Two letters to a difficult church
First and Second Corinthians, in order
Corinth was divided, litigious, confused about sex, chaotic in worship, and unsure whether the dead rise. Paul answers all of it. This path covers both letters and shows how the cross reframes every question the church raised.
Built for the days between Sundays
For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are dying, but to us who are saved it is the power of God.
What you'll come away with
What this path is for
Not a reading streak. These are the things you should be able to do on your own once you have worked through it.
Read a letter as an answer
Much of 1 Corinthians responds to a letter the church sent Paul. You will learn to hear the question behind each reply instead of reading the reply cold.
Work through the difficult chapters
Head coverings, speaking in the assembly, spiritual gifts. You will know what is genuinely disputed, what the main positions are, and what each one does with the text.
Understand the resurrection chapter
1 Corinthians 15 is the longest sustained treatment of resurrection in the New Testament. You will be able to follow its argument step by step.
See why Paul boasts in weakness
2 Corinthians is the most personal letter he wrote. You will understand why he answers a charge of being unimpressive by agreeing with it.
How the tutor works
A tutor, not a search box
The same eight habits run through every path. They are what make this study rather than summary.
Questions first
Open a passage and Trinity asks what you noticed. Your reading comes first, then the explanation.
Greek and Hebrew, one tap away
Tap a word to see the Greek or Hebrew behind it. See what it can mean and where else it shows up.
Follow the thread
Pick one image, promise, or line. Follow it from Genesis through the prophets into the Gospels.
Context that clicks
Who wrote it, to whom, and why. Get the background the first readers already knew.
A plan that bends
Miss a week and nobody guilt-trips you. Your plan fits the time you actually have and picks up where you left off.
Bring your doubts
Ask the question you'd never ask out loud. Trinity takes it seriously, no judgment.
Pick up the thread
Every session ends with a short recap of what you read and what's worth coming back to.
Every side, fairly told
On baptism, the end times, and more, you get the main views and their best arguments. Disputed questions are labelled as disputed.
The path itself
What you'll study, in order
Each unit builds on the one before it. Lessons live inside Trinity; this is the shape of the ground you will cover.
A church coming apart
Corinth: the city and the congregation
Four factions and one cross
Wisdom that looks like foolishness
Servants, not celebrities
The scandal in chapter 5
Lawsuits between believers
The questions they wrote in
Marriage, singleness, and chapter 7
Food offered to idols
Rights Paul refused to use
Freedom limited by love
Warnings taken from the wilderness
Worship and gifts
Head coverings, and what is actually disputed
The Lord's Supper done badly
One body, many gifts
Love in chapter 13, read in its setting
Tongues, prophecy, and orderly worship
If the dead are not raised
The earliest summary of the gospel we have
What collapses without resurrection
The order of the end
What kind of body Paul is describing
Death swallowed up, and the therefore at the end
Second Corinthians
A painful visit and a letter written in tears
Comfort that gets passed on
Treasure in clay jars
The collection for Jerusalem
Rivals, and reluctant boasting
The thorn, and grace that is sufficient
I've led a small group for six years, and honestly I was mostly repeating Sunday's sermon. Trinity kept asking what the passage actually said before it would tell me anything. Our Thursday nights are better for it.
I was baptized in March and still couldn't find anything in the Bible. I asked what a psalm even is, which felt embarrassing to type. It showed me Psalm 13, a man complaining to God. I didn't know that was allowed.
I mostly use it for word study. When I'm stuck on a Greek term, it walks me through what it can mean without pretending the question is settled. It's told me "scholars disagree here" more than once, which I respect.
Forty years in church and I'd never finished the Bible. I'm in Numbers now. Not thrilling, but I'm still going. Most days I read it before the kettle's boiled.
I'm not sure I believe any of it yet. I came in wanting to argue, and I still do. It argues back properly. It names the best objection before I can, and it doesn't sulk when I won't concede.
I ask it what a fifteen-year-old would really ask about a chapter. It gives me the awkward questions, not the tidy ones. Twice now it's sent me off to study properly, which I suppose is the point.
I read on my phone during my eleven-minute break, and it never tries to make it an hour. Last week it caught that I'd misread who was speaking in Job. It was one of the friends, not God. Changed the whole chapter for me.
I work in two languages, so I'm fussy about words. I asked why one Hebrew word is lovingkindness in one place and steadfast love in another. I got a real answer about hesed, not a devotional paragraph.
I worried it would hand my people easy answers to hard chapters. It mostly doesn't. Someone asked it about hell, and it laid out what Christians have held and said plainly which parts are disputed. I can work with that.
I sit with dying people, so I don't have much patience for cheerfulness. I'd been avoiding the lament psalms. It walked me through Psalm 88, which ends in the dark and stays there, and it didn't rush to fix it.
I'd abandoned three reading plans before this one. I went quiet for a while, came back, and it just carried on. No lecture. I'm in Isaiah now.
Before you start
Questions people ask about this path
This is one of the most disputed passages in the New Testament. Trinity sets out the complementarian reading, the egalitarian reading, and the arguments about whether the sentences are a quotation Paul is answering. It shows you the evidence each side leans on and does not pretend the matter is closed.
Paul says he speaks in tongues more than any of them, and also that not everyone does. Pentecostal, charismatic and cessationist Christians read chapters 12 to 14 differently, and the path presents all three positions from their own texts.
You can take 1 Corinthians alone, and many people do. Reading both is better, because 2 Corinthians shows what happened after the first letter landed, and that is a rare thing to be able to watch.
It is about a church that had spiritual gifts and no patience with each other. It works at a wedding, but its first audience was a congregation suing one another. Reading it there makes it considerably more demanding.
Start this path today
The first unit is free, and you do not need to know anything going in. Trinity will ask what you noticed before it explains a thing.
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