This section continues to deal with the problem of disunity in the church at Corinth and in particular with the continued allegiance to human philosophies and leaders that contributed to the disunity. Human wisdom was keeping believers from divine wisdom, and from spiritual growth and unity.

Almost every form of spiritual elitism, ‘deeper life movement,’ and ‘second blessing’ doctrine has appealed to this text,” even though each of these is “nearly 180 degrees the opposite” of Paul’s intent.

CAMPUS CRUSADE FOR Christ has popularized the concepts of 1 Corinthians 2:6–3:4 with its well-known circle diagrams for the natural, carnal, and spiritual persons. The natural person does not have the cross of Christ anywhere in his or her life; ego is on that person’s throne. The carnal Christian has the cross inside the circle of his or her life, but ego still remains on the throne. The spiritual Christian has the cross central and ego dethroned. These diagrams are both helpful and misleading. They correctly remind us that believers do not automatically have Christ in charge of every area of their lives. Christians are free to take back a certain measure of control and in essence do so every time they consciously sin. The diagrams also correctly capture the fundamental difference between Christian and non-Christian, though it is perhaps worth noting that ego is not always on the throne of an unbeliever’s life. More noble, family-centered or humanitarian concerns may be central, but the point remains that God is not.

The only way to know God personally is to know that we have been known personally by God. God has already come for us and wants to know us and to be known by us. God’s love for us is expressed to us in his initiating grace that does not wait around for us to show interest. And what are his terms? There are no terms.

Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years! But you can read only 2,600—because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer.… For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don’t have the time.

In many respects 2:6–3:4 is parallel to 1:18–2:5. In both sections Paul contrasts God’s wisdom with human wisdom (1:18–25; 2:6–16), and in both sections Paul shifts from the plural “we” to the first person singular as he recounts his initial ministry in Corinth (2:1–5; 3:1–4).

Who are the “mature” (2:6), the “spiritual,” and the “natural” man (2:14–15; 3:1), the “worldly” (3:1), and the “infants” (3:1)?

While the Corinthians may have defined maturity in terms of knowledge, Paul is far more interested in defining maturity according to behavior in community. The passage aims at defining who is mature/wise and who is not. At the present time, based on their internal rivalries, the Corinthians are not.

Mature (teleios) can mean “perfect” (KJV) or “complete,” but can also refer to a person who has full membership in a group, one who is fully initiated. Here Paul uses this term in the same way it is used in other forms by the writer of Hebrews (6:1; 10:14) to refer to salvation. Those who are mature are those who are redeemed and are completely trusting in Jesus Christ.

True believers are the only ones among whom the gospel can be wisdom. To all others it is a stumbling block or foolishness (1:23)

Paul shares with the most immature Corinthian that which all Christians today therefore share: an ability to commune with God, understand his will, and make sense of the foundational truths of Scripture. It is deeply ironic that the generation with the greatest number of accurate, understandable translations of the Bible, replete with study helps from brief annotations to massive commentaries, should be one of the most biblically illiterate societies in the history of the church. When we are dependent on a handful of prominent leaders, we then become unable to reject false teaching or to discipline immoral behavior by our favorite authorities.

The second temptation involved believers trying to separate the beginning of the Christian life from the living of the Christian life. As Paul reminds the Corinthians, our lives as Christians begin with absolute dependence on God’s powerful, saving work. We hear the gospel of Christ crucified and respond to it in faith (1:17; 2:1–5). This response is the result of the Spirit’s work, who gives us true wisdom so that we can understand, rather than reject, the gospel (2:12–14). We are also baptized in the name of Christ, the only Savior and Lord (1:12–15). Yet this dependence on God’s provision is not a temporary stage in our spiritual development, for the gospel is both the gracious gift by which we begin the Christian life and the source of ongoing power for living the Christian life (cf. 15:1–4). The truth about “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (2:2) is therefore not a basic teaching to be left behind as we mature but a lens through which to view all of Scripture (1:19, 31; 2:9, 16) and all of life.

In light of the aforementioned parallels and the prior assertion that the message of Christ crucified is God’s power and God’s wisdom (1:24) and that Christ became wisdom for us from God (1:30), the claim in 2:6, “We do, however, speak a message of wisdom,” flows well with the context, even if the first impression is a bit surprising since Paul has repeatedly disavowed wisdom in the proclamation of the gospel (1:17; 2:1, 4). Yet Paul does not reject all wisdom, only the wisdom belonging to this age and the rulers of this age. Here he speaks of God’s wisdom.

