1 Corinthians 1:18 vs. “The Old Rugged Cross”

George Bennard (recorded by Carrie Underwood) · checked 2026-08-21

What we checked

Passage1 Corinthians 1:18 chapter ↗

Translation shownBSB (Berean Standard Bible)

Presents itself asinspired-by

Categorynot a quote

AlbumMy Savior · 2021

Words addressed tonot addressed to God (sung about Him)

Teaching or experienceexperience (the singer’s story)

Graded against the standard

Quotation criteria not graded: this song never presents its words as scripture

Applies to every song the Name held holy · God shown holy · true of God · the standard

✓Reverent treatment

✓ What's good

The hymn never says it is quoting at all: no chapter and verse, no translation named, nothing framed as scripture
What it says about Christ is checkable and true to the text. He left glory, bore the cross, died for sinners, and will call His own home
It keeps the contempt that verse 18 names rather than tidying it away, and it says plainly that the cross is despised
The affection it expresses has a biblical address in Galatians 6:14, the reference the hymn's own 1915 printing carried

⚠ Cautions

Paul's subject in verse 18 is the message of the cross, the thing preached. The hymn's subject is the cross as an object. Read the verse through the hymn and that swap is easy to miss
The scripture references attaching this hymn to 1 Corinthians 1 come from hymnal editors, not from the songwriter, and they mark a theme rather than a quotation
The hymn's devotion to the cross itself has been contested since the 1920s. That argument is about emphasis, and the hymn's own words do name Christ, but a singer should know the question exists
Hymnals print three or four stanzas, so what a congregation actually sings varies, and the stanza that names Jesus outright is one of the ones sometimes dropped

Verse Proof

1 Corinthians 1:18

The text in BSB (Berean Standard Bible)

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

Paul is writing to a church that has split into parties named after its favourite preachers, and the first seventeen verses of the letter are an appeal to stop. He ends that appeal by saying Christ sent him to preach the gospel, and not with clever speech, so that the cross of Christ would not be emptied of its power. Verse 18 is the reason he gives. The subject of the sentence is not the wooden cross but the announcement about it, the thing Paul preaches, and the sentence sorts its hearers into two groups by what they make of that announcement. Both descriptions are in progress rather than settled: those who are perishing, those who are being saved. Verses 19 to 25 continue the same thought, with Jews asking for signs and Greeks for wisdom while Paul keeps preaching a crucified Christ.

What the song says, described not quoted

A hymn of 1913, printed with four stanzas in most hymnals and three in some, each followed by the same refrain. The singer looks at a cross standing on a hill in the distance and calls it a sign of suffering and disgrace, then says he loves it because of who was killed there for a lost world. The second stanza grants that the cross is held in contempt, says it draws the singer anyway, and credits the Lamb of God with leaving glory to carry it to Calvary. The third stanza names Jesus outright and finds beauty in a blood-stained object because of what was accomplished on it. The fourth pledges lifelong loyalty to the cross, accepts the disgrace that comes with it, and looks ahead to being called home to share Christ's glory. The refrain is the singer's resolve: to cherish the cross and hold on to it until it is traded for a crown.

Two independent lyric sources agree on the grammar that matters here. The verbs the singer aims at the cross are love, cherish, cling and exchange. Christ is named directly once, with two titles elsewhere. Nowhere in the hymn is God or Christ addressed in the second person, so the whole text speaks about them rather than to them. Of roughly twenty lines, four or five state something creed-able about Christ and the rest report what the singer sees, feels, resolves and expects. No chapter and verse is cited in the hymn, and no translation is named.

Paul's sentence has one subject with two predicates. The subject is the message of the cross. To one set of hearers it is foolishness, and to the other it is the power of God. The hymn keeps both halves of that reception, the contempt and the value, and it moves them both onto the object. In the verse, what the world finds absurd is what is preached. In the hymn, what the world despises is the cross itself, and what the singer loves is the cross itself. The hymn also adds something the verse does not contain. Paul does not say he loves the cross. He says the word of the cross is God's power to those being saved. An affection directed at the cross does have a text behind it, and it is a nearby one: Galatians 6:14, where Paul says he will boast in nothing except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. The 1915 printing of this hymn carried Galatians 6:14 at its head. So the hymn's central figure is scriptural. It is answering a different sentence than the one on this page.

