Passage

1 Corinthians 8.6

Book: 1 Corinthians · NASB95

Verse

"yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him." (1 Corinthians 8:6, NASB95)

Immediate context (±2 verses)

NASB95 (NASB95)

"4. Therefore concerning the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that there is no such thing as an idol in the world, and that there is no God but one. 5. For even if there are so-called gods whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords,"

"6. yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him."

"7. However not all men have this knowledge; but some, being accustomed to the idol until now, eat food as if it were sacrificed to an idol; and their conscience being weak is defiled. 8. But food will not commend us to God; we are neither the worse if we do not eat, nor the better if we do eat." (1 Corinthians 8:4-8, NASB95)

The verse sits in Paul's discussion of food sacrificed to idols (1 Cor 8:1-13), the apostle's response to a Corinthian situation in which Christians were divided over whether to eat meat that had been ceremonially offered to pagan deities. Paul's THEOLOGICAL ANCHOR (v. 6) is the foundation for his pastoral counsel (don't eat if it would harm a weaker brother's conscience).

Setting

Speaker: Paul the Apostle, with Sosthenes as co-sender (1 Cor 1:1).
Audience: The church at Corinth, a young, troubled, mostly-Gentile-converted congregation in the Greco-Roman trading hub of Achaia, navigating multiple practical-doctrinal disputes.
Location: Written from Ephesus (1 Cor 16:8).
Time period: c. AD 54-55, mid-third missionary journey.

Theological reading

The verse is one of the apologetically and theologically MOST IMPORTANT single sentences in the Pauline corpus, performing a single explosive move: Paul reformulates the Shema (Israel's foundational monotheistic confession, Deuteronomy 6:4) Christologically, making Jesus INTERNAL to Israel's monotheism.

The Shema's text and Paul's split

Deuteronomy 6:4 (the Shema, foundational Jewish monotheistic confession):

Shema Yisrael, YHWH eloheinu, YHWH ehad, "Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one."

LXX rendering:

Kyrie, ho Theos hēmōn, kyrios heis estin, "Lord, our God, the Lord is one."

The Shema uses TWO divine titles for YHWH: Theos (God) and Kyrios (Lord, the Greek translation of the unutterable Tetragrammaton YHWH). Both terms refer to the same Deity, Israel's One God.

Paul's reformulation at 1 Corinthians 8:6:

all' hēmin heis Theos ho Patēr... kai heis Kyrios Iēsous Christos "yet for us there is but one God, the Father... and one Lord, Jesus Christ"

Paul takes the Shema's two divine titles and distributes them between Father and Son. The Theos (God) of the Shema is identified with the Father; the Kyrios (LORD = YHWH) of the Shema is identified with Jesus Christ. This is not a softening of monotheism, it is a CHRISTOLOGICAL EXPANSION of monotheism. Paul keeps the Shema's "one" (heis) intact; he reformulates who is included within the divine identity.

This is, structurally, the New Testament's most explicit single-verse statement of what scholars call "Christological monotheism", the inclusion of Jesus within the unique divine identity of the God of Israel without compromising monotheism.

Why this is apologetically and historically decisive

The reformulation is dated within ~25 years of the crucifixion. Paul writes 1 Corinthians c. AD 54-55. Christ died c. AD 30-33. The Shema-Christological-reformulation is therefore not a 4th-century Nicene innovation, not a Constantinian imposition, not a late-developing doctrine, it is in the EARLIEST extant Pauline letters, written by a Pharisee-trained Jewish apostle to a multi-ethnic Christian community as a settled apostolic teaching. Hurtado (Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, 2003) and Bauckham (Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity, 2008) make this their central historical-theological case against late-development theories of Christ's deity.

The argument-structure: the only plausible explanation for a Pharisee-trained Jewish apostle (whose monotheism was the load-bearing distinctive of his religious identity) reformulating the Shema Christologically within ~25 years of the crucifixion is that Christ's divine identity was already fixed in apostolic teaching from very early on, likely at the Resurrection encounter itself. Late-development theories (Christ's deity emerging in 4th-century Constantinian church) cannot explain Paul writing this in AD 54-55.

The agency-prepositions Christology

The verse's grammatical structure also encodes pre-existence Christology:

ex hou ta panta, "from whom are all things" (Father as source / origin)
di' hou ta panta, "through whom are all things" (Christ as agent / instrument)

The di' hou attribution to Christ, agency in creation, pairs Christ with the Father as creator. Compare:

John 1.3, "All things came into being through Him (di' autou), and apart from Him nothing came into being"
Colossians 1.16, "For by Him (en autō) all things were created... all things have been created through Him (di' autou) and for Him (eis auton)"
Hebrews 1.2, "through whom (di' hou) also He made the worlds"

The Pauline-Johannine-Hebraic convergence on Christ as agent-of-creation, dated across the 50s-60s-90s AD, is one of the strongest internal-coherence Christological data points in the NT.

