NOTES for Co1 3:6

“Who is Paul? Who is Apollos? They are only servants.” How often we forget this... How often we put human, fleshly things first. We choose a community, a parish, a Church on the basis of “I like it”—and then declare that only here, among us, is everything genuine and correct, while everything unlike us is wrong and worthy of every condemnation, if not immediate destruction. But what matters to God is not who plants and waters His field, or by what means. Only one thing matters to Him: our unity with Him and with one another.

Returning to the divisions that had arisen among the Corinthian Christians, Paul, as we can see, is not at all trying to decide which of the parties opposed to one another in the Corinthian church is closer to the truth. It is clear to him that all of them are equally far from the truth. For the apostle, the only truth is the Resurrection and the life of the Kingdom, to which he bears witness, and he sees the disputes that have arisen in the church of Corinth only as an obstacle to this life. Paul is not trying to persuade anyone of anything; he is only trying to set the accents correctly. He tells the Corinthian Christians directly that all their disagreements and disputes, which, as we can see, also provoke envy and mutual hostility (v. 3), have nothing to do with spiritual life. The disputants themselves may have thought otherwise, but that only meant that they had confused spiritual life with the life of the still untransformed world, which Paul calls "fleshly" and by which the Corinthian Christians, as we can see, had become very carried away, completely forgetting about the Kingdom (vv. 1-4).

Of course, "fleshly" in the apostle's mouth did not mean "base" or "unworthy." Paul was far from the idea of considering the body ("flesh") a container of evil or sin. He was speaking only of the fact that in the life of fallen humanity it is not the spiritual that predominates over the natural, as God intended, but the natural over the spiritual. And these consequences of the fall had to be overcome, otherwise it was impossible to enter the Kingdom. This is precisely the task the apostle sets before the Corinthian Christians, calling them to remember that all those whose followers they considered themselves to be, and whose merits they argued about, were servants of one God and were doing one work (vv. 5-7).

As we can see, Paul is trying to convey to his readers a simple but very important truth: arguments about primacy make sense only in our world, which has not yet been transformed. For the Kingdom they are not relevant. And the point is not that there are no differences there and that all servants of the Kingdom are the same. They differ just as people differ in our world, which has not yet been fully transformed, and their ministries are also different, perhaps even unique (vv. 8-9). But no one is left without a reward. And in this respect there can be no question of competition among servants in the Kingdom, because each receives precisely his own reward, intended precisely for him and suited to him. In the Kingdom no one is deprived, and therefore the question of primacy, of chasing the chief reward, loses all meaning there. But this can be understood only when one looks at events through the eyes of an inhabitant of the Kingdom. This is exactly how Paul invites the Corinthian Christians to look at the situation in their own church.

When Paul mentions the divisions and disagreements in the Corinthian church, he connects them with the absence of true wisdom and with the fact that its members are “fleshly.” He is evidently speaking of human nature, which in this case determines a person's whole life. Yet nature can take different forms, judging by the fact that the apostle often calls people who live a natural life not “fleshly” but “natural.”

Indeed, the corresponding Greek words might better be conveyed by such concepts as “bodily” (“fleshly”) and “natural” (“psychical”). Nature is broader than bodily existence, but in any case it is not “breath” (“spirit”), whether “human breath” (which evidently means the “breath of life” that God “breathes” into every person at creation) or God's “breath,” experienced when the power of God acts within a person.

Spirit is not nature, even when we speak of the human spirit. Yet the stream of our life (called the “soul” in biblical language) has both a spiritual and a natural component. If the spiritual predominates, a person may be called “spiritual.” But in a fallen human being, nature usually predominates, and then we must speak of a “natural” person, who may nevertheless be far from alien to intellectual, aesthetic, and even religious experiences and the corresponding experience. The problem is that even in such experience, often called “spiritual” in everyday usage, it is in fact nature rather than spirit that predominates.

A person who does not understand his own spiritual life very well—or indeed his own life in general—can easily mistake manifestations of his higher nature (psychic in the modern sense of the word) for manifestations of the spirit. Yet as soon as he has to defend his experience, whether intellectual, aesthetic, or especially religious, human nature reveals itself in all its power and displays itself in all its glory.

At that point, lofty ideas, profound aesthetic experiences, and the most refined religiosity quickly give way to the most primitive, almost animal, “bodily” emotions. A person will often throw himself upon an ideological opponent as upon an enemy threatening his life and well-being. In many respects this is indeed so, for the life and well-being of the natural person are bound up with the inviolability of the experience he is defending.

Of course, if a person truly lived a spiritual life, if his life and well-being were connected with the spirit within him rather than with his nature, he would not rush so furiously to defend his convictions and views, nor would he make an absolute of his intellectual, aesthetic, or even religious experience. If something of this kind does happen, then there can be no question of spiritual life, which is precisely what Paul writes in his letter to the Christians of Corinth.