· Not a quote: The hymn quotes nothing and cites no verse. So the word-for-word standard does not apply. Its affection for the cross as an object matches Galatians 6:14 rather than the sentence in 1 Corinthians 1:18. That sentence's subject is the message about the cross, not the thing itself.

▸ Official upload. Now listen with the proof in mind.

In Paul the cross is something announced. In the hymn it is something held.

Why it matters

This is one of the most widely printed hymns in the English language, in something like 447 hymnals, and hymnal editors have pointed it at 1 Corinthians 1 for decades. That is worth checking precisely because the pointing is close to right. The chapter and the hymn are both about a shameful object that turns out to be worth everything.

The difference is where each one puts the weight. Paul's verse says the preaching divides people. The hymn says the object holds the singer. Nothing in the hymn contradicts the verse, but a singer who has the hymn by heart and reads verse 18 quickly may take Paul to be defending an emblem when he is defending a sermon. That distinction is the whole point of verses 19 to 25, where the thing the world calls folly is stated as a message: Christ crucified, preached.

Is it safe to dwell on?

Sung on repeat, this song moves between God and the singer.

The dwelling tag is mixed, and the mix is unusually easy to see here. The nouns belong to the cross and to Christ. The verbs belong to the singer, who loves, cherishes, clings and expects to trade. Sung on repeat, what that plants is a settled loyalty to something the world finds embarrassing, and a refusal to be embarrassed by it. That is a good thing to have planted, and it is close to what Paul is after in the chapter, since verse 18 exists to tell a divided church not to be ashamed of a message that sounds absurd.

What repetition here does not plant is the message itself. The hymn gives you an image and a resolve, and it gives them well. If you want the sentence that goes with the image, read 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 alongside it, or Galatians 6:14, which is the verse this hymn was first printed under. The image and the sentence hold each other up.

Helpful comparison

It is worth being exact about who connected this hymn to this passage, because the answer is not the songwriter. The 1915 printing headed the hymn with Galatians 6:14. Hymnary's text authority page lists more than a dozen scripture references for the text, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 among them, and the United Methodist Hymnal at number 504 lists 1 Corinthians 1:22-25. Those are editors' index entries, added later, grouping the hymn under a theme. They are useful and they are not citations by the author. Bennard's own documented account describes meditating on John 3:16, not on 1 Corinthians.

The hymn's treatment of the cross has been argued over for a century, which is itself worth knowing. The hymnologist Erik Routley judged the affection misplaced in the strongest terms. In 1924 Frank C. Huston published an answering hymn making the point that it is Christ, not the cross, who redeems. Older hymnody addresses the cross directly too, as the Latin hymn beginning "Faithful cross" does, so the figure is not an invention of 1913. The argument is real and it is old, and it is about emphasis rather than about error.

Sources

Carrie Underwood — The Old Rugged Cross (Official Audio Video) · (the recording checked for this proof; oEmbed reports the channel as carrieunderwoodVEVO)
Carrie Underwood official site — My Savior · (album release 26 March 2021, thirteen tracks, "The Old Rugged Cross" as track 10)
Hymnology Archive — The Old Rugged Cross · (Bennard's own account, the contested completion sites, the 13 February 1913 copyright registration, the Galatians 6:14 heading in the 1915 printing, and the Routley and Huston criticism)
Hymnary.org — text authority, "On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross" · (George Bennard 1913, meter 12.8.12.8 with refrain, 447 hymnals, and the scripture reference list including 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 and Galatians 6:14)
Hymnary.org — The United Methodist Hymnal 504 · (the hymnal's own scripture reference for this hymn, 1 Corinthians 1:22-25)
Timeless Truths hymn library — The Old Rugged Cross · (first lyric source: four stanzas with refrain, the verbs of attachment, no second-person address to God)
Hymnal.net 618 — The Old Rugged Cross · (second, independent lyric source, agreeing on the verbs and the absence of second-person address; printed here with three stanzas under the heading "Glorying in the Cross")
Wikipedia — The Old Rugged Cross · (composition dates and places, Rodeheaver's purchase of the rights, and the Carrie Underwood 2021 recording)

Corrections

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