NOTES for Co1 3:1-9

¹And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ.

²I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able.

³For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?

⁴For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?

⁵Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?

⁶I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.

⁷So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.

⁸Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labour.

⁹For we are labourers together with God: ye are God's husbandry, ye are God's building.

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.

Other notes

For Co1 3:1-9