Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary 1 Corinthians 6:1

"Dare any of you, having a matter against his neighbor, go to law before the unrighteous, and not before the saints?" — 1 Corinthians 6:1 (ASV)

In speaking of Christians taking other Christians to court, Paul does not specify any criminal cases, for he teaches elsewhere that these, along with any punitive penalties, must be handled by the state (Romans 13:1–7). The legal “cases” (GK 3215) referred to here, therefore, include different kinds of property cases (v.7). The decisions to be made by Christians are ministerial and declarative (cf. Matthew 16:18–19; 18:18–20), not punitive. By “dare” (GK 3328), Paul strongly admonishes rather than commands Christians to take their legal grievances for settlement before qualified Christians. In this way, he allows for the possibility that under some circumstances Christians might take cases to the secular civil court.

Paul writes here in the light of Roman law, which allowed Jews to apply their own law in property matters; and Christians, who were not yet distinguished as a separate class, must have had the same privilege. But since Jewish and Christian communities appealed to Roman law for the right to try their own property cases, certainly it would be right to take some cases before the civil court. By analogy, Paul himself, who had received his Roman citizenship according to Roman law, appealed to the civil courts—to the Roman commander (Acts 22:25–29), to the governor (Acts 23:27; Acts 24:10–21), and to the emperor (Acts 25:4–12)—to establish his right to a proper trial and proper treatment as a Roman citizen (Acts 16:37–39). In modern life this biblical principle allows for church cases to be brought into civil courts to determine the extent of the rights of the congregation—as, for example, their right to own and retain their own church property. What concerned Paul was that the Corinthians were failing to exercise their prerogative in settling such cases themselves.

The “saints” (GK 41) are those who are holy—those consecrated and set apart for God; the same word is translated “God’s people” in v.2. They are in sharp contrast with the “ungodly” (GK 96) or the unsaved. In saying that God’s people will judge the world, Paul is writing eschatologically. At the second coming of Christ, God’s people, who are coheirs with Christ (Romans 8:17), will reign and judge the world with him in his millennial kingdom (2 Timothy 2:12; Revelation 20:4; cf. Daniel 7:22; Matthew 19:28).