1 Corinthians 2 Footnotes

2:1-5 The slick, impressive style of speaking that dazzled some Corinthians was inappropriate to the message of Christ crucified. In repudiating “brilliance of speech or wisdom” (v. 1), Paul was not condemning effective speech or rigorous thinking per se. After all, elsewhere he exhorted his audience to be mature in their thinking (14:20; Eph 4:14). Rather, he was saying that the flowery, pretentious rhetoric so cherished by the Greeks was inconsistent with the God whose word Paul shared. Paul was far more concerned with that message than with the medium.

If the “wisdom” of God for human history is the message of the crucified Messiah, then the hope for humanity arising from it is, by contrast, indescribably glorious (vv. 6-13). Paul knew firsthand what it was like to be blinded to the glory of Jesus Christ. Although there is no record he was among those who called for Jesus’s death, he was of the same mind in the early days of the church. God had been merciful to him and by the Spirit’s special illumination, Paul had glimpsed—but only just glimpsed—the glory of Jesus Christ that far surpassed what humans are able to see apart from the Spirit’s illumination.