Ciampa and Rosner think that the “message of wisdom” is not to be associated with the gospel in the sense of the message of salvation for all and that “mature” refers to more experienced Christians. “God’s secret wisdom” in 2:7 is to be equated with the “mind of Christ” in 2:16 and “both refer in context to the wisdom of the cross applied to everyday life,” which is “precisely what Paul offers to the Corinthians in the letter as a whole.” This position, they claim, does not entail a two-tiered view of the gospel or the introduction of any sort of elitism into the church.230 The problem is behavioral, not an issue of one’s “status.” The context clearly indicates that behavior is a primary issue and that the distinction Paul makes is between maturity and immaturity as 3:1–4 shows (see also 14:20). Others, however, make the case that “mature” is a term applicable to all believers, just as Paul speaks elsewhere of all Christians as “saints,” “beloved,” “elect,” “called,” and “faithful.” The “mature” are those who love God (2:9) and those who have received the Spirit (2:12), who enables them to understand God’s wisdom. The only wisdom Paul preaches is the wisdom of the cross, not more sophisticated instruction for a select group. It is the same wisdom for beginners and more advanced Christians, but the measure of this wisdom is one’s grasp of the deep things of God embodied in the cross that manifests itself in behavior.

Paul’s reference to the mature in 2:6 is the first in a series of terms critical to the argument running through 3:4. Verses 14–15 contrasts the “man without the Spirit,” who cannot understand the things of God, with the “spiritual man,”235 who discerns all things. In 3:1–3 Paul employs “flesh” and “infant” language to describe the Corinthians since he could not, he claims, speak to them as “spiritual.” It is this collection of terms in the overall argument that provides the best clue to the meaning of “mature,” a term that finds its opposite in the term “infants” in 3:2. In context, “mature” is parallel to and synonymous with “spiritual,” and perhaps somewhat interchangeable with “wise” as used in Corinth.

The term itself, in principle, can refer to all believers, who have received the message of the cross, but the Corinthians’ behavior was not in keeping with who they were in Christ as the letter so ably demonstrates. While Paul does not advocate a two-tiered gospel, a distinction in different “classes” of believers, he does recognize stages of growth in Christlikeness as manifested in the fruit of the Spirit.240 Paul does not advocate a wisdom beyond the cross, but he does urge the Corinthians to embody the message of the cross. The Corinthians’ failure to live out the reality of the cross in their relations to one another deemed them as mere “infants” in Christ. Maturity is related to behavior, living out the paradigm of the cross in love, rather than knowledge.

“Mystery,” as noted in the discussion on 2:1–2, is a common Pauline term used to describe something previously unknown but now disclosed by revelation. Paul develops the term more fully in Colossians and Ephesians and explains the mystery as the inclusion of Gentiles in God’s salvation. God’s mystery is not a riddle that men can solve but rather a secret that the human mind by itself is wholly unable to penetrate.

That the rulers did not know God’s secret is demonstrated in the crucifixion (see Acts 3:17; 4:25–28; Luke 23:34) of Jesus, the “Lord of glory,” a title applied to Christ by Paul only here.

In referring to “our glory” and Jesus as the “Lord of glory,” Paul implicitly connects the destination of God’s people with Jesus. This is the first mention of “glory” in the letter, which anticipates Paul’s emphasis on glory elsewhere, culminating in the focus on resurrection in chap. 15 (see esp. 15:40–42). The glory of Jesus remains hidden to the rulers of the world, as does the final destination of God’s people.

If “us” refers back to the more immediate “those who love him” in 2:9, then all believers are in view rather than an inner circle in the early church. The contrast is not so much between “us” and “them” as it is why they cannot know and we can.261

Paul does not elaborate further here on the content of the revelation as he does elsewhere (Col 1:24–28; Eph 3:8–13) because this is not his intent in the present argument, which focuses more on the fact and the means of revelation rather than the content. The context, however, supplies that Paul is speaking of God’s plan of salvation in Christ crucified. Furthermore, what God has prepared for those who love him is “glory” (2:8; cf. also 15:20–28). Paul’s language of the “deep things” of God corresponds to his analogous exclamation in Rom 11:33, “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” In Eph 3:8 he speaks of preaching to the Gentiles “the unsearchable riches of Christ,” and in 3:18 of the same letter he prays that believers might be able to grasp “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.”

2:9. Here Paul quotes Isaiah 64:4, which was part of a prayer for God to intervene in history again on behalf of the remnant who hoped in him; Paul adapts the wording of the quotation slightly, as was common in ancient citations. (He may also slightly conflate this text with the LXX of Is 65:17, which speaks of the present being forgotten in the world to come.) The point is that the things of the eternal God are inaccessible to mortals except by the means Paul articulates in verse 10.

