2. The gospel as a contradiction to human wisdom 1:18-2:5

Paul set up a contrast between cleverness of speech and the Cross in verse 17. Next he developed this contrast with a series of arguments. Boasting in men impacts the nature of the gospel. He pointed out that the gospel is not a form of sophia(human wisdom). Its message of a crucified Messiah does not appeal to human wisdom (1:18-25). Second, its recipients are not specially wise in the eyes of humanity (1:26-31). Third, Paul's preaching was not impressive in its human wisdom, but it bore powerful results (2:1-5).

"There are . . . three particularly important expository passages in 1 Corinthians. They may be regarded as the letter's principal theological discourses and as such deserve special attention.

"These three key discourses deal, respectively, with the wisdom of the cross (1:18-2:16), the nature of Christian community (12:4-13:13), and the resurrection of the dead (chap. 15). In each instance Paul's reflections on the topic are deliberate and focused, and lead him to develop a more or less extended and coherent argument. Moreover, each of these passages occurs at an important point within the overall structure of the letter. The discourse on wisdom, situated prominently at the beginning of the letter, supports the apostle's urgent appeals for unity (1:10-4:21). It can be argued that the discourse on Christian community undergirds, directly or indirectly, all of the counsels and instructions in chaps. 8 through 14. And the discourse on resurrection, a response to those who claim that there is no resurrection of the dead' (15:12), is located prominently at the end of the letter."²⁷

"In this part of the [first] discourse [i.e., 1:18-2:5] the argument proceeds in three steps: Paul makes his main point in 1:18-25, confirms it in 1:26-31 with an appeal to the Corinthians' own situation, and then further confirms it in 2:1-5 with reference to what and how he had preached in Corinth.

"The apostle's thesis is registered first in 1:18 and then twice restated (in 1:21 and 1:23-24).²⁸

Superficial displays of oratory that to them appeared to be demonstrations of wisdom impressed the Corinthian Christians excessively. Paul pointed out that the wisdom of God, the gospel of Christ, had power that mere worldly wisdom lacked.

 The folly of a crucified Messiah 1:18-25

"This paragraph is crucial not only to the present argument (1:10-4:21) but to the entire letter as well. Indeed, it is one of the truly great moments in the apostle Paul. Here he argues, with OT support, that what God had always intended and had foretold in the prophets, he has now accomplished through the crucifixion: He has brought an end to human self-sufficiency as it is evidenced through human wisdom and devices."²⁹

1:18 The message (logos) of the Cross, in contrast to the speech (logos) of human wisdom (v. 17), has the Cross as its central theme. When people hear it, it produces opposite effects in those who are on the way to perdition and in those on the way to glory. Paul contrasted foolishness and weakness with wisdom and power (cf. Rom. 1:16).

"What would you think if a woman came to work wearing earrings stamped with an image of the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima?

"What would you think of a church building adorned with a fresco of the massed graves at Auschwitz? . . .

"The same sort of shocking horror was associated with crossand crucifixionin the first century."³⁰

1:19 Paul's quotation of Isaiah 29:14 shows that it has always been God's method to show the folly of merely human wisdom.

1:20 The first three questions in this verse recall similar questions that Isaiah voiced when the Assyrians' plans to destroy Jerusalem fell through (Isa. 33:18; cf. Job 12:17; Isa. 19:12). Paul's references to the age (Gr. aion) and the world (kosmos) clarify that he was speaking of purely natural wisdom in contrast to the wisdom that God has revealed. God's wisdom centers on the Cross.

"In first-century Corinth, wisdom' was not understood to be practical skill in living under the fear of the Lord (as it frequently is in Proverbs), nor was it perceived to be some combination of intuition, insight, and people smarts (as it frequently is today in the West). Rather, wisdom was a public philosophy, a well-articulated world-view that made sense of life and ordered the choices, values, and priorities of those who adopted it. The wise man,' then, was someone who adopted and defended one of the many competing public world-views. Those who were wise' in this sense might have been Epicureans or Stoics or Sophists or Platonists, but they had this in common: they claimed to be able to make sense' out of life and death and the universe."³¹

1:21 Human reasoning does not enable people to get to know God nor does it deliver them from their sins. These benefits come only through the "foolishness"(in the eyes of the natural man) of the message preached (Gr. kerygma), namely the gospel. The true estimation of things, therefore, is that human reasoning is folly.

Paul was not saying that all the wisdom that unbelievers have produced is worthless. However in comparison with what the wisdom that God has revealed about Himself can accomplish human wisdom is of little value.

"Not every human knowledge about any given topic--physics or medicine, for instance--is under debate in our text (at least not primarily). Paul has something more specific in mind . . . Paul aims specifically at the human wisdom about Godas wisdom of the world,' at theo-logy' as wisdom of the world.'"³²

1:22 The Jews characteristically asked for signs as demonstrations of God's power (cf. Matt. 16:1-4; Mark 8:11-12; John 2:18). In contrast, the message of the Cross seemed to be a demonstration of weakness, namely Jesus' inability to save Himself from death.

