ESSAY
What the Corinthians Did Right
POSTED
February 11, 2016

Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is one of those epistles in Scripture to which pastors and teachers resort to show the church everything that it shouldn’t be. There is, of course, good reason for this. The Corinthian church was filled with all sorts of problems. Personality cults (i.e., factions), sexual immorality (both in illicit use and illicit abstinence), self-promotion, and denial of the bodily resurrection on the last day are just a few problems these yahoos had. What a messed up church! This is not the place where someone would want to move his family just to be a part of a church . . . even if it was planted by the apostle Paul himself.

While the Corinthian church can become the whipping boy for our churches nowadays, there is an angle on the Corinthian situation that seems to be thought about rarely. Do we ever stop and think that the Corinthians might have been in the mess they were in because they were doing something right? “Impossible,” you say? Really? Anthony Thiselton, in his commentary on 1Corinthians, says, “[Paul] left behind him a thriving church, throbbing with vitality and full of gifts and services (1:4-8; 12:1–14:40). The problems which would emerge would be those of life, not of decline.”[1] I agree.

Corinth was a port city that was certainly debauched. There was at least one Jewish synagogue there because Paul went there and disputed with the Jews there every Sabbath for a while (cf. Ac 18.1ff.). Paul comes in after being laughed out of northern Greece (the Areopagus) for teaching the resurrection of the dead. The Christian Faith has very little Christian presence in Corinth at the time of his arrival. There is no Christian history to fall back on like we have in America. This is a rank pagan city for the most part. The church is started, and when Paul leaves it eighteen months later, it is probably still small. Because of the size of houses in which they met, the local churches had probably no more than thirty-five to fifty worshipers and maybe one hundred fifty to two hundred Christians total in this huge city. Within three years of his leaving, Paul writes back to the Corinthians based upon reports he hears from Choloe’s household and from a letter written to him asking him questions about certain issues. First Corinthians is Paul’s initial answer. He will deal with the rest of the issues when he visits them again.

What happened in between the time Paul left and the letter? The church at Corinth was evangelizing and bringing in new people. Those new people coming from this corrupt cosmopolitan environment would naturally bring many of their old ideas and lifestyles with them. This is then not just their problem, but it is the church’s problem. The church itself is a toddler and the people coming in are infants. The presence and growth of problems come with people bringing in all of their old baggage with them. Change happens, but not all at once. It is a long, slow process exorcising a fundamental way of thinking. Consequently, the church has problems. Problems, in this case, are a sign of life, not death. It is not like the Corinthians weren’t concerned about these issues. They were corresponding with Paul asking him what they should do about them. They were looking for instruction and many, if not most, seemed more than willing to obey. All this to say, their problems might just have been the result of doing something right; namely, reaching out and bringing in the sin-sick in Corinth.

This speaks volumes to the church today. There are those who want to exist in a problem-free church. Believe me. I understand the sentiment. But the only way to do this is to be a dead church. Problems are a sign of life because they are a part of a growing and/or maturing process. There is no maturation as a church in wisdom or numbers without problems. If the church is going to be what God has called her to be, there will be problems. Those that seek to pull away from churches that have problems looking to move to the church or a “pure” church (i.e., a church that is doing everything the way I think they ought to be doing it) may be fighting against God himself.

This is not to say that there is no time to leave a church. Jesus was excommunicated from the church, and he told the faithful in Thyatira, who were obviously in the minority, to separate themselves from the lovers of Jezebel. There is a time to separate or be separated from a church. Persistent impenitence is a reason to separate from a church. The existence and struggle with problems is not.

Commenting on the status of the church at Corinth, Calvin writes: “It may perhaps appear strange that he should give the name of a Church of God to a multitude of persons that were infested with so many distempers, that Satan might be said to reign among them rather than God. . . .Farther, notwithstanding that many vices had crept in, and various corruptions both of doctrine and manners, there were, nevertheless, certain tokens still remaining of a true Church. This is a passage that ought to be carefully observed, that we may not require that the Church, while in this world, should be free from every wrinkle and stain, or forthwith pronounce unworthy of such a title every society in which everything is not as we would wish it. For it is a dangerous temptation to think that there is no Church at all where perfect purity is not to be seen. For the man that is prepossessed with this notion, must necessarily in the end withdraw from all others, and look upon himself as the only saint in the world, or set up a peculiar sect in company with a few hypocrites.”[2]

This gives no excuse not to deal with the problems. Paul deals with the problems head-on and pulls no punches. He gives us a pastoral template of how presenting problems ought to be handled. But he didn’t write off the church as no church of God at all because all of these issues were prevalent in their church. The church is called to minister to less than perfect people. As we live as the church we are going to have more and more problems because people come in with all of their problems. This is as it should be. Moving all over the country to find the ideal church, the church in which my family can be safe, will eventually wind up being an us-four-and-no-more church. The problem with these types of people is fundamentally the same as the fundamental problem with which Paul deals the Corinthians: they have not learned to live a life shaped by the cross and resurrection of Jesus, the one who hung out with repenting tax collectors and prostitutes rather than the “pure” religious crowd.

The Corinthian church, even with all its problems, might have been doing something right. So, don’t loose heart if you are living in a church that struggles with problems and their solutions but sometimes cannot seem to get on top of them. That could be a sign of the life of the church.


Bill Smith is pastor of Cornerstone Reformed Church in Carbondale, IL. 

[1]Anthony C Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000) 29.

[2]John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. XX (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2003) 50, 51.

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