While Paul still begins this letter with thanksgiving and grace (the way he began all his letters), the first chapter of 1 Corinthians offers a glimpse into the deep divisions in this early Christian community. Even in his initial greeting, Paul works in small correctives:

In verse 2, he addresses the Corinthians as “the church of God at Corinth” not just “the church of Corinth.” With this subtle shift in language, Paul reminds the Corinthians they are part of something bigger (a universal Church) and not a freestanding body all their own. In the same verse, Paul reminds the Corinthians to be a “holy people” who call on the name of Jesus, whom Paul describes with the phrase “their Lord and ours.” With this addition, Paul is again presenting the Corinthians a reminder they don’t have a sole claim to Jesus; Jesus is for everyone. And all this is just in verse 2! So what exactly was going on with the Christians in Corinth?

As a wealthy Greek city, Corinth had a number of quirks. For one, there was a custom among the Corinthian elites of having “house philosophers” (a professional philosopher who would live and teach in the home of a wealthy patron and bring prestige to the household as a result). With early Christian teachers like Paul and Apollos often living and teaching in Gentile homes, it’s possible some early Gentile converts to Christianity may have misunderstood these early teachers as house philosophers. As such, while Paul and Apollos and others were trying to teach new Christians to follow Christ, some early believers may have misunderstood and taken greater pride in following Paul or Apollos or Peter, hence Paul’s famous admonition in verse 12:

One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.”

Adding to the confusion, it wasn’t just wealthy Gentiles in the church at Corinth. There were also Jews and poorer Gentiles who brought different sets of assumptions into the mix. Jewish converts to Christianity struggled with the relationship between Jesus and the traditional laws (a problem not unique to Corinth but very much present there). And meanwhile, lower class Gentile Christians felt empowered by Paul’s message and had to walk an uneasy tension of still being servants or even slaves. In fact, it’s entirely possible some enslaved Corinthians worshiped in the same community as their enslavers, but Paul upsets the social norms by describing these Christians as adelphoi (siblings, and thus, equals). On this issue and so many others, Paul calls on the Corinthians not to buy into the wisdom of the popular culture (which imposes pious philosophy, questionable morality, and social stratification) and instead pursue the wisdom of Christ which, to the rest of the world, looks like foolishness or even insanity.

We’ll see all of these issues addressed in greater depth in the chapters ahead, along with arguably the biggest takeaway of the night:

Paul wants the Corinthians to find unity with one another and with the larger Church, but he does not want to confine them to uniformity. Paul calls on the Corinthians to find common purpose and banish division, but he also respects their diversity and will later build on this theme with the analogy of a body— many parts working for one common purpose.

Unity, not uniformity. That’s the command of 1 Corinthians 1.