Main news for 3 August 2025

King James Version (en)

1 Corinthians, Chapter 1, verse 13

¹³Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul?

NOTES

In his letter to the Corinthian Christians, Paul is evidently speaking about some division that had happened in the Corinthian church, about certain church or near-church parties that had formed there. Now, of course, it is hard to say exactly what the essence of the conflict was, but judging by Paul's words, one has to think that the issue was groups formed around different teachers or preachers connected with the Corinthian church. And apparently things sometimes reached the point where, behind their mentors, their followers sometimes ceased to see Christ, often forgetting the very essence of Christianity.

The apostle, judging by his words, did not try at all to go into the subtleties of the disagreements that had arisen. He asks a simple question: who was crucified for you? Who opened the Kingdom to you? One of your teachers or mentors? Or Christ after all? Paul does not try to resort to any theological arguments; he is not interested in the details of the doctrine or religious worldview of the groups that had arisen in the Corinthian church. And not because he lacked the knowledge to sort it all out. He simply remembers well what many of his Corinthian fellow believers had apparently begun to forget: Christianity is not a religion, and the Church is not a theological academy or a club of religious intellectuals. Jesus did not come into the world and did not die on the cross in order to give the world a new religion, a new theology, or a new morality, but in order to open the Kingdom to it. And the Church was founded by Him as a community of people living in the Kingdom.

Of course, religion, theology, and morality can all be useful for witness to the Kingdom. But not when they come to the forefront, so that disagreements on these questions begin to determine the whole life of the church community, even to the point of division. If this has happened, it means that Christ has already been forgotten in this community, and the church has essentially ceased to be the Church, turning into an ordinary religious organization. Paul speaks sharply against such a transformation. For after his meeting with the Risen One on the Damascus road, he became an inhabitant of the Kingdom, not an adherent of a new religion. And he calls the Corinthian Christians to the same thing: to be inhabitants of the Kingdom.

Describing his witness, Paul says that Christ sent him not to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel. Paul is an apostle, a witness bearing the good news of the Messiah who has come into the world and of the Kingdom which, according to the Messiah's word, "has drawn near." Apostleship is always witness. An apostle is not a teacher, not a mentor, not the presider of a church assembly, not a catechist. His task is more definite: he is a witness who must tell about what he has seen and experienced. He must tell it in such a way that those who listen see and experience everything, as far as possible, as clearly and distinctly as the witness himself.

If the matter is the Kingdom, then the listeners must experience being joined to the life of the Kingdom just as the witness who carries out apostolic ministry has experienced it. Of course, every Christian activity is to some degree, or at least should be, apostolic: after all, a Christian is a citizen of the Kingdom, and if that is so, then communion with him must necessarily open the Kingdom to those who share in it. But apostolic ministry is witness exclusively, or at least primarily; the apostle devotes his whole life to it.

For the Church such witness is of the greatest importance: it is a matter of the Kingdom being manifested to the world by concrete people who live by that Kingdom. Authentic Christianity, Christianity not as a new religion or a new teaching but as new life, can spread through the world only in this way. But in individual churches, in every age, there has been a tendency to turn Christianity from the experience of new life into a new religion or some new spiritual teaching. This is what happened in the Corinthian church as well.

There, judging by the apostle's words, certain groups had appeared, apparently formed around teachers or preachers known in the community, and their members identified themselves precisely with their own group. The reaction to the appearance of such groups may have been the appearance of certain "pure Christians" or "just Christians," who said of themselves that they were "Christ's," in contrast to supporters of various teachers and preachers. But whatever all these people said about themselves and about one another, all of them had already ceased to be simply Christians.

They had already linked their Christianity not only and not so much with Christ and His Kingdom as with certain people. And Christianity itself had become for them a new teaching rather than a new life. This is the essential transformation against which Paul warns the Corinthian Christians: it shifts their attention from Christ and the Kingdom to something that may even be interesting and in some respect true, but has no direct relation to the Kingdom. And therefore it has no direct relation to Christianity as such.

Moving from the conversation about the Kingdom and salvation to the concrete problems...

Moving from the conversation about the Kingdom and salvation to the concrete problems of the Corinthian church, Paul reproaches the Corinthian Christians for the divisions that had arisen among them (vv. 10-12). Of course, the issue could hardly have been the deification of Paul himself or of anyone else whom the apostle mentions in his letter. But parties of supporters and followers could certainly have formed in the Corinthian church, much as groups of supporters and followers of one or another philosophical school sometimes arose in Greek cities. And in opposition to the supporters of all the groups that existed among the Corinthian Christians, a party, so to speak, of "pure Christians" inevitably had to appear, people who criticized all the others for deviating from the truth and proudly said of themselves: but we belong to Christ!

Of course, this state of affairs did nothing to help normal spiritual life. And the issue was not only that constant disputes inevitably distracted the Corinthian Christians from the main thing for which they gathered in church. The main problem was that such disputes, as can be seen, often divided those arguing so deeply that they did not even want to communicate with one another, and thus destroyed the Church as a spiritual space. For when Jesus departed, He did not leave in the world a religious brotherhood or a theological school. He left here a community of people living in the Kingdom, through whom it could abide in the world, transforming it. This, and only this, is the Church's chief task. Everything else, preaching, religious instruction, theological research, and even works of mercy, matters only as witness to the Kingdom. Of course, the development of theology is impossible without theological disputes.

But if disputes end with the community falling apart into groups opposed to one another, such theologizing must be recognized as a complete spiritual failure. And the issue is not only counter-witness, but also that the people taking part in such disputes are ultimately not brought into communion with the Kingdom by them, but separated from it. For the Kingdom requires not unity of views, but normal relationships with one's neighbor, and if those are absent, one will have to forget about abiding in the Kingdom. Even those whose arguments turn out to be impeccable from a theological point of view.

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