ACTS BIBLE
The American Church week 6 · 1 Corinthians 3:5-23
No one lays a foundation other than the one laid. What the gathering is for, and what happens to a church that wants the state's help.
Last week the heart, then the house. This week the room the houses gather into.
Two things have to happen here, because nothing later in the course picks them up. The first is what a gathering is actually for. The second is what happens when a church decides it would rather have the state's help, which is the question week four left open when the chart showed the church marrying every empire that offered.
Paul answers both in one chapter, written to the worst-behaved congregation in the New Testament.
Corinth was not a church with a doctrine problem. It was a church with a personality problem.
Paul names it in the first chapter. Each of you says, I follow Paul, or I follow Apollos, or I follow Cephas, or I follow Christ (1 Corinthians 1:12).1 Four teams, and the fourth is the worst, because the people using Christ as a faction label had turned the head of the church into a party badge.
By chapter three Paul has a diagnosis. There is jealousy and strife among you. Are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way (1 Corinthians 3:3)?2 The word is sarkikoi, fleshly. The sin underneath a church split is not usually heresy. It is ordinary envy wearing a doctrinal coat.
And notice what Paul does not do. He does not tell them to disband, and he does not tell the sound ones to find a better congregation. He writes to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints (1 Corinthians 1:2), and then spends sixteen chapters fixing it.1
Hold that, because it answers an objection later in this lesson.
Then the verse everything here rests on. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 3:11).3
Not can lay a better one. Cannot lay another one at all. Every church that has ever existed is either built on that foundation or is not a church, whatever is on the sign.
Paul has just explained why, and the explanation is the doctrine this whole course keeps returning to. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6-7).3
That is salvation as God's work from start to finish, applied to church work. The men are real, the labor is real, the growth is not theirs. Which is exactly why boasting in Paul or Apollos is absurd, and it is also why the factions collapse the moment anyone takes the sentence seriously.
The foundation is fixed, but what people build on it is not, and this is the part that should sober anybody who has ever run anything in a church. Gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw. Each one's work will become manifest, because the Day will disclose it, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If it survives, he receives a reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire (1 Corinthians 3:12-15).4
Two things in that, and both matter.
A man can be genuinely saved and have his life's work in the church burn. Paul says so plainly. Sincerity is not the test; the fire is.
And the test is not attendance, budget or influence. Those are the easiest things to build with, and wood, hay and straw are the cheapest and fastest materials on the list.
Three verses later Paul says something that changes what a church building is. Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you (1 Corinthians 3:16)?5
Every "you" in that sentence is plural. He is not saying each of you is a little temple. He is saying the congregation, together, is the temple, and God lives in it.
That is the answer to a question Baptists have been asked for four hundred years: if the church is people, why gather? Because the temple is the assembly. A Christian streaming a sermon alone is doing something good and is not doing this.
Now the honest one, and week four handed the room the ammunition for it.
If Nicaea was convened by an unbaptized emperor, if there were two popes for forty years, if the church took the empire's power every time it was offered, then why show up? Why not keep Christ at home, where none of that reaches?
The objection is real. Some people in that room have been hurt by a congregation, and telling them their pain is imaginary would be a lie.
But the objection proves too much, and Corinth is why.
That church had factions over celebrity teachers. It had a man sleeping with his father's wife, and the congregation was proud of how tolerant that made them (1 Corinthians 5:1-2). It had members suing each other in pagan courts (1 Corinthians 6:1-6). It had people getting drunk at the Lord's Supper while others went hungry (1 Corinthians 11:20-22).6
Paul calls them saints and writes them a letter.
If a church's failures disqualify gathering, Corinth disqualifies it first, and the New Testament would have told them to go home. It told them to stop boasting in men and to eat together properly. Do not neglect to meet together, as is the habit of some (Hebrews 10:24-25).7
Which brings the chart from week four down to a question you can actually answer.
Read 1 Corinthians 3:6 again and ask what a church is confessing when it reaches for the machinery of the state. God gives the growth. A congregation that believes that sentence does not need a magistrate to fill its pews, and a congregation that stops believing it will start looking for one.
That is the Baptist argument, and it is worth knowing that it is ours before anybody else's. Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts in 1635 for saying the civil magistrate has no authority over conscience, and the church he gathered in Providence was the first Baptist congregation in the colonies.8 He did not argue that faith is private. He argued that a state church fills a room with people who came for reasons other than Christ, which is precisely the diagnosis the First Great Awakening had to preach against a century later.
Say the cost out loud too, because the class already knows it. The wall Williams wanted is now maintained largely by people who would prefer the garden gone, and Christians watch it used against them in local decisions every year. That is a real loss and pretending otherwise insults anyone who has watched it happen.
The answer is not to take the power back. It is that a church holding state power stops being able to tell who actually believes, and a church without it has nothing to fill a room with except the Word and the God who gives the growth, which is what Paul told Corinth the increase depends on.3
Paul ends the chapter by taking the factions apart from the top. So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's (1 Corinthians 3:21-23).9
The order in that sentence is the cure. The church does not belong to its pastor, its founders, its denomination or its country. It belongs to Christ, who is the head of the body and the one who loved the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:23-25).10
Paul uses the same image writing to Ephesus, and there he names the stone. The household of God is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, and in him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple (Ephesians 2:19-22).11 The temple language from 1 Corinthians 3 and the foundation language are one picture.
He laid it by living the perfect life we could not live, dying the death we had earned, and rising again, and the debt was paid in full with nothing left for us to add. That is why no council can improve the foundation and no scandal can crack it.
God chooses, and the Father draws. No one comes to the Son unless the Father draws him (John 6:44), and he gives the growth.12 Which means the gathering is not something we sustain by cleverness, and Scripture stays the final authority over how we run it, including over the parts we like.
straw most available to a church in our town right now?
about attendance?
for a substitute. What substitutes are on offer, apart from the state?
Next class: Christ in education, and who is teaching the children when we are not looking.