What does 1 Corinthians 1:26 mean?

Paul has described why so many intelligent, well-educated, and thoughtful people reject the gospel message. Many bright and rational persons recoil at the suggestion that the Son of God was crucified on a Roman cross to pay the price for human sin. From their perspective, such a god would be foolish and weak. Anyone who believes this, by extension of their thinking, must also be foolish and weak.

Paul now asks the Corinthian Christians to think about everyone in their congregation. He wants them to evaluate those God called to believe in Jesus on a human scale. How do they stack up? His answer is not flattering to them. Few of them were wise by human standards. In other words, they didn't have may PhDs or academics or skilled speakers who could debate with eloquence.

In addition, few of the believers in Corinth had much power, in human terms. They did not command armies or run large corporations. They did not possess extraordinary wealth so that they could control the actions of many other people in service to themselves.

Finally, not many of the Corinthian believers were born into nobility. In the highly segregated social system of Paul's day, being born into the right family brought with it incredible privilege and status that was difficult to lose and impossible to earn. Those people didn't tend to come to Christ and join the Corinthian church.

Paul describes those who are in Christ in Corinth, and in most places, in the following verses. His emphasis here is not to denounce learning, since the Bible is full of exhortations towards wisdom and reason (Acts 17:11; 1 Peter 3:15; Colossians 2:8). Rather, he is pointing out the enormous gap between merely understanding the gospel and accepting it (James 2:19).