Now I urge you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree in what you say, that there be no divisions among you, and that you be united with the same understanding and the same conviction [1 Corinthians 1:10 (Christian Standard Bible), a portion of the Epistle reading for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, RCL, Year A].
Paul wrote these words to a fractured church. The Corinthians were quarreling—forming parties around their favorite teachers and preachers. “I belong to Paul.” “I belong to Apollos.” “I belong to Cephas” [1:12]. Some even claimed, with what we can only imagine was a certain smugness, “I belong to Christ.”
We know this pattern well. For two thousand years, Christians have repeated it. We’ve divided over doctrine, practice, authority, interpretation. We’ve split denominations, planted competing churches across the street from one another, and claimed—each faction in its turn—that we are the faithful ones, that our reading of Scripture is Christ’s own.
The irony is bitter: this very passage, written to heal division, has itself been weaponized. Preachers use it to prove that their side represents true unity, that the other faction is the problem. Paul’s appeal becomes another tool of fracture.
I’ve watched these divisions for twenty-three years in the Presbyterian Church (USA). I have close friends who’ve been caught in the United Methodist separation. I know a retired UMC bishop whose childhood congregation voted to disaffiliate from the denomination he once led. I know a former Moravian pastor whose congregation has gone years without settled pastoral leadership because of theological fractures that seem unbridgeable. These are not abstractions. They are wounds in the body of Christ.
The Appeal to the Name
Paul fervently frames his plea: “I appeal to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. ”
The Name. In biblical thought, a name signifies character, authority, presence. To bear someone’s name is to represent them, to be identified with them, to have your identity shaped by theirs.
Paul appeals to the Name—which means he’s asking the Corinthians to remember whose name they bear and to ask whether their divisions make sense in that light.
This cuts deeper than our usual questions. We ask about polity, doctrine, ethics. These questions matter—I’m not dismissing them. Bad structures wound people. Theology has consequences. Ethics shape communities.
But Paul asks: Whose name do you bear, and what does that name require of you in the midst of disagreement?
“Has Christ been divided?” [1:13]. Paul’s question is a theological alarm. He’s suggesting that the Corinthians’ behavior risks becoming a false statement about Christ Himself. Their quarrels are Christological incoherence.
What do we say about Christ by the way we divide his body?
Paul appears to expect the answer: “No, Christ has not been divided. Christ cannot be divided.”
But our lived reality, embodied in our separations, our competing denominations, our inability to share the Lord’s table across theological lines, increasingly answers: “Yes, apparently he has been.”
That gap—between Paul’s expected “No” and our lived “Yes”—is where we find ourselves. The cross won’t let us look away from it.
The Cross Creates Division Even as It Judges Our Divisions
Paul pivots in verse 17:
For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ will not be emptied of its power [1:17].
I think that the cross does at least two things at once. First, it exposes false unities—those built on power, prestige, rhetorical brilliance, tribal belonging, or claims to superior wisdom. Any unity depending on these things cannot be the unity of Christ.
Second, the cross relativizes all human claims to righteousness, including ecclesial ones. The cross is God’s great leveling act. It strips every faction—progressive and conservative, traditional and reforming—of the right to claim moral or theological self-justification.
Paul warns against “eloquent wisdom” becoming the basis of Christian community. Eloquent wisdom—sophisticated theology, compelling arguments, careful exegesis—can itself become a form of power that empties the cross of its meaning. Within the current debates within the Presbyterian Church, both sides in our current fractures have eloquent wisdom. Both can marshal Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Both can claim fidelity.
But the cross humiliates all of it.
Any division that forgets the scandal and humility of the cross becomes a lie.
What the Cross Asks of Us
Paul offers no easy resolution. He doesn’t pretend the Corinthians can simply decide to agree. He doesn’t minimize their theological disputes or suggest that right doctrine doesn’t matter. He certainly doesn’t propose that they ignore their differences for the sake of institutional peace.
Instead, he appeals. “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters…”
That posture matters. Paul doesn’t invoke a golden age of unity that never existed. He doesn’t accept division as inevitable, shrugging and moving on. He appeals—as one who loves the church enough to name its wounds without abandoning it.
This may be the hardest and most faithful posture available to us: neither nostalgic nor cynical, neither clinging to false peace nor embracing righteous separation as if it solves everything.
The cross asks us what kind of people we are becoming by the way we’re fighting. It asks whether our manner of disagreement—our tone, our accusations, our willingness to demonize—bears any resemblance to the one whose name we claim. It asks whether we can distinguish between theological conviction and tribal self-justification.
These are not comfortable questions. They don’t adjudicate who’s right about ordination standards or constitutional amendments or biblical interpretation. The cross doesn’t give us an algorithm for resolving our disputes. Some will find this deeply unsatisfying. We want the cross to tell us which side is faithful; Paul seems more concerned that we not forget whose name we invoke while we argue.
But the cross does strip away any comfort of certainty. It removes the option of claiming that our faction alone is faithful, that our reading of Scripture is self-evidently Christ’s own, that separation—or remaining—proves our righteousness.
“Has Christ been divided?”
Paul expects us to answer no. Our lived reality suggests yes. We cannot resolve that tension in a single meditation or a single generation.
But the cross asks us to hold it—to bear the wound of disagreement as a form of witness, to refuse the ease of either righteous separation or false unity, to remember whose name we bear even when, especially when, we cannot agree on what bearing that name requires.
Paul appeals. He doesn’t solve. He calls us back to the Name, to the cross, to the question that won’t go away: What do we say about Christ by the way we divide his body?
The answer we give won’t be found primarily in our words. It will be found in how we live—and how we love—in the midst of fracture.
Be First to Comment