God’s Peculiar, Powerful Way

This paragraph is crucial, both in the context of this particular letter and for the overall understanding of Paul’s theology. Here he delivers the heart and essence of the gospel he believed and proclaimed. Paul’s lines reveal that God works in a most peculiar way—first, God works in defiance of the standards of this world as they are understood or construed by humanity, and second, God’s work is powerful so that it incapacitates, reverses, even turns upside down the values of this world as they are objectively established and understood by humans. Paul declares this way of God’s working as a fact—it is God’s saving activity that amounts to the soteriological reality of the cross of Jesus Christ.

1:18 Paul sets up a rhetorical contrast scheme that captures t…