Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 1 Corinthians · About this commentary
I Write to Admonish My Children
1 Corinthians 4:14-17
14 I don’t write these things to shame you, but to admonish you as my beloved children. · WEB
Having flattened them, Paul names the relationship that gave him the right to — not a rival teacher but a father — and sends Timothy as a living reminder.
I don't write these things to shame you, but to admonish you as my beloved children 1 Corinthians 4:14.
After the most cutting paragraph in the letter, he states his intention, and the distinction he draws is the one all correction turns on. Shame makes a person feel small; admonition tells them what to do. He had said two verses earlier that his purpose was to move them to shame in a different matter 1 Corinthians 6:5, so this is not squeamishness about discomfort — it is a claim about aim. He is not trying to leave them humiliated but to leave them changed.
For though you have ten thousand tutors in Christ, you don't have many fathers. For in Christ Jesus, I became your father through the Good News 1 Corinthians 4:15.
Here is the answer to I follow Paul, I follow Apollos 1 Corinthians 1:12. The parties had been treating him as one option among several teachers; he points out that teachers are replaceable and paternity is not. A tutor was a household slave who supervised a boy's education — competent, useful, and hired. Corinth could accumulate ten thousand of them. It had one father, and the fatherhood came through the Good News, which keeps even this claim from being personal prestige: what begot them was the gospel he carried, not his personality.
This is the ground of his authority throughout the letter, and it is worth noticing that he never once appeals to office in this passage. Not I am an apostle and you must obey, but I am your father and I am asking.
I beg you therefore, be imitators of me 1 Corinthians 4:16.
A startling instruction until the context is remembered. What he has just described of himself is hunger, beating, homelessness, manual labor, blessing when cursed 1 Corinthians 4:11–13 — that is what they are asked to imitate, not his authority or his gifts. He asks the same elsewhere and always attaches it to the cross rather than to himself: be imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ 1 Corinthians 11:1 Philippians 3:17.
Because of this I have sent Timothy to you, who is my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, who will remind you of my ways which are in Christ, even as I teach everywhere in every assembly 1 Corinthians 4:17.
And the instruction is made concrete by sending a person. Timothy is my beloved and faithful child — the same family language, one generation further on, so the pattern being asked for is already visible in someone they can watch. His errand is to remind, not to introduce; and the last clause quietly removes any suggestion that Corinth is being singled out or given a local rule: even as I teach everywhere in every assembly. A congregation convinced of its own distinctiveness is told it is being asked for nothing unusual.
held with reason What this mark means