When Difference Takes Center Stage
Dividing a biblical text into chapters is quite helpful for locating passages, but sometimes it disrupts the flow of thought. In 1 Corinthians, this happens easily. We read chapter 1, get to the discussion about Paul, Apollos, and Cephas, turn the page, and it seems like Paul has started a new topic.
He hasn’t.
After asking if Christ is divided, Paul continues speaking about the cross. “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18). Jews demand signs, Greeks look for wisdom, but he preaches Christ crucified (1 Corinthians 1:22-24). And when he reaches chapter 3, the factions reappear: “For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not mere human beings?” (1 Corinthians 3:4).
The argument is all there.
The cross dismantles human criteria for greatness. Eloquence, prestige, intelligence, charisma, influence: all these can be useful. The problem begins when they stop being service and become the center.
Paul knew the risk. He was an educated man, trained at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). He could have based his authority on his education, his history, his argumentative skills. Instead, he says he decided to know nothing among the Corinthians “except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).
Not because thinking was a sin. That would be a rather strange reading of Paul.
But because even a good thing can take a place that isn’t its own.
That’s exactly why discussions about denominations usually go wrong on both sides. On one side, there are those who treat their tradition as if it were the final form of Christianity itself. The right church, the right theology, the right liturgy, the right reading, the right music. The ecclesiastical surname starts functioning almost as proof of fidelity to Christ.
On the other, there are those who treat all identity as suspect and imagine that abolishing names would solve the problem.
It doesn’t.
Corinth didn’t have Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, or Pentecostals. And it managed to produce factions just fine without any of those labels.
The human heart doesn’t need denominational bylaws to compete.
This is where Paul’s text is more unsettling than it seems. The problem isn’t first in the existence of differences, but in what we do with them. Paul doesn’t deny that he planted and Apollos watered. He denies that either of them can receive the glory for the growth.
“Only God, who makes things grow” (1 Corinthians 3:7).
That sentence should be sufficiently offensive for all of us.
Because it puts both the famous pastor and the historic denomination in their place, both the church that grows and the church that prides itself on not growing, both the intellectual and the anti-intellectual, both the traditional and the modern.
None of them is the center.
The cross is.
Perhaps the question isn’t whether we can have identities. Perhaps it’s whether our identities can still kneel before Christ without demanding that he look like us.