The Corinthian church is experiencing divisions due to a cultural drift towards worldly values of "spiritual" wisdom, knowledge, and power, which Paul contrasts with the cross-shaped, self-sacrificing love that defines true biblical spirituality.
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what is going on in corinth those of you
who are trainers will know that we often
talk about
setting the text in its context and the
whole book context
which gives to us of course the melodic
line eventually the whole book context
is going to help and strengthen us
as we come to this and other particular passages
passages
in the epistle what is going on in
corinth in one word
division that is what is happening
in the church there is a conflict
between the church and its apostolic founder
founder
there's a movement which seems to have
been initiated by the few
but which is beginning to infect the
many to move away from paul
and his teaching to what they are
claiming is a greater wisdom
and a deeper spirituality
and if you look carefully at the text of
these opening chapters
you'll find that there are four
buzzwords that are
very much the concern of the corinthian
congregations let me just give them to
you that you'll find they occur
many different times through the chapters
chapters
the first is spiritual pneumaticos what
does it mean
to be spiritual that's the big debate in corinth
corinth
the second is wisdom we'll look at that
especially tomorrow sophia
what does it mean to be wise where is
wisdom found what is the nature of wisdom
wisdom
the third is knowledge gnosis and the fourth
fourth
is power that great word dunamis the
ability to get the job done
the um strengthening to accomplish
the task spiritual wisdom
knowledge power these are the emphases
that come
from the opening chapters of corinth of corinthians
corinthians
and clearly come from the corinthian culture
culture
now we know that corinth was a
successful commercial
wealthy glitzy city it was a great port
lots of travel in and out of currents
lots of trade going on there
cosmopolitan city actually in paul's day
it was called new corinth it was only
100 years old because it had been refounded
refounded
and i guess everybody would have said it
was cool currents
if you wanted to be the place where
things were happening where
everyone was on trend current seems to
have been that sort of city
in the ancient world it was of course
also a byword for immorality
and for license and if you describe
someone as being
a corinthian you would mean that his sexual
sexual
morals were very loose and yet it was a great
great
center of religion some of the scholars
tell us there were more pagan temples
in corinth than perhaps you would find
ethnic restaurants in a great city today
and uh it was full of people who were
peddling wisdom
the celebrities of the ancient world in
the first century are the traveling
philosophers the sophists as they were
called and they were in and out of
corinth making a great killing for themselves
themselves
because people always wanted to hear
something new they always were
interested in what's the
what's the trend what's the cutting edge
and there were plenty of people around
with plenty of so-called wisdom
in that great cosmopolitan city welcome
to corinth
welcome to chicago welcome to london
it's no difficulty in making the connection
connection
in our own thinking now
of course the context in which we live
always shapes
the way in which we read the bible when
we teach people
truth and framework one of the things
that we need to remind them is that you
cannot avoid having a framework
we all of us read the bible through our frameworks