Likewise the Greeks typically respected wisdom, an explanation of things that was reasonable and made sense. However the message of the Cross did not appear to make sense. How could anyone believe in and submit to One who was apparently not smart enough to save Himself from suffering execution as a criminal when He was not one? Furthermore how could anyone look to such an One as a teacher of wisdom?

". . . the Jews' and Greeks' here illustrate the basic idolatries of humanity. God must function as the all-powerful or the all-wise, but always in terms of our best interests--power in our behalf, wisdom like ours! For both the ultimate idolatry is that of insisting that God conform to our own prior views as to how the God who makes sense' ought to do things."³³

1:23 A crucified Messiah was a stumbling block to the Jews because they regarded Messiah as the Person on whom God's blessing rested to the greatest degree (Isa. 11:2). However, Jesus' executioners hung Him on a tree, the sure proof that God had cursed Him (Deut. 21:23; Gal. 3:13).

Paul used the terms "Greeks"(v. 22) and "Gentiles"(v. 23) interchangeably.

"It is hard for those in the christianized West, where the cross for almost nineteen centuries has been the primary symbol of the faith, to appreciate how utterly mad the message of a God who got himself crucified by his enemies must have seemed to the first-century Greek or Roman. But it is precisely the depth of this scandal and folly that we mustappreciate if we are to understand both why the Corinthians were moving away from it toward wisdom and why it was well over a century before the cross appears among Christians as a symbol of their faith."³⁴

1:24 The "called"contrast with the unsaved among both Jews and Gentiles (1:2; Rom. 8:28, 30). Christ is the instrument of God's power in conquering the forces of evil and delivering people from their control. Moreover He is the instrument of God's wisdom in solving the problem human reasoning could not unravel, namely how people can know God and come to God. The wisdom literature of the Old Testament personified wisdom as God's agent in revelation, creation, and redemption. Jesus Christ personally is that wisdom because He is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes (Rom. 1:16; cf. v. 30).

"This is Paul's most brilliant epigrammatic description of the world in which the Gospel is preached, and of the Gospel itself."³⁵

1:25 The "foolishness"of God, the gospel of the Cross, is wiser than human wisdom, and the "weakness"of God, in the eyes of unbelievers, is stronger than human strength.

At the moment, books are pouring off the presses telling us how to plan for success, how vision' consists in clearly articulated ministry goals,' how the knowledge of detailed profiles of our communities constitutes the key to successful outreach. I am not for a moment suggesting that there is nothing to be learned from such studies. But after a while one may perhaps be excused for marveling how many churches were planted by Paul and Whitefield and Wesley and Stanway and Judson without enjoying these advantages. Of course all of us need to understand the people to whom we minister, and all of us can benefit from small doses of such literature. But massive doses sooner or later dilute the gospel. Ever so subtly, we start to think that success more critically depends on thoughtful sociological analysis than on the gospel; Barna becomes more important than the Bible. We depend on plans, programs, vision statements--but somewhere along the way we have succumbed to the temptation to displace the foolishness of the cross with the wisdom of strategic planning. Again, I insist, my position is not a thinly veiled plea for obscurantism, for seat-of-the-pants ministry that plans nothing. Rather, I fear that the cross, without ever being disowned, is constantly in danger of being dismissed from the central place it must enjoy, by relatively peripheral insights that take on far too much weight. Whenever the periphery is in danger of displacing the center, we are not far removed from idolatry."³⁶

In these verses (18-25) Paul sought to raise the Corinthians' regard for the gospel message by showing its superiority over anything humans can devise through reasoning and philosophizing. His purpose in doing so was to encourage them to value the content of the message more highly than the "wisdom"evident in styles of those who delivered it.

"One can scarcely conceive a more important--and more difficult--passage for the church today than this one. It is difficult, for the very reason it was in Corinth. We simply cannot abide the scandal of God's doing things his way, without our help. And to do it by means of such weakness and folly! But we have often succeeded in blunting the scandal by symbol, or creed, or propositions. God will not be so easily tamed, and, freed from its shackles, the preaching of the cross alone has the power to set people free."³⁷

 The folly of the Corinthian believers 1:26-31

Paul turned from the content of the gospel to the Corinthian believers to strengthen his argument that the gospel he preached contradicted human expectations. God had chosen "nobodies"rather than the "beautiful people"of Corinth. They themselves were evidence that God's "foolishness"confounds the wise. Jeremiah 9:23-24, with its emphasis on boasting in one proper thing or another improper thing, lies behind this pericope.

1:26 This verse reflects that there were few in the Corinthian assembly who came from the higher intellectual and influential levels of their society. This characteristic has marked most local churches throughout history.

1:27-28 The Old Testament is full of illustrations of God choosing less than promising material for His instruments. His method did not change with the coming of Christ nor has it changed since then.

"Things that are not"are things that are nothing. They are non-entities in the eyes of the world. The "things that are"are those things and individuals that the world values highly. Paul did not mean that God cannot or will not save the affluent, but the glory of the gospel is that God's mercy extends to those whom the affluent tend to write off.

