Verse 2—"I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified." The worst Bible study I was ever a part of was a men's morning study at my internship at a church in Kauai in college. One of the men there was proud that he had never read any book but the Bible. He used verses like this as his rationale. Predictably, he was one of the angriest, nastiest, most judgmental and theologically suspect people I have ever met.
Of course, Paul does not literally "know nothing" but Christ. He quotes Greek and Roman poets. He knows the Hebrew Bible inside and out. But his point is that he did not use rhetorical force and Greek philosophy to make his case. He used nothing but his knowledge of the murdered king to preach the mysteries of God. And verse 5 tells us how his convincing actually worked—not through argument but through miracles, demonstrations of the Spirit and of power.
The critical thing is that "knowing nothing" is not the goal. Verse 6—they do speak wisdom to the mature. You should want to get to that point. You should want to grow into the kind of person who can receive and speak God's wisdom. Paul is not celebrating ignorance. He's saying he didn't rely on rhetorical tricks. The guy from Kauai was proudly stuck at step one and calling it faithfulness.
Verses 9-10 are often pulled out of context to say that there are things we cannot know or perceive about God. But that's the opposite of what Paul is saying. The point of verses 9-10 is that God has revealed to us those things that "eye has not seen and ear has not heard." We have received the Spirit of God, through whom we know the deep things of God. We should not be satisfied with shallow, skin-deep, rocks-skipping-across-the-surface knowledge of God and Their mysteries. We should know "even the depths of God."
Verse 13 speaks of "words taught by the Spirit"—perhaps a reference to speaking in tongues or some sort of prayer language. This will become a much bigger topic later in the letter.
Questions for reflection:
Where have you seen anti-intellectualism masquerade as faithfulness—and what damage did it do?
What would it look like to pursue "even the depths of God" rather than settling for surface-level faith?