The natural man is the unconverted and unregenerate, the person who is void of the Spirit and who belongs to this age (1:20; 2:6)

Only God’s Spirit knows what is in his heart, but because believers have God’s Spirit, they can know his heart too. This was a radical statement for most of ancient Judaism, because most Jewish teachers did not believe that the Spirit was active in their day. “Spirit” had a broad variety of meanings, including “attitude,” “disposition”; hence “spirit of the world” need not refer to any particular spiritual being (unlike God’s Spirit).

2:7 God’s wisdom. A crucified savior. The salvation of sinners through Jesus’ death on the cross is a “mystery”: it is “hidden” for Jews who regard this message as a “stumbling block” (1:23) and for Greeks who regard it as “foolishness” (1:23). mystery.

2:7 mystery. This term does not refer to something puzzling, but to truth known to God before time, that He has kept secret until the appropriate time for Him to reveal it. See notes on Matt. 13:11; Eph. 3:4, 5. for our glory. The truth God established before time and revealed in the NT wisdom of the gospel is the truth that God will save and glorify sinners. See notes on Eph. 3:8–12.

2:9 These words from Is. 64:4, often incorrectly thought to refer to the wonders of heaven, refer rather to the wisdom God has prepared for believers. God’s truth is not discoverable by eye or ear (objective, empirical evidence), nor is it discovered by the mind (subjective, rational conclusions).

2:9–10. The blessings of salvation were prepared by the Father, carried out by the Son, and applied by the Spirit (Eph. 1:3–14) to all believers who as a result love God (1 John 4:19). The only way the Corinthians could know this was by the Spirit, who knows and reveals these deep things of God about salvation.

This wisdom comes from God, not man (v. 7). This wisdom tells the mature saint about the vast eternal plan that God has for His people and His creation. The wisest of the “princes of this world [age]” could not invent or discover this marvelous wisdom that Paul shared from God.

In this section, Paul uses numerous technical terms that the Corinthians employed to justify their spiritual elitism (“wisdom,” “mature,” “secret,” “spiritual”) and redefines them so that they include that which is available to all believers. Therefore, one of the keys to applying this section is to understand accurately how Paul himself reapplied these terms and then how they can be translated into today’s world.

The secret of verses 7–8 is clearly an “open secret” for all believers. Verse 9 must be interpreted in light of verse 10: what once was inconceivable has now been revealed. Hence every use of these verses to justify the promotion of some esoteric knowledge not known to the church at large is wholly unjustified. So too verse 9 may not fairly be applied to Christ’s second coming in order to support the latest, fanciful reconstruction of end-time events. Neither may it legitimately be attributed to support the latest human plans or proposals which seem to diverge from consensus wisdom in the church. Indeed, verse 10a warns against all attempts to reach God through human speculation.

The Spencers’ words emerge out of just such a dialogue and merit careful consideration: “The spiritual person is one who lives out Christ crucified,” which includes “turning away from a life of excessive wealth and being ready to be despised or thought irrelevant if necessary to promote God’s reign.” Hence, “the oppressed Christians of this world in South and North America and elsewhere may well be more ‘spiritual’ than those Christians considered successful by the world because they are already nearer to imitating Paul’s example.” What is more, “true oppression will not lead to the pitfall of arrogance, another deception of the world. To hear God’s Spirit we must live a prophetic life, always ready to follow our crucified Lord; and we must always listen to others who live such lives.”

Paul is saying is: ‘We go on to explain things which only those who have already given their hearts to Christ can understand.’

6. However (de) introduces a contrast. Paul is rejecting ‘men’s wisdom’, but not all wisdom.

But Paul’s contrast is rather between those who receive God’s wisdom (the message of the cross) and those who do not (cf. Bornkamm, TDNT, iv, p. 819). Later Paul will face the fact that there are ‘mere infants in Christ’ (3:1), but that is not his concern at this point. And when he comes to it he will criticize the ‘infants’ for being deficient in love, not knowledge (cf. Bruce).

The fact is that the New Testament writers do not envisage ‘grades’ of Christians. All believers should go on to maturity (Heb. 6:1). Some of the later Gnostics classified people into permanent groups according to their spiritual potential. They held that some were ‘perfect’, while others could never attain that standing. Paul is not making this kind of distinction. He is contrasting Christians (who have accepted the wisdom of the cross) with outsiders (who have not). It is mature to accept God’s wise provision, even if the world sees it as folly.

in a mystery’, where ‘mystery’ does not mean a puzzle we find difficult to solve. It means a secret we are wholly unable to penetrate, but which God has now revealed: ‘God’s pre-temporal counsel which is hidden from the world but revealed to the spiritual’ (Bornkamm, TDNT, iv, p. 820). At one and the same time it points to the impossibility of our knowing God’s secret, and to the love of God which makes that secret known to us. The wisdom has been hidden (the perfect participle denotes a continuing state). Where unbelievers are concerned it remains hidden; they are still in the dark about it. It is revealed to believers, but it is not a matter of common knowledge among members of the human family.

