highlights

  • Factions rallying around human teachers expose how Corinthian believers have absorbed the honor-competition culture of the surrounding Greco-Roman world.
  • The cross of Christ deliberately inverts all human status: God chose what is weak and foolish to shame what is strong and wise, leaving no room for boasting.
  • True spiritual wisdom is hidden mystery revealed by the Spirit, not rhetorical achievement — making faith rest on God's power rather than human persuasion.
  • Paul and Apollos are mere servants planting and watering; God gives the growth, and only Christ is the foundation on which the church can be built.

The Folly That Is Power

Paul does not negotiate with the divisions. He dismantles the premise behind them. In a culture saturated with rhetorical competition and the pursuit of sophia (wisdom), he announces that "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" (1:18). The Greek dynamis (power) here is not merely metaphorical. Paul sets it against every form of human credentialing. The cross — stauros in Greek — was an instrument of shame and state violence, the last thing any self-respecting philosophical movement would center itself on. Yet that is precisely where Paul plants his flag.

Gordon Fee observes that the Corinthians' division reflects a deeper problem: they have absorbed the values of their surrounding culture, particularly the Greco-Roman honor system in which patrons, teachers, and civic leaders competed for status and collected followers. "The Corinthians," Fee writes, "were behaving according to the norms of the wisdom of the age" (The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT, 1987). To rally behind Apollos because of his eloquence, or behind Paul because he baptized you, is to import the sociology of the forum into the fellowship of the crucified.

Paul's response is to recount what God has actually done: "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are" (1:27–28). Anthony Thiselton notes that this is not anti-intellectualism but a principled theological inversion — God's choosing upends every human calculus of worth and achievement (The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC, 2000). The cross exposes the deep lie behind status competition: that the strong deserve their strength, and the wise their wisdom.

We find it significant that Paul does not simply ask the Corinthians to stop ranking themselves against each other. He points them to the shape of the gospel itself — a crucified Messiah — and says: look at what God chose. If that's the center, then every other hierarchy is unmasked.

Milk, Mystery, and the Spirit

When Paul turns to his own ministry, he presents himself as a deliberate counter-example. He came to Corinth not with "lofty speech or wisdom" but "in weakness and in fear and much trembling" (2:1–3). He resolved to know nothing among them except "Jesus Christ and him crucified." This was not timidity but theological strategy: faith must rest on the dynamis of God, not on the persuasive force of human argument.

Yet Paul does speak wisdom — a wisdom hidden, mysterion in Greek, which the Spirit of God reveals. The pneumatikos (spiritual person) discerns all things because the Spirit searches even the depths of God (2:10–15). The claim is not elitist — it is an argument that true spiritual perception is given, not achieved, which is precisely the point the Corinthians have missed by turning their teachers into trophies.

David Garland underscores the irony: the Corinthians pride themselves on spiritual maturity, but their very factionalism proves they are still "infants in Christ," still needing milk rather than solid food (3:1–3; 1 Corinthians, BECNT, 2003). The presence of jealousy and strife is not a sign of depth; it is a sign of immaturity. Spiritual people do not divide over personalities because they understand that Paul and Apollos are merely servants — "God's fellow workers" — while the Corinthians are "God's field, God's building" (3:9).

The building metaphor then sharpens into a warning. Various workers build on the one foundation that has been laid — Jesus Christ — with materials that the day of judgment will test with fire. What survives and what burns will be revealed. No one, Paul insists, can lay any foundation other than the one already laid (3:11). The teachers are not the foundation; Christ is. To organize your loyalty around a teacher is to build on the wrong thing entirely.

What strikes us here is how Paul holds two things at once: genuine affection for the Corinthians and unsparing honesty about what their factionalism reveals. He does not shame them cruelly, but he does not flatter them either. That combination — loving and clear — is harder than either one alone.

Last updated: March 3, 2026.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

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Holiness and Discipline in the Church

1 Corinthians 5–11