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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadCambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - 1 Corinthians 1:2 - 1:2
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
2. τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ τοῦ θεοῦ. ἐκκλησία signifies an assembly. St Paul adds the words ‘of God’ to shew that it should be one in Him, ‘For the Church’s name is not one of separation, but of unity and concord.’ Chrysostom.
ἡγιασμένοις. Literally, to them that have been sanctified. The word here rendered sanctify means (1) to consecrate to the service of the Deity, and hence (2) to purify, make holy. The word here partakes of both senses. Those who have become united to Christ by faith have not only been dedicated to Him, but have been made partakers of His holiness by their participation in the Life that is in Him. But such persons were by no means as yet free from actual sin, as chapters 5, 6, 8, 11 conclusively prove. ‘The Church of Christ, abstractedly and invisibly, is a kingdom where no evil is; in the concrete, and actually, it is the Church of Corinth, Rome, or England, tainted with impurity. And yet, just as the mudded Rhone is really the Rhone and not mud and the Rhone, so there are not two churches, the Church of Corinth and the false church within it, but one visible Church, in which the invisible lies concealed.’ Robertson, On the Corinthians, Lect. 2. The change of construction from the singular to the plural here, from the idea of the Church as a collective whole to the aggregate of the persons that compose it, should be noted. This construction is not uncommon in Greek, as ‘the liveliness of the Greek language’ (see Kühner, Grammatik der Griech. Spr. sec. 371, 5 a) would lead us to expect. If, with Lachmann and Tregelles, we place τῇ οὔσῃ ἑν Κορίνθῳ between ἡγιασμένοις ἐν Χ. Ἰ. and κλητοῖς ἁγίοις the construction is harsher than that in the text.
κλητοῖς ἁγίοις. See note on κλητός above. The Corinthians were designed by God’s appointment for holiness. That was the purpose of His call (κλῆσις). ἁγίοις differs from ἡγιασμένοις in this, that the latter expression refers to the past act of God’s mercy in cleansing believers from sin and imparting holiness to them, the former to the abiding condition into which that act introduced them.
σὺν πᾶσιν. This is added, either (1) because the Epistle, which dealt with so many and such weighty truths, was not to be treasured up as the peculiar heritage of the Corinthian Church, but was to be regarded as the common possession of the universal Church of Christ. Or (2) perhaps it is better, with Olshausen, to regard the Apostle as reminding the Corinthians that they form only a part, and that but a small one, of the whole Church of Christ, a consideration which their self-satisfaction was leading them to forget.
ἐπικαλουμένοις is rightly rendered in A.V. of the habitual calling on the name of Christ.
αὐτῶν καὶ ἡμῶν. Their Lord and ours. This addition tends to confirm the second of the two interpretations given in the last note but one.