‘Not gnōsis but love is the touchstone of Christian maturity and spirituality’ (Barrett). The verb has prepared reinforces the earlier thought that God is working out his plan (v. 7). The glories that come to believers are not haphazard, but are in accordance with God’s plan from of old.

Paul proceeds to emphasize the activity of the Spirit. He has mentioned him only once up till now, but in vv. 10–14 he speaks of him six times. It is the Spirit who made the revelation. And the Spirit searches all things, which means, not that he conducts searches with a view to obtaining information, but that he penetrates all things. There is nothing beyond his knowledge. In particular Paul specifies the deep things of God. Deep is often used of the mighty depths of the sea, and thus comes to mean the ‘unfathomable’. It is impossible for any creature to know the innermost depths of the divine counsel, ‘the depths of God’. But they are known to the Spirit, the Spirit who has revealed the truths of which Paul speaks.

11. The Spirit’s insight into the mind of God is brought out by an analogy from the nature of man. Nobody can really know what is going on in a man’s mind, nobody but the man’s own spirit.

12. Once again an emphatic we contrasts Christians with ‘wise’ heathen. Whatever be the case with others, we are led by God’s Spirit. Some understand the spirit of the world to mean Satan, and this would give an excellent sense. However, Satan does not seem to be referred to in just this way (though ‘the prince of this world’, John 12:31, comes near to it, and cf. Eph. 2:2). Further, it goes beyond what is required by the context. Throughout this passage Paul is opposing a ‘wisdom’ that is not satanic but human. It seems that we should accept some such meaning as ‘the spirit of human wisdom’, ‘the temper of this world’ (Lenski, ‘It is what makes the world “world” ’). Believers have not received the spirit of worldly wisdom. In passing we notice that the word for world here is kosmos, ‘the ordered universe’, not aiōn, ‘age’ (as in vv. 7–8), which means the world in its temporal aspect.

we (the pronoun is emphatic) have the mind of Christ. He does not mean that every Christian can understand all Christ’s thoughts. He means that the indwelling Spirit reveals Christ. The spiritual person accordingly does not see things from the viewpoint of the worldly. He sees them from the viewpoint of Christ.

On the other hand, understanding God personally is different than understanding anything else. One can understand Aristotelian ethics without knowing Aristotle. But Paul pushes it a step further and says that no one can really understand God until he begins to know God. In this way, knowing God is radically different than knowing about God. Jonathan Edwards once said:

There is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness. A man may have the former, that knows not how honey tastes; but a man cannot have the latter unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind. So there is a difference between believing that a person is beautiful, and having a sense of his beauty. The former may be obtained by hearsay, but the latter only by seeing the countenance. There is a wide difference between mere speculative rational judging any thing to be excellent, and having a sense of its sweetness and beauty. The former rests only in the head, speculation only is concerned in it; but the heart is concerned in the latter. When the heart is sensible of the beauty and amiableness of a thing, it necessarily feels pleasure in the apprehension. It is implied in a person’s being heartily sensible of the loveliness of a thing, that the idea of it is sweet and pleasant to his soul; which is a far different thing from having a rational opinion that it is excellent.

True believers are the only ones among whom the gospel can be wisdom. To all others it is a stumbling block or foolishness (1:23)

12 I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, 13 though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief,

nor the leaders of the Gentiles, to whom it was foolishness, understood God’s divine wisdom. In their ignorance of God, their willing ignorance, they executed His Son. Paul’s own testimony demonstrates that ignorance (1 Tim. 1:12–13). That is the outcome of human wisdom. In the world’s eyes, Jesus was anything but glorious; but in God’s eyes He is the very Lord of glory

God has used angels for many amazing and wonderful services to man. But He did not entrust the revelation of the New Covenant to an angel. The truths of His Word God revealed through the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the divine author of Scripture. He used many human agents, but the message is entirely His. The revelation is God’s pure Word.

It is just as impossible for the world to understand faithful Christians as it is for them to understand God Himself and His Word. They try to appraise believers, of course, but they are always wrong. They may accurately evaluate our faults, shortcomings, and our living that is inconsistent with our faith. But they cannot accurately evaluate our faith. If the gospel itself is a stumbling block and foolishness to them, so is faith based on the gospel.

The doctrine of illumination does not mean we can know and understand everything (Deut. 29:29), that we do not need human teachers (Eph. 4:11–12), or that study is not hard work (2 Tim. 2:15). It does mean that Scripture can be understood by every Christian who is diligent and obedient.

