Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 88 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This lecture assembles the whole story behind the Corinthian letters: two canonical letters, two lost ones, three visits, and a church Chrysostom called Paul's problem children. Dr. Essex shows how First Corinthians deals with the reports before it answers the church's own questions, because the Corinthians had not put their finger on their real problems, and closes with the terminology of tongues, where two plain observations from the text would, he says, end a great deal of contemporary confusion. Listen for the difference between what is permissible and what is profitable.
Paul's founding ministry ran from late AD 50 into early summer 52, eighteen months under Gallio's shelter, and by his own testimony it was evangelistic: he determined to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and him crucified, and could feed them only milk, not solid food, for they were babes in Christ, with new converts continually arriving. He also delivered the traditions of church life, and commends them in chapter 11 for holding them. The contrast is Ephesus on the third journey, three years with two devoted to teaching; the lesson of Corinth may well have taught Paul to move beyond milk when God gave him time. In the providence of God, the man raised up to water what Paul planted was Apollos, mighty in the Scriptures and eloquent, and between the two men there was no division at all: when Paul writes First Corinthians, Apollos is with him. The division was in Corinth, where parties had formed around preference for one messenger's style over another's.
Ephesus sat directly across the Aegean from Corinth on the trade routes, so news flowed constantly, and Paul had already written the lost letter against tolerating immorality. The situation deteriorated, and two things occasioned the canonical letter: a report from Chloe's household of divisions and quarrels, and an official letter from the church, likely carried by Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus, whom Paul commends for refreshing his spirit, posing questions Paul answers in the now-concerning series beginning at 7:1. The letter's own note fixes its season: I shall remain in Ephesus until Pentecost, so Paul writes between Passover and mid-May; and since the wide door and many adversaries fit the climax of the Ephesian ministry that Luke records, Essex dates it to spring of AD 56, near the end of the three years, noting that a sea journey of a week to ten days between the cities leaves ample room for all the comings and goings without stretching the calendar.
Second Corinthians reveals what Acts omits. Paul calls his coming visit the third, and recalls warning sinners when present the second time; since the founding visit needed no such discipline, an unrecorded second visit intervened, and it went badly: the sorrowful or painful visit of 2 Corinthians 2, where Paul confronted sin, the offender and much of the church resisted, and he resolved not to come again in sorrow. In its wake he wrote, out of much affliction and anguish of heart with many tears, the severe letter, also lost, upholding the standard while assuring them of his love. He dispatched Titus with it, left Ephesus, and was too burdened to minister in Troas when Titus failed to appear; in Macedonia Titus met him with good news: the majority had repented, discipline had been exercised, and Paul now urges them to forgive and reaffirm love to the disciplined man. Yet infiltrating opponents remained, and knowing from Corinth itself how outsiders exploit division, Paul wrote canonical Second Corinthians from Macedonia as a preemptive confrontation before his third visit, the winter in Corinth recorded in Acts 20 where he wrote Romans.
First Corinthians opens by planting the church's identity: sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling, and the thanksgiving of 1:4 to 9 is genuine, not a softening tactic: enriched in everything, lacking no gift, and, echoing the vision of Acts 18, assured that God is faithful and will confirm them blameless to the end. Then immediately the exhortation: I exhort you that there be no divisions among you. The whole letter lives in that gap between position and practice. Some had reverted to old patterns, the world's rhetoric and wisdom, pre-Christian immorality, even participation in temple rites, and drunkenness at the Lord's own table; and the church-wide sin was toleration, boasting of broad-mindedness where it should have been ashamed. Essex presses the contemporary edge: a church that judges the world while refusing to judge itself has inverted Paul's instruction exactly.
The diagnosis under the symptoms is pride. The Corinthians were puffed up, wise in their own eyes with the world's wisdom, esteeming themselves above the suffering apostles as if the truly spiritual had already arrived and prospered. Knowledge makes arrogant, Paul writes, and he needles their pretension with the repeated, do you not know, a sanctified sarcasm aimed at a church proud of knowing. Two bodies organize much of the teaching: the human body, which matters to God because it is destined for resurrection, against the creeping notion that what one does in the body is indifferent; and the church as God's temple and Christ's body, so that the one who destroys God's temple, by division and quarreling, will himself be destroyed by God.
The purpose statement Essex offers: Paul, their father in the faith, addresses the church's problems known from reports and their letter, giving answers and solutions so that a church holy in practice, and not only in position, would come forth in Corinth. And the letter keeps one eye on the unbeliever: conduct your assembly so that outsiders do not conclude you are mad; do not judge outsiders, whom God judges, but judge within. The evangelistic logic follows: the church's impact on the community flows from its internal life; the world cannot live the standard, lacking the new nature and the Spirit, and the church's calling is to practice among its own people what it preaches, so that watching outsiders see a set-apart life and, as God works, are drawn to its source.
