1 Corinthians 1:2

“To the Church of God, the sanctified in Christ Jesus, which is at Corinth, saints by call, with all that in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is theirs and ours.”

The term ἐκκλησία, Church, formed of the two words, ἐκ, out of, and καλεῖν, to call, denotes in ordinary Greek language an assembly of citizens called out of their dwellings by an official summons; comp. Acts 19:41. Applied to the religious domain in the New Testament, the word preserves essentially the same meaning. Here too there is a summoner: God, who calls sinners to salvation by the preaching of the gospel (Galatians 1:6). There are the summoned: sinners, called to faith thenceforth to form the new society of which Christ is the head. The complement of God indicates at once Him who has summoned the assembly, and Him to whom it belongs. The term, the Church of God, thus corresponds to the ordinary Old Testament phrase: Kehal Jehova, the assembly (congregation) of the Lord; but there is this difference, that the latter was recruited by way of filiation, while in the new covenant the Church is formed and recruited by the personal adherence of faith.

According to the reading of several Mjj. (Vatic., Clarom., etc.), the apostle immediately adds to the words: the Church of God, the apposition ἡγιασμένοις ἐν Χριστῷ ᾿Ιησοῦ, the sanctified in Christ Jesus. As the Church is composed of a plurality of individuals, the apostle may certainly, by a construction ad sensum, join to the singular substantive this apposition in the plural. The received reading separates this substantive from its apposition by placing between the two the words τῇ οὔσῃ ἐν Κορίνθῳ, which is at Corinth. This arrangement seems at first sight more natural; but for that very reason it has the character of a correction. It seems to me probable that, thinking already of the moral disorders which stained this Church, the apostle felt himself constrained to characterize the community he is addressing rather morally than geographically. God is holy, and the Church of God ought to be holy like Him to whom it belongs. The perfect participle ἡγιασμένοις indicates not an obligation to be fulfilled, but a state which already exists in them, and that in virtue of a previously accomplished fact. That fact is faith in Christ, which implicitly contains the act of total consecration to God. To embrace Christ by faith is to accept the holiness which He realized in His person; it is to be transplanted from the soil of our natural and profane life into that of His Divine holiness. The regimen, in Christ Jesus, expresses this idea, that our holiness is only participation in His in virtue of the union of faith with Him: “For their sakes I sanctify myself,” says Jesus (John 17:19), “that they also might be sanctified in truth.” Several Fathers have applied the expression, sanctified in Jesus Christ, to the fact of baptism; their error has been confounding the sign of faith with faith itself.

After having thus characterized the assembly of God as composed of consecrated ones, the apostle adds the local definition: which is (which really exists, οὔσῃ) at Corinth. He had passed from the unity of the Church to the plurality of its members; he returns from this plurality to the unity which should continue. One feels that his mind is already taken up with the divisions which threatened to break this unity. When we think of the frightful corruption which reigned in this city (Introd. p. 6), we can understand with what inward satisfaction the apostle must have written the words, “the Church of God...at Corinth”! Bengel has well rendered this feeling in the short annotation: Ecclesia in Corintho, laetum et ingens paradoxon.

Immediately after the words: sanctified in Christ Jesus, it is surprising to find: saints by call, which seem after the preceding to form a pleonasm. The solution of this difficulty is involved in the explanation of the regimen which follows: with all those who call upon...This regimen has been connected with the dative τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ, as if the apostle meant: I address my letter, or I address this salutation, to the Church which is at Corinth, and not only to it, but also to the Christians of the whole world (Chrysostom, Theodoret, Calvin, Osiander, Reuss). But, on the contrary, no apostolical letter has a destination so particular and local as the First Epistle to the Corinthians. Meyer limits the application of the words: with all who call upon, like the similar address of 2 Corinthians 1:1: “with all the saints who are in all Achaia,” and thinks that those referred to here are simply all the Christians scattered throughout the province of Achaia, and who are grouped round the Church of the metropolis; so, after him, Beet, Edwards, and others. But the passage quoted proves exactly the contrary of the conclusion drawn from it. For it shows how Paul would have written here also, if such had been his meaning. Holsten, feeling the impossibility of importing such a restriction, imagines another less arbitrary. He refers the words to the Christians of other Churches, who might be at present staying at Corinth, especially to the emissaries who had come from Jerusalem (those of Christ), of whose presence Paul was well aware. But the phrase used is far too general to admit of so limited an application. Mosheim, Ewald think that Paul means by it expressly to include in his salutation all the parties which were formed. But the preposition σύν, with, would imply that one of the parties was already separated from the Church itself, while the whole letter proves that they still formed part of it. We must therefore give up the attempt to make the regimen “ with all them who...” dependent on the term: the Church of God, and connect it, as is in itself more natural, with the preceding words: “ saints by call. ” The meaning is: “saints in virtue of the Divine call, and that in communion with all them who invoke the name of the Lord in every place.” Thus the tautology disappears which is implied in the words: “saints by call,” with the preceding: “sanctified in Christ Jesus.” There is not here a new synonymous epithet needlessly added to the preceding. The sainthood of the faithful is expressed a second time to connect this new feature with it: that sainthood is the common seal of the members of the Church universal. The words κλητοῖς ἁγίοις are there solely as the point of support for the following regimen: σὺν πᾶσι, with all them who...This construction also explains quite naturally the two adjectives, πᾶσι, all, and παντί, every (place), which follow. More than once in this letter the apostle will have to censure the Corinthians for isolating their course from that of the rest of the Church, and for acting as if they were the only Church in the world (comp. especially 1 Corinthians 14:36); and therefore in the very outset he associates them with a larger whole, of which they are only one of the members, and with which they ought to move in harmony. Heinrici, while explaining the σύν exactly as we do, thinks he can separate κλητοῖς from ἁγίοις by a comma, and connect the σύν with κλητοῖς alone: “saints, called with all them who...” This translation is grammatically forced, and besides it leaves the pleonasm of “saints” and “sanctified” as it was.