The natural man is the unconverted and unregenerate, the person who is void of the Spirit and who belongs to this age (1:20; 2:6)

The unsaved person does not understand the Christian; they live in two different worlds. But the Christian understands the unsaved person. First Corinthians 2:15 does not suggest that unsaved people cannot point out flaws in the believer’s life (they often do), but that the unsaved man really cannot penetrate into the full understanding of what the Christian’s life is all about. I like the New American Standard Bible’s translation: “But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no man.” That “no man” includes other Christians as well. We must be very careful not to become spiritual dictators in the lives of God’s people (2 Cor. 1:24).

The secret of verses 7–8 is clearly an “open secret” for all believers. Verse 9 must be interpreted in light of verse 10: what once was inconceivable has now been revealed. Hence every use of these verses to justify the promotion of some esoteric knowledge not known to the church at large is wholly unjustified. So too verse 9 may not fairly be applied to Christ’s second coming in order to support the latest, fanciful reconstruction of end-time events. Neither may it legitimately be attributed to support the latest human plans or proposals which seem to diverge from consensus wisdom in the church. Indeed, verse 10a warns against all attempts to reach God through human speculation.

William Barclay’s definition of the person without the Spirit (psychikos) remains both timeless and timely. This kind of individual “lives as if there was nothing beyond the physical life and there were no needs other than material needs.” Such a person “thinks that nothing is more important than the satisfaction of the sex urge” and thus “cannot understand the meaning of chastity.” One “who ranks the amassing of material things as the supreme end of life cannot understand generosity,” and one “who has never a thought beyond this world cannot understand the things of God.” Surely sexual immorality, materialism, and atheism prevail even more pervasively in our Western world today than in mid-twentieth-century Scotland where Barclay first penned these words.

Paul already explained that there are two kinds of people in the world—natural (unsaved) and spiritual (saved). But now he explained that there are two kinds of saved people: mature and immature (carnal). A Christian matures by allowing the Spirit to teach him and direct him by feeding on the Word. The immature Christian lives for the things of the flesh (carnal means “flesh”) and has little interest in the things of the Spirit. Of course, some believers are immature because they have been saved only a short time, but that is not what Paul is discussing here.

In 3:1 the argument transitions from the nature, revelation, and recipients of God’s wisdom (2:6–16) to a direct application of this wisdom to the Corinthian factions. There are significant parallels between 3:1–4 and 2:1–5. Both sections begin with the emphatic expression “And I,” both address the Corinthians with the affectionate “brothers,” both refer to Paul’s initial missionary preaching and teaching in Corinth, and both make application of the immediately preceding units (1:18–31; 2:6–16). The contrast, however, between 2:1–5 and 3:1–4 is striking. Whereas 2:1–5 portrays Paul’s preaching as a powerful, Spirit-inspired proclamation of Christ crucified, Paul’s claim in 3:1–4 is that he was not able and is still not able to speak to the Corinthians as spiritual people but as “worldly,” as “mere infants in Christ.” In introducing these terms Paul confronts head-on the Corinthian pursuit of worldly wisdom by sharply rebuking their childish behavior.298 The re-mention of personality-centered factions in 3:4 shows that the disunity addressed in 1:10–13 has shaped Paul’s response all along. In terms of the structure of the argument, 3:1–4 is a transitional unit, completing the argument of 2:6–16 and looking ahead to the following emphasis on the wisdom of God and his servants.

That he is addressing believers is clear from the designation “in Christ.” The Greek term translated “man without the Spirit” is reserved for unbelievers and refers to those who do not accept the things of the Spirit of God, who consider spiritual things as foolishness, and who are not able to know the things of God (2:14). Paul does not say that the Corinthians are not spiritual, only that he was not able to speak to them as spiritual. In principle they are spiritual by virtue of their reception of the Spirit of God, but in practice the designation “spiritual” is not an appropriate term for them in their present condition. In context the opposite of “spiritual” is “infant,” which means that “spiritual” is synonymous with “mature” (2:6).

The NIV renders two different Greek terms as “worldly” (3:1, 3), apparently adopting the stance that there is not a significant discernible difference in meaning between the two. Other translations distinguish the terms, such as the NASB, rendering sarkinos in 3:1 as “men of flesh” and sarkikos in 3:3 as “fleshly,” which follows the common suggestion that sarkinos carries the idea of “made of flesh,” that is, human, and sarkikos means something a bit different, such as “characterized by flesh.” The term “infant” carries a negative connotation in many contexts but not always.305 There is nothing blameworthy in being an “infant in Christ” at the beginning stages of Christian experience, yet when Paul claims in 3:2 that they are still not ready for solid food, the term “infant” becomes pejorative in this context. The “infant”/“adult” metaphor occurs two more times in the letter, 13:11 and 14:20.

