The apostle's call for unity in the congregation (chapters 1–4) has been at the same time a call to reaffirm and realize the consequences of the new self-understanding that is given with life in Christ. Paul's hearers are to understand themselves as “God's church in Corinth,” called by the holy, gracious, and faithful God whose wisdom and saving power have been disclosed in “Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” Both individually and corporately they belong to Christ and therefore to God (3.21–23).

Throughout the first four chapters, but especially in the excursus of 1.18–2.16, Paul has been distinguishing at least implicitly between “this age” (or “the world”) and an age that is yet to come. Although the coming age, which is “God's reign” (4.20), has been inaugurated in the cross where God's saving power is already at work, the Corinthians would be quite wrong to regard it as somehow fulfilled already (4.8). This “already but not yet” of life in Christ means that the believers in Corinth must reckon for the time being with a dual identity. Fundamentally, in their belonging to Christ and to God they belong to God's reign. Thus, as God's church they comprise an eschatological community, a community of the end-time. However, as God's church in Corinth they also comprise a “present-time” community with a specific social location and continuing social identity.

To the extent that Paul's congregation was noticed at all by the wider Corinthian public, it was likely regarded as simply another of the city's offbeat religious societies with roots in distant parts of the Mediterranean world.