1 Corinthians 3:23

We might be tempted to give the words, and ye are Christ's, a restrictive meaning: “Ye are His alone, not your teachers'.” But in the two analogous propositions, that which precedes and that which follows, Paul certainly does not mean: “All things are only yours,” and “Christ is only God's.” It is not restrictions we have here, but strong affirmations; the thought is not limited, it rises. “All things are the Church's, because it belongs itself to Christ, and depends on Him.” It is in this saying, and ye are Christ's, that allusion is found to the fourth party. It is not merely a few presumptuous people, puffed up with conceit of their own wisdom, who can say: And as for me, I am Christ's; this is the privilege of the whole Church.

And, as if to put the last stroke to the annihilation of all human glory, Paul denies it even in the person of that Lord in whom all mankind might legitimately glory: and Christ is God's. As the Church possesses all things because it depends on Christ, Christ possesses all things because He depends on God; comp. 1 Corinthians 11:3. God in Christ, such then for man is the one subject of glorying (1 Corinthians 1:31). It has been asked, from the first ages of the Church, whether these words referred to Christ as man, or as a Divine Being. The old commentators and several of the Fathers, even Athanasius (see Edwards), applied them to the eternal relation between the Son and the Father. This is done also by Meyer, Kling, etc. Hence would follow the subordination of the Son to the Father, even within the Trinity. Others, Augustine, Calvin, Olshausen, de Wette, Edwards, apply them to Christ only in His humanity, in order to maintain the essential equality of the Father and the Son. It must be remembered, above all, that they refer to the Lord in His present state of glory, for it is as glorified that He is the Head of the Church. But this itself proves that the first explanation is not less true than the second; they are as inseparable from one another as the two states, the human and Divine, in the person of the exalted Christ. That is to say, we apply the notion of dependence contained in Paul's expression, not only to the Lord's humanity, but also to His Divinity. Is not this implied besides in the names of Son and Word used to denote His Divine being? And is not Beet right in affirming that only this notion of the essential subordination of the Son to the Father enables us to conceive the unity in the Divine Trinity? The meaning therefore is, that as to His one and indivisible person as Son of God and Son of man, Jesus receives all from the Father, and consequently belongs to Him wholly. It is on this absolute dependence that His universal sovereignty rests.

As soon as the Church of Corinth rises to the view of these relations, what will become of the miserable desire among its members to magnify themselves and to turn what may be wanting to others into a ground of self-satisfaction? How will it be possible for one, when he contemplates the absolute dependence in which the Son abides relatively to the Father, still to glory in himself or in another? Each believer will possess everything, even the eminent teachers who enable him to make progress, as gifts from His hand.

After thus making the Corinthians ashamed of their guilty infatuations, it only remains to the apostle to check the rash judgments in which some indulge respecting him: this is what he does in the following passage, which closes this section.