Commentators understand the comparable metaphors of “milk” and “solid food” differently, depending on the interpretation of the content of Paul’s “wisdom for the mature” (see 2:6). The metaphor itself was commonly employed in the ancient world to refer to elementary versus advanced teaching, an image that depicted progression in knowledge. In the New Testament the metaphor carries this apparent sense in Heb 5:12–14 (cf. also 1 Pet 2:2). If the same holds for 1 Cor 3:2, then milk represents Paul’s initial missionary preaching centered on the cross and solid food portrays more advanced teaching, God’s wisdom that unveils the meaning of the cross.

By referring to “solid food” Paul uses their language that means that the contrast in this case is not between two different diets but between “the true food of the Gospel (whether milk or meat), and the synthetic substitutes which the Corinthians have preferred.” Paul knows only one kind of wisdom, Christ and him crucified.

If we maintain the distinctions mentioned above between sarkinos and sarkikos, then Paul’s characterization of them as sarkikoi carries the notion of “characterized by flesh.” Thiselton proposes a further nuancing between the two occurrences of sarkikos in 3:3. The first he translates “unspiritual” and the second, “centered on yourselves.” In Gal 5 Paul contrasts the works of the flesh and the life in the Spirit using the terms “jealousy” and “quarreling” in the vice list of fleshly deeds (Gal 5:19). What is at issue, Thiselton claims, “is the anomaly of Christians who are nominally or in principle focused on Christ but in practice and in stance still focused on the interests of the self.” For the Corinthians to behave in this manner is “acting like mere men” (3:3), a phrase that is repeated in 3:4 and is the equivalent of “walking according to the flesh.” Paul stops short of calling them “natural” (cf. 2:14, “the person without the Spirit”), but his use of the term “man” comes close. They are acting no different from people who belong to the world, human beings who tend toward strife and envy. Factionalism gives evidence of a fleshly mindset rather than the “mind of Christ” (2:16).

3:1 The cause of problems in the church was more than external, worldly influence. It was also internal carnality. The pressures of the world were combined with the weakness of the flesh. carnal. Although Corinthian believers were no longer “natural,” they were not “spiritual” (fully controlled by the Holy Spirit). In fact, they were “carnal” (controlled by the fallen flesh). Though all believers have the Holy Spirit (cf. Rom. 8:9) they still battle the fallen flesh (see notes on Rom. 7:14–25; 8:23). babes in Christ. The carnality of those believers was indicative of their immaturity. They had no excuse for not being mature, since Paul implied that he should have been able to write to them as mature, in light of all he had taught them (v. 2). See notes on Heb. 5:12–14; 1 Pet. 2:1, 2.

But “the message of the Cross” (1 Cor. 1:18) concerned more than justification. It also concerned sanctification. It called for a renewal of attitude and action in response to God’s revelation. It called for righteousness in thought and deed (Heb. 5:11–14). And this part of the message of “Christ … crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2), this solid food (3:2), the Corinthians had spurned. As a result they were still worldly (v. 3). Instead of mature behavior characterized by humility and concern for others—obedience to God—the Corinthians were infantile, self-centered, and therefore divisive (v. 4; cf. 1:12). They wanted lives of exaltation (4:8) without lives of humiliation (4:9–13) because they did not understand that “Christ … crucified” was a message concerned not only with justification but also with sanctification (cf. Phil. 2:1–8). This misunderstanding was at the root of their disunity (cf. 1 Cor. 1:10; 3:4), which error Paul wanted to correct.

It is important that we preach the Gospel to the lost; but it is also important that we interpret the Gospel to the saved. The entire New Testament is an interpretation and application of the Gospel. Paul did not write Romans, for example, to tell the Romans how to be saved—for they were already saints. He wrote to explain to them what was really involved in their salvation. It was an explanation of the “deep things of God” and how they applied to daily life.

Paul will have more to say about spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12–14, but this should be said now: A mature Christian uses his gifts as tools to build with, while an immature believer uses gifts as toys to play with or trophies to boast about. Many of the members of the Corinthian church enjoyed “showing off” their gifts, but they were not interested in serving one another and edifying the church.

What is the ministry all about? It involves loving, feeding, and disciplining God’s family so that His children mature in the faith and become more like Jesus Christ.

“Spiritual” must therefore mean not merely having the Spirit but having the Spirit in charge. Even at the end of Paul’s one-and-one-half-year stay in Corinth, he had expected these young Christians to be more transformed in their behavior. Now, a full three years later, their squabbling is that much more inexcusable. Their immaturity resembles that of adults acting like infants by still eating only baby food (v. 2). Or, to change the comparison, they are acting like unregenerate people (“mere men”—v. 3b) rather than those in whom the Spirit has come to reside. Verse 4 reminds us of the specific problem at hand and reiterates two of the slogans of 1:12.