Patristic and Reformation reception

Tertullian (Adversus Praxean 4-9, c. AD 213) uses 1 Cor 8:6 with John 1:1-3 + Col 1:16 against modalism: the verse's distinction (one God + one Lord) requires real Father-Son distinction; modalism's collapse of the Persons cannot account for the structure.
Athanasius (Discourses Against the Arians 2.9-15, c. AD 358), central anti-Arian text. Athanasius argues: kyrios applied to Christ within the Shema-reformulation context means YHWH; therefore Christ is YHWH; therefore Arius's Christ-as-creature is foreclosed.
Cyril of Alexandria (On the Unity of Christ, c. AD 438), emphasizes the unified-person Christ; the same Lord Jesus Christ who is the Shema's kyrios is the one who became flesh.
Augustine (De Trinitate 1.6.13, 5.13.14), uses the verse in his Trinitarian exposition; the Patēr + kyrios Iēsous distinction grounds real-Personal distinction within the unity-of-essence.
Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 39, a. 7, on the Persons of the Trinity), appeals to 1 Cor 8:6 for the Father-Son-and-Holy-Spirit distinct-yet-one structure.
Calvin (Commentary on 1 Corinthians 8:6), emphasizes both the monotheism AND the Christological inclusion: "the unity of the divine essence is here intimated, and at the same time the distinction of Persons in that unity."

Apologetic deployment

Against Islamic shirk (associationism) objection ("Trinitarianism is polytheism"): Paul, the Pharisee-trained Jewish apostle, writes Christological-monotheism within Israel's monotheism. The Shema-reformulation isn't a softening of monotheism, it's an expansion of who is INCLUDED in the unique divine identity. Christianity's monotheism is at least as rigorous as Judaism's (which Paul shared) AND it includes Jesus.
Against late-development theories (Bart Ehrman How Jesus Became God, 2014; the historical-Jesus quest's "low Christology" assumptions): the AD 54-55 dating of Christological monotheism in 1 Cor 8:6 is decisive. The deity of Christ was not a 4th-century Nicene innovation; it was apostolic-foundation in the 50s.
Against unitarian / JW / Mormon Christologies: the Shema-distribution makes Jesus Christ as Kyrios equivalent to the Shema's YHWH, not a created intermediary, not an exalted human, not an emanation. Christ is internal to the unique divine identity that the Shema confesses.
For early-high-Christology (Hurtado / Bauckham / Wright case): the verse is exhibit A. Pair with Philippians 2.5-11 (the Christ-hymn) and Colossians 1.15-17 (the cosmic-Christ hymn) for the trio of pre-Pauline Christological hymns confirming early-and-high-from-the-start Christology.

Key words (Greek)

one, εἷς / heis (G1520): cardinal numeral, "one." Used twice in v. 6 (one God, one Lord), preserves the Shema's ehad / heis monotheistic numerical commitment while redistributing between Father and Son.
Lord, Κύριος / Kyrios (G2962): the LXX standard rendering for the Hebrew Tetragrammaton YHWH. When Paul applies Kyrios to Jesus in the Shema-reformulation context, he is identifying Jesus with the YHWH of Israel's monotheistic confession. This is the Hurtado / Bauckham central exegetical claim.
from whom, ἐξ οὗ / ex hou: source-origin preposition; applied to the Father, the ultimate source of all things.
through whom, δι' οὗ / di' hou: agency-instrument preposition; applied to the Son, Christ as agent of creation. Pairs with John 1:3 (di' autou), Col 1:16 (di' autou), Heb 1:2 (di' hou) as the agency-of-creation Christology.

Cross-references

Deuteronomy 6.4, the Shema; Paul's source text being Christologically reformulated
John 1.1-3, Logos + creation; same agency-of-creation Christology
Colossians 1.15-17, cosmic-Christ hymn; sister Christological-monotheism statement
Philippians 2.5-11, Christ-hymn; sister early-high-Christology text
Hebrews 1.2-3, agency-of-creation parallel
1 Timothy 2.5, companion heis Theos kai heis mesitēs monotheism + unique-mediator (just-promoted rich hub)
John 8.58, egō eimi; pre-existence + identification with YHWH companion