1:29 God has chosen this method so the glory might be His and His alone. How wrong then to glorify His messengers! Glorying here has the idea of putting one's full confidence in some inappropriate object to secure ourselves.

1:30 God is the source of the believer's life in Christ (cf. v. 2). Righteousness, sanctification, and redemption are metaphors of salvation, the result of the wisdom we find in Christ (cf. 6:11). Righteousness focuses on our right standing in the sight of God, sanctification on His making us more holy, and redemption on our liberation from sin.

1:31 This loose quotation from Jeremiah 9:24 summarizes Paul's point. Instead of emphasizing the Lord's servants and what they have done we should focus on what the Lord Himself has done in providing wisdom and power in Christ.

God's purpose was not to make a superficial splash but to transform lives, something the Corinthians could see in their own experience.

"The issue of election is particularly strong in 1 Corinthians. Paul opens the letter by affirming not only his call (called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God') but also that of the Corinthians (called to be saints,' 1:2). This conviction reappears in the final verse of the thanksgiving, functioning there as part of the ultimate ground for Paul's confidence (1:9): God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.' When the issue surfaces again a few verses later with renewed rhetorical emphasis (1:24, 26-30), it becomes clear that the concept of election or call no longer merely undergirds Paul's argument; it has instead become the focus of this argument. The Corinthians, it seems, have not grasped what election means."³⁸

 The folly of Paul's preaching 2:1-5

Paul offered the example of his preaching among the Corinthians as a further illustration of what the wisdom of God can do in contrast to what the words that humans regard as wisdom can do.

"The matters of literary contextand the continuity of the argumentare all important in understanding I Corinthians 2. Otherwise, much of the chapter reads like pure gnosticism, and Paul is made the advocate of a private religion reserved for the spiritual elite (2:6-16)."³⁹

2:1 The apostle's preaching in Corinth was "not in excellence of rhetorical display or of philosophical subtlety."⁴⁰

Some early texts have "mystery"(Gr. mysterion) instead of "testimony"(martyrion). The difference is not significant. The gospel was both the message God had previously not revealed that the apostles made known and the message to which they bore witness.

2:2 As far as his preaching went, Paul only spoke about Christ crucified. This was his regular practice (Gal. 3:1). He left all other knowledge aside.

"According to Acts xviii. 1 Paul moved on to Corinth from Athens, and it is often supposed that after an attempt to marry the Gospel to Greek philosophy in his Areopagus speech (Acts xvii. 22-31), which was attended with indifferent success (Acts xvii. 32 ff.), he determined to change his tactics and preach nothing but the cross.⁴¹For this imaginative picture there is no evidence whatever."⁴²

". . . 1 Corinthians is more than a practical letter aimed at telling the readers what to do and what not to do. The letter in fact primarily seeks to influence the minds, dispositions, intuitions of the audience in line with the message Paul had initially preached in the community (2:2), to confront readers with the critical nature of God's saving action in the crucified Christ in such a fashion that it becomes the glasses to refocus their vision of God, their own community, and the future. The advancing of such an epistemology gives the letter a theological purpose that unifies its otherwise unconnected structure."⁴³

Centering his preaching on Christ crucified was not a new tack Paul took in Corinth because of previous lack of response (cf. Acts 17:22-31).

"What Paul avoided was artificial communication that won plaudits for the speaker but distracted from the message. Lazy preachers have no right to appeal to 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 to justify indolence in the study and careless delivery in the pulpit. These verses do not prohibit diligent preparation, passion, clear articulation, and persuasive presentation. Rather, they warn against any method that leads people to say, What a marvelous preacher!' rather than, What a marvelous Savior!'"⁴⁴

2:3 The reason Paul felt weak, fearful, and trembling was probably his sense of personal inadequacy in the face of the spiritual needs he faced when he entered Corinth (cf. Acts 18:9-10).

"If this was epilepsy, or malarial fever (Ramsay), it might well be the recurrent trouble which he calls a thorn for the flesh' (2 Cor. xii. 7)."⁴⁵

2:4 Paul did not design his content ("message,"logos) and or his delivery ("preaching,"kerygma) to impress his hearers with his eloquence or wisdom. Rather he emphasized the simple message he announced. Conviction came as a result of the Holy Spirit's power, not the "wisdom"of the preacher. We should not interpret this verse as deprecating persuasion but as a warning that conviction does not come as a result of persuasive arguments. It comes as the Holy Spirit opens blind eyes when we herald the gospel. The warning is against self-reliance in the preacher.

"Mere human sophiamay dazzle and overwhelm and seem to be unanswerable, but . . . it does not penetrate to those depths of the soul which are the seat of the decisions of a lifetime."⁴⁶

"It is possible for arguments to be logically irrefutable, yet totally unconvincing."⁴⁷

2:5 Paul's reason for this approach was so his converts would recognize that their faith rested on a supernatural rather than a natural foundation, namely the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit (cf. Matt. 16:15-17).

The apostle's conviction concerning the importance of the superior power of the gospel message was clear in his own preaching.