The major issue we must resolve in order to apply 3:1–4 today is the question of who in contemporary Christianity corresponds to the “carnal” Christians in Corinth. There are in fact two ever-present dangers to avoid in coming to grips with the identity of these carnal Christians. The first is to deny the category altogether, in flat contradiction to Paul. There are those who seem to claim that there is no such thing as a carnal Christian. This is an unfortunate way of putting things, since the term carnal comes straight out of the Bible here.

The second danger is to define carnality in much broader terms than Paul does, so that anyone who has ever made a profession of faith, however superficial, can be counted as a true (but carnal) Christian, irrespective of his or her subsequent lifestyle. We must remember that Paul is not talking about such people here. These Corinthians have received the Spirit, exercised his gifts, and grown in wisdom and knowledge (1:7; 12:13) but are now using what they have learned and experienced in a destructive rather than constructive fashion. What is more, spirituality in Paul’s world was much more bound up with group behavior than with individual piety. The New Testament knows of no Christians who are not associated with a fellowship of believers. This does not mean that a person cannot be saved if he or she never goes to church, merely that Paul is not likely to have had such people in mind when he spoke of carnal Christians.

The view that denies carnality altogether does rightly stress that many Christians have interpreted this concept out of context. Carnal or worldly Christianity is nothing more or less than being controlled by one’s sinful nature, performing what Galatians 5:19–21 calls “the acts of the sinful nature”—sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and on and on (cf. the vice lists of Rom. 1:29–31 and 1 Cor. 6:9–10).

But a person who seems never to submit to God’s will is more likely the “natural” person of 2:14 than a carnal Christian, regardless of what professions he or she has made at some time in the past. Again, we must remember 1:6–7, where Paul states that these Corinthians had seen remarkable transformation in their lives and spiritual empowerment but were now abandoning these victories in favor of petty infighting.

Fee concisely captures the correct balance: “There is no question that Paul considers his Corinthian friends believers and that they are in fact acting otherwise. But Paul’s whole concern is to get them to change, not to allow that such behavior is permissible since not all Christians are yet mature.” Again, “spiritual people are to walk in the Spirit. If they do otherwise, they are ‘worldly’ and are called upon to desist. Remaining worldly is not one of the options.”

you can tell what a person’s relationship with God is by looking at the way that person relates to others. If someone is at variance with others and is a quarrelsome, argumentative, troublemaking type, that person may be a diligent church-attender, even a church office-bearer, but not a child of God. But if someone is at one with others, and has relationships that are marked by love and unity and concord, then that person is on the way to being one of God’s children.

1. The affectionate address Brothers softens the rebuke Paul is about to make; he must make it, but he makes it in love. In the days of the mission in Corinth he had not been able to address them as spiritual; in those early days the kind of maturity he has just been speaking about had not been possible. The converts had been worldly (sarkinos, which means ‘fleshy, (made) of flesh’, BAGD), which Paul explains as mere infants in Christ. There was nothing wrong in this at that time. It is inevitable that those who have just been won for Christ should be mere infants in Christ. Maturity comes from growth and development. It takes time. Beginners in the faith cannot be mature.

The present situation is different. It was all very well for the Corinthians to have been in the position of ‘infants’ when they actually were ‘infants’. But they should have outgrown that state long since.

3. Paul gets to the root of the matter with his accusation that they are still worldly. He has changed his word for worldly from sarkinos (v. 1) to sarkikos. The -inos termination means ‘made of …’; thus tablets ‘made of stone’, lithinos, are contrasted with those ‘made of flesh’, sarkinos (2 Cor. 3:3). The -ikos ending rather means ‘characterized by …’; we see it in psychikos of the ‘natural’ man and pneumatikos of the ‘spiritual’ man (2:14–15). The difference between sarkinos and sarkikos is like that between ‘fleshy’ and ‘fleshly’ (cf. Lenski, ‘ “fleshy,” and you cannot help it; “fleshly,” and you can but do not help it’). The more thoroughgoing word is sarkinos, but there is no blame attaching to it as applied to those who are young in the faith. But sarkikos, ‘characterized by flesh’, when used of those who have been Christians for years, is blameworthy. The mature believer is pneumatikos, ‘characterized by spirit’. To be characterized instead by flesh, as the Corinthians were, is the very opposite of what Christians should be. ‘Flesh’, of course, as often in Paul, is used in an ethical and moral sense. It indicates the lower aspects of human nature (cf. Rom. 13:14; Gal. 5:13, 19; Eph. 2:3, etc.).