Holiness is the normal character of all them that call on the name of the Lord, says the apostle. This expression is evidently in his view the paraphrase of the term “believers.” A Christian is therefore, according to him, a man who calls on the name of Jesus as his Lord. The term ἐπικαλεῖσθαι is applied in the Old Testament (by the LXX.) only to the invocation of Jehovah (Isaiah 43:7; Joel 2:32; Zec 13:9). Immediately after Pentecost, the name for believers was, “they who call on the name of the Lord” (Acts 9:14; Acts 9:21; Romans 10:12-13); the name of Jesus was substituted in this formula for that of Jehovah in the Old Testament. The very word NAME, applied, as it is in these passages, to Jesus, includes the idea of a Divine Being; so when the Lord says of His angel, Exodus 23:21, “My name is in him,” that is to say, He makes this being His perfect revelation. The title Lord characterizes Jesus as the one to whom God has committed the universal sovereignty belonging to Himself; and the Church is, in the apostle's eyes, the community of those who recognise and adore Him as such. It is therefore on an act of adoration, and not on a profession of faith of an intellectual nature, that he makes the Christian character to rest. The words: ἐν παντὶ τόπῳ, in every place, designate the universality of the Christian Church in point of right (and already, in part, of fact, when St. Paul wrote); comp. 1 Timothy 2:8. This idea accords with the πᾶσι, all, which precedes, and, as we have seen, it agrees with the context. But a large number of commentators endeavour to limit the sense of this expression, by assigning to it as its complement the words following: αὐτῶν καὶ ἡμῶν, “ of them and of us,” or “ theirs and ours. ” But what would the expression signify: “ their and our place”? De Wette, Osiander, Rückert understand thereby Corinth and Ephesus; Paul would mean: all them that call upon the Lord on your side of the sea, as well as on ours. But to what purpose is this distinction? Besides, the Church of Corinth had already been sufficiently described at the beginning of the verse. Mosheim and Ewald think that by “our place” the apostle means to denote the place of worship of his own partisans, and by “their place” the rooms where the other parties assembled. This explanation is already refuted by our foregoing remarks (p. 44). And Paul would have carefully avoided legalizing in any way the separation which he blamed so severely. Meyer's explanation, followed by Beet and Edwards, seems to me still more forced; the expression, our place, denotes the Christian communities of Achaia, in so far as morally the property of the apostles; here of Paul and Sosthenes, who preached the gospel in them; and the expression, their place, refers to those same communities, in so far as they depended on the Church of Corinth, their metropolis. Does such an exegetical monstrosity deserve refutation? Yet it is surpassed still, if that be possible, by Hofmann's explanation, according to which Paul means that Christians (them), more especially the preachers of the gospel (us), are found everywhere among those by whom Christ is invoked! We must, with Chrysostom, Calvin, Olshausen, etc., simply give up the attempt to make the complements of them and of us depend on the word place; and leave the phrase, in every place, in its absolute and general sense. As to the two pronouns, αὐτῶν and ἡμῶν, of them and of us, they depend on the word Lord, and are the more detailed repetition of the pronoun ἡμῶν (our Lord), which preceded: “Our Lord, who is not only yours, our readers, but also ours, your preachers.” There is here, as it were, a protest beforehand against those who, forgetting that there is in the Church only one Lord, say: “As for me, I am of Paul; I, of Apollos; I, of Peter!” “Who is Paul, who is Apollos, other than servants by whom ye believed, by each of them according as the Lord gave to him?” (1 Corinthians 3:5; 1 Corinthians 3:22-23). So thoroughly is this the prevailing concern in the apostle's mind, from the very beginning of this letter, that six times, between 1 Corinthians 1:1; 1 Corinthians 1:10, he repeats the expression: of our Lord Jesus Christ. The received reading, τε καί, instead of the simple καί, may certainly be maintained, though it has against it several important manuscripts; it dwells a little more strongly on the fact that believers have Jesus Christ for their only Lord, as well as preachers, and thus better justifies the repetition of the preceding ἡμῶν in these two pronouns.