For Paul, Christianity is first and foremost life with Christ in His Kingdom, and witness to Him and to this life. This is why the apostle says below that the Kingdom is “not in word, but in power.” Judging by the apostle's words to the Christians in Corinth, for them it was...
For Paul, Christianity is first and foremost life with Christ in His Kingdom, and witness to Him and to this life. This is why the apostle says below that the Kingdom is “not in word, but in power.” Judging by the apostle's words to the Christians in Corinth, for them it was different. It is no accident that Paul speaks of authentic Christian life as the life of people who are persecuted, poor, and unsuccessful. He seems to contrast such a life with the life led by many Christians in Corinth who had found their place in the world. It is possible, of course, that some of Corinth's church leaders had indeed built something resembling an ecclesiastical career—although at that time it was naturally quite unlike what it became later, when church institutions were not only legal but even official and highly influential.
Yet the problem was not one of scale but of the inner condition of those who pursued such a career. The problem was precisely that these people had found themselves in this world and had settled into it, perhaps not as luxuriously as ecclesiastical careerists in other ages, but quite comfortably. The trouble was not that they had become leaders of certain local church or church-adjacent groups and movements; it lay in their inner condition, which the apostle describes in a single word: you have become rich. They had lost the spiritual condition that Jesus—and Isaiah of Jerusalem centuries before Him—called poverty. What matters here is not what a person has or how much, but what they rely on, and whether they think they truly possess anything. God's poor person understands perfectly that they are empty and ready to receive into themselves, into their life, soul, and heart, whatever God may wish to fill them with. With their whole being they sense that they have nothing in this world on which they could rely, and indeed nothing valuable at all, nothing worth clinging to.
The rich person, on the other hand, is certain that they possess something of the sort—something that belongs to them by right, not because God gave it to them, but because they earned and deserved it. One can rely on what one has earned and deserved; it will not fail. It is yours. You are rich. Yet this wealth proves earthly, of this world, and unrelated to the Kingdom. The rich person may be rich in words about the Kingdom. But only the poor person attains its power, and the apostle knows this perfectly: he himself was richer than many, yet chose poverty for the sake of Christ and the Kingdom.