The structure is little debated. After the prologue with its genuine thanksgiving, the body falls in two movements. First, 1:10 through chapter 6, Paul's response to the reports: the divisions of 1:10 to 4:21, rooted in a misconception of the message, judging messengers by rhetoric, and a misconception of the ministry, dividing servants whom Christ unites; then the disorders, the tolerated immoral man, the lawsuits, and the loose sexual theology behind them, all failures to apply the lost letter's principle. Only then, from 7:1, the now-concerning answers to their letter: marriage, virgins, idol food, worship, gifts, the resurrection, the collection. Essex draws the pastoral point: the Corinthians' own questions were symptoms; Paul treats the disease first, and the preacher should let Paul teach him what is primary and what is secondary. Unlike Romans, doctrine and application are not sequential blocks here but blended throughout.
On things sacrificed to idols, Paul threads a needle: flee idolatry and its temple rites, behind which demons stand, yet know the idol is nothing and the meat is meat; the governing distinction is that the permissible is not always the profitable, and love limits liberty for the sake of the weaker conscience, with Paul himself the model, be imitators of me, as I am of Christ. On worship, he genuinely praises their holding of the traditions, then withholds praise for their assembly: the wealthy, free by early afternoon, began the fellowship meal without the laboring poor and arrived at the bread and cup gorged and drunk, an abomination of the very supper they were faithfully scheduling; God's judgment had already begun among them, and the reform is simple: recover the meaning, wait for one another, or eat at home.
For exegesis, Thiselton's NIGTC is the encyclopedic standard, mining the commentaries and literature into a full map of positions, to be used like Cranfield on Romans, gratefully and critically; Garland's new Baker volume covers similar ground more readably. Gordon Fee's commentary has been deeply influential in evangelicalism and must be known, again with discernment. Dr. MacArthur's exposition was preached and published before Thiselton and Fee appeared, so it does not interact with them. Together they equip the expositor for a letter whose every chapter touches a live contemporary question.
Before defining tongues, Paul's plain statements set boundaries. First, not all speak in tongues: the rhetorical questions of chapter 12 expect the answer no, so tongues cannot be the universal sign of Spirit baptism or of salvation. Second, in the assembly, two or at the most three were to speak, in turn and with interpretation, so a room full of simultaneous speech is no biblical exercise of the gift. Essex observes that these two principles alone, honestly applied, would end the charismatic chaos of many a so-called Christian gathering, whatever one concludes about the gift's nature or duration.
Four identifications circulate: angelic speech, drawn from, tongues of men and of angels; human languages; liturgical, archaic, ecstatic phrases like pagan worship speech; or the language of the heart released and articulated. Essex holds human languages, with Dr. Thomas's book on spiritual gifts: 13:1 is a hypothetical condition, even if I spoke every tongue of men and angels without love, not a claim that Corinthian tongues were angelic; the ecstatic and heart-language views cannot explain why interpretation is required; and although First Corinthians was written before Acts, Luke's account uses the very same terminology for indisputably human languages, we hear them in the tongues to which we were born, with no qualifier distinguishing Corinth's gift. In cosmopolitan Corinth, traveling unbelieving Jews could hear the gospel in their birth languages, a sign to unbelievers as at Pentecost, for the Jews ask for signs; while uninterpreted simultaneous speech, real languages or not, sounds like madness to anyone who does not know them, which is exactly Paul's warning about the outsider.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all eighteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. How does Paul himself characterize his founding ministry at Corinth?
2. What was the actual relationship between Paul and Apollos?
3. What two things occasioned First Corinthians?
4. How does Essex date First Corinthians?
5. How do we know about the unrecorded second visit to Corinth?
6. What did Titus report when he met Paul in Macedonia?
7. Why is the thanksgiving of 1 Corinthians 1:4-9 significant?
8. What does Essex identify as the church-wide sin at Corinth?
9. What does the repeated question, do you not know, accomplish?
10. Why do the two bodies matter in First Corinthians?
11. What is the letter's stance toward outsiders?
12. Why does Paul answer the reports before the church's own questions?
13. What distinction governs the idol-food discussion?
14. What had gone wrong at the Lord's table?
15. What are the two principles Essex says would end the charismatic chaos?
16. How does Essex read, tongues of men and of angels?
17. Why does the identical terminology in Acts matter for defining tongues?
18. Why might tongues have flourished at Corinth in particular?
All eighteen correct. Lecture 20 is complete.
Paul treats the divisions and disorders before answering the questions the Corinthians actually asked. How can a church, or an individual believer, learn to distinguish the diseases from the symptoms in its own life?
The Corinthians boasted of tolerance where they should have been ashamed, while judging no one within and, in effect, leaving judgment of the world to themselves. Where does Paul's reversal, judge within, not without, cut against the instincts of the modern church?
The permissible is not always the profitable, and Paul limited his own liberty as a model. What liberties might love ask you to limit, and how do you decide without sliding into legalism?
God is faithful, through whom you were called into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, and he will confirm you blameless to the end. (A paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 1:8-9)
Dr. Essex names Anthony Thiselton's NIGTC as the encyclopedic exegetical standard on First Corinthians, with David Garland's newer Baker volume, Gordon Fee's influential commentary read with discernment, and John MacArthur's exposition, and commends Robert Thomas's Understanding Spiritual Gifts on the tongues question.