The accusation is made specific: there is jealousy and quarrelling. The former word means basically something like ‘zeal’, ‘ardour’. It is usually ranked as a virtue by classical writers, and sometimes also by New Testament writers (e.g. 2 Cor. 7:7; 11:2). But this temper all too easily leads to envy and the like, and characteristically the New Testament writers use the word for that evil thing that is one of ‘the works of the flesh’ (Gal. 5:20). For quarrelling, cf. 1:11. Both terms point to self-assertion and unhealthy rivalries. Whereas Christians should be considerate of others (cf. Rom. 12:10), the Corinthians were asserting themselves (cf. 4:8). Paul asks whether this is not worldly (sarkikos), and acting like mere men. This last expression means ‘like natural men’ (2:14).

Market research claims that the self-improvement industry—which includes self-help books, seminars, and life coaches—is an $11.17 billion dollar industry. We are obsessed with personal growth—finding fulfillment, happiness, and meaning. We are looking to be actualized, to become ourselves, to grow into the people that we believe we have the latent potential to become. The Corinthians were no different, and they viewed Christianity as a means of achieving their aspirational, progressive ends. But the innate desire for growth extends beyond the personal.

The church has often thought of worldliness only in terms of dancing, alcoholic drinking, and the like. But worldliness is much deeper than bad habits; it is an orientation, a way of thinking and believing. Basically it is buying the world’s philosophies, buying human wisdom. It is looking to the world—to human leaders, to influential and popular people, to neighbors, associates, and fellow students—for our standards, attitudes, and meaning. Worldliness is accepting the world’s definitions, the world’s measuring sticks, the world’s goals.

Before Paul chastises them for their immature sinfulness, he reminds them again that he is speaking to them as brethren, as fellow believers. That is a term of recognition and of love. It reminded his brothers in Christ that they were still saved, that their sinning, terrible and inexcusable as it was, did not forfeit their salvation. He did not try to diminish the seriousness of their sins, but he did try to diminish or prevent any discouragement that his rebuke might otherwise have caused. He stood with them as a brother, not over them as a judge.

In 2:14–15 Paul contrasts believers and unbelievers, and his use of “spiritual” in that context refers, therefore, to positional spirituality. The “natural man” (v. 14) is the unsaved; “he who is spiritual” (v. 15) is the saved. In the positional sense, there is no such thing as an unspiritual Christian or a partially spiritual Christian. In this sense every believer is equal. This spiritual is a synonym for possessing the life of God in the soul, or as we saw in 2:16, having the mind of Christ.

When a Christian sins, he is being practically unspiritual, living on the same practical level as an unbeliever. Consequently Paul is compelled to speak to the Corinthian believers much as if they were unbelievers.

Perhaps somewhat to soften the rebuke, he also compares them to babes in Christ. It was far from a compliment, but it did recognize that they truly belonged to Christ.

They were not babes because they were newly redeemed, but because they were inexcusably immature.

they became what James calls forgetful hearers (James 1:25). A person who does not use information will lose it; and spiritual truth is no exception. Spiritual truths that we ignore and neglect will become less and less remembered and meaningful (cf. 2 Pet. 1:12–13).

Like many Christians today, the Corinthians seemed quite content to stay on milk. Some congregations do not want the pastor to get “too deep.” Their fleshly habits are not much threatened if, for instance, the preacher sticks primarily to evangelistic messages. Evangelism is the cutting edge of the church’s mission, but it is for unbelievers, not believers. Or the congregation wants Scripture to be preached so superficially that their sin is not exposed, much less rebuked and corrected.

Nothing is more precious or wonderful than a little baby. But a twenty-year-old with the mind of an infant is heartbreaking. A baby who acts like a baby is a joy; but an adult who acts like a baby is a tragedy. It doubtlessly grieved the Holy Spirit, as it grieved Paul, that the Christians in Corinth had never gotten out of their spiritual infancy.

Because self-centeredness is at the heart of fleshly behavior, jealousy and strife are always found in an immature congregation. Jealousy is the attitude, and strife is the action that results from it. One is the inner emotional condition, the other the outward expression of selfishness.

Sinful desire is like cancer; it has many forms and affects many parts of the church in many ways—all of them destructive. Carnality is a general evil that has many manifestations. It will corrupt morals, weaken personal relationships, produce doubt about God and His Word, destroy prayer life, and provide fertile ground for heresy. It will attack right doctrine and right living, right belief and right practice.

Jealousy is a severe form of selfishness, begrudging someone else what we wish were ours. And selfishness is one of the most obvious characteristics of babyhood. An infant’s life is almost totally self-centered and selfish. Its whole concern is with its own comfort, hunger, attention, sleep. It is typical of a young child to be self-centered, but it should not be typical of an adult, especially a Christian adult. It is spiritually infantile to be jealous of and to cause strife among fellow believers, and it betrays a fleshly perspective.