The Life-Changing Blessings of an Identity in Christ—Reading the Corinthian Letters

Life can be challenging, and for this reason all of humankind requires resilience—a capacity to cope with life’s challenges, which determines whether one can experience quality of life. This was also true for the Christian community in Corinth during Paul’s third missionary journey. Paul wrote the first Corinthian letter to deal with a variety of challenges and concerns in the church, and for Paul, all these ongoing challenges and concerns mirrored their being worldly (ὡς σαρκίνοις 1 Corinthians 3:1) and being infants in Christ (ὡς νηπίοις ἐν Χριστῷ 3:1). Being worldly implies that one holds on to worldly wisdom and this is why Paul teaches them about God’s wisdom (2:6–9). He shows in this letter how this can be dealt with, namely by having the Spirit (2:10–16) and having the mind of Christ (2:16)—thus being spiritually intelligent. Later, when Titus arrived with good news about the Corinthian church, Paul wrote the second Corinthian letter to express relief and joy. In 2 Corinthians 5:17, Paul refers to a new creation (καινὴ κτίσις), being in Christ (ἐν Χριστῷ), and having an identity in Christ. The focus of this article is the blessings of an identity in Christ, and to interpret the Corinthian letters to understand how an identity in Christ can lead to Christian spiritual intelligence, resilience and quality of life. The method of interpretation is multidisciplinary, including socio-historical, lexical–syntactical, and theological analyses, as well as insights gleaned from psychology. It is found that an identity in Christ brings holiness, strengthens the believer, gives access to spiritual gifts, brings unity and divine wisdom, provides hope, love and harmony, and leads to resilience—all contributing to quality of life. The new identity in Christ affects the believer’s calling, values, priorities, behaviour, relationships and response to the world in different ways, which in turn can heal a broken society.