1 Corinthians 12:1, spiritual gifts, consider who Paul writing to, Corinth was a loud place, it sat on a narrow neck of land with a sea on either side, which made it one of the great crossing points of the ancient world. Ships that did not want to risk the long dangerous voyage around the bottom of Greece would put in at one of Corin’s harbors and their cargo and sometimes the ships themselves would be hauled across the strip of land to the other sea. Everything passed through, sailors, merchants, money, languages, religions, it was fast, rich and crowded, the kind of place where the world washed up on the docks every morning.
Corinth was also a new city wearing an old name, the original Corinth had been destroyed by Rome, leveled and then about a century before Paul arrived, it was rebuilt as a Roman colony, repopulated largely with freed slaves and veterans and traders. This history matters, because it meant Corinth had no deep settled aristocracy, no ancient families everyone agreed to respect. Corinth was a place where status was up for grabs, where people clawed their way up the ladder and then made very sure everyone could see how high they had climbed.
Self-promotion was practically the civic religion, who you knew, what you owned, how impressive you sounded in public, which patron you could name. The whole city ran on display and it ran on religion, too, the loud kind, Corinth was packed with temples and shrines to the old gods and the worship there was often a sensory event with music, frenzy, ecstatic speech and worshippers working themselves into states that looked and sounded spiritual. Paul actually reminds the Corinthians of this directly before they knew Jesus Christ, he says they were pagans carried away to idols that could not speak a word, this is a loaded reminder, because it tells you these were people who already had a mental category for spiritual ecstasy long before the Holy Spirit ever entered the picture.
The Corinthians had spent their whole lives in a culture where the most impressive religious experience was the loudest, strangest, most visibly out of control one, so when the genuine gifts of the Holy Spirit started showing up among the Corinthians, they instinctively reached for the only ruler they had ever owned and they measured the gifts the way their old temples had taught them to measure spiritual power, by the spectacle, by the volume, by how much it made a crowd gasp.
Corinth was also a new city wearing an old name, the original Corinth had been destroyed by Rome, leveled and then about a century before Paul arrived, it was rebuilt as a Roman colony, repopulated largely with freed slaves and veterans and traders. This history matters, because it meant Corinth had no deep settled aristocracy, no ancient families everyone agreed to respect. Corinth was a place where status was up for grabs, where people clawed their way up the ladder and then made very sure everyone could see how high they had climbed.
Self-promotion was practically the civic religion, who you knew, what you owned, how impressive you sounded in public, which patron you could name. The whole city ran on display and it ran on religion, too, the loud kind, Corinth was packed with temples and shrines to the old gods and the worship there was often a sensory event with music, frenzy, ecstatic speech and worshippers working themselves into states that looked and sounded spiritual. Paul actually reminds the Corinthians of this directly before they knew Jesus Christ, he says they were pagans carried away to idols that could not speak a word, this is a loaded reminder, because it tells you these were people who already had a mental category for spiritual ecstasy long before the Holy Spirit ever entered the picture.
The Corinthians had spent their whole lives in a culture where the most impressive religious experience was the loudest, strangest, most visibly out of control one, so when the genuine gifts of the Holy Spirit started showing up among the Corinthians, they instinctively reached for the only ruler they had ever owned and they measured the gifts the way their old temples had taught them to measure spiritual power, by the spectacle, by the volume, by how much it made a crowd gasp.
