1 Corinthians 2:6–16
We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written:
“No eye has seen, no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him”—
but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.
This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment:
“For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
IT IS MORE THAN A LITTLE IRONIC that a passage that should teach us to be humble has been used by some people to justify an astonishing measure of arrogance. These people voice their opinions as to what God is like and what God is doing, and if you challenge them at any point they may reply in the words of Paul in verse 12: “We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.” More than once I have been informed that, by contrast, I am one of the people Paul describes in verse 14: “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.” In other words, if you agree with such people, you are spiritual; if you disagree, you are not. Press them a little harder, and ask how they know their interpretation is correct and what checks they accept on their own authority, and they may reply, with supreme confidence, in the words of verse 15: “The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment.” In the worst cases, this leads to flagrant authoritarianism—utterly self-focused leaders who are accountable to no one but themselves.
Almost by way of reaction, other people have argued that this passage says nothing about the Spirit helping people to understand the truth, but only about the Spirit helping people to apply the truth to themselves. If biblical interpretation is held hostage to some sort of mystical experience of the Spirit, they say, and taken out of the realm of words, history, grammar, and exegesis, then there is no logical stopping place. At the end of the day we are locked into subjectivism, each opinion claiming to be taught by the Spirit. Biblical interpretation has to be out there in the marketplace of ideas, and atheistic Bible interpreters can be just as right, just as often, as faithful, believing interpreters—it’s just that apart from the Spirit they are unable to apply the text that they rightly interpret to themselves. Of course, this sounds like a wonderful defense of the objectivity of truth. But one might be excused for thinking that this is not an obvious reading of verses 12–16.
In fact, from the Reformation on, these verses have been used primarily to justify quite a different proposition. Here the point has been that those “without the Spirit” (v. 14) are so dead that it is folly to think that arguments can bring them to faith. The things of the Spirit are simply “foolishness” to such people, who “cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.” In other words, the Holy Spirit himself must do an antecedent work in our hearts and minds if we are going to believe. Without his help, gospel truths will always seem alien to us.
That is much closer to what this passage is about, but even so it is important to set the chapter in its context. If we are to make sense of this passage and discover how the cross of Christ remains a controlling theme, we must do two things.
First, we must steadfastly grasp that this passage is a continuation of the argument begun in 1:18. As we have seen, the last half of chapter 1 exalts “the message of the cross” (1:18) over against the “wisdom” of the world. When he talks about his own priorities as a preacher (2:1–5), Paul is still talking about the message of the cross. His “message” and his “preaching” (2:4) have as their content not “wise and persuasive words” but “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (2:2). So when Paul now goes on to insist that his message is in one sense “a message of wisdom” after all (2:6), we are not to think that Paul has gravitated to some new message. Far from it: he is still talking about what it meant when “the rulers of this age . . . crucified the Lord of glory” (2:8). In other words, Paul has not launched into a new topic, a fresh discussion of esoteric wisdom. He is still focused on the message of the cross—and we shall fail to understand this chapter unless we bear that fact in mind.
Second, we must observe that the argument in these verses is largely set up in terms of three controlling contrasts. These three contrasts overlap a little, and they must be rightly understood.
First Contrast: Those Who Receive God’s Wisdom and Those Who Do Not (2:6–10a)
Paul has already shown (in 1:18–25) that the message of the crucified Messiah, judged by the world to be just so much nonsense, is in fact the most momentous display of God’s wisdom. For some it is a message of weakness and foolishness, but for those who believe, Christ is both “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1:24). At this point Paul wants to unpack a little more just what it is in this wisdom that makes it impossible for people to recognize it, the more so if they themselves have ostensibly been pursuing God’s wisdom.
So Paul begins to set up the contrast. He has just finished explaining his own resolution to avoid manipulative rhetoric, mere eloquence, but he does not want for a moment to risk giving the impression that the message of the cross is “foolish” in every sense: “We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing” (2:6). The one word in this verse that has precipitated endless discussion is the word mature, sometimes rendered “perfect.” Very often the word is connected with a subset of all true believers, namely, the “mature” believers. In other words, taken in this way it implicitly introduces a distinction in the fellowship of Christians: there are mature believers, and there are immature believers—a point that Paul himself makes at the beginning of chapter 3, as we shall see.
But such an interpretation really does not fit here. The mature in this context really must refer to all Christians, who cherish the message of the cross, over against the world that rejects the message of the cross. The question then becomes, Why does Paul choose this word, the word mature, to describe all Christians in this context? Could he not have guessed that it would lead to all kinds of misinterpretation?
Almost certainly Paul chose this word because the Corinthians themselves loved it—and loved to apply it to themselves. They thought of themselves as mature, and, without suggesting that Paul was not a Christian, they thought of Paul and his message as immature. In the next chapter Paul will find it necessary to tell them that, within the Christian camp, they are the ones who are immature (3:1–4). But before he gets there, he must challenge their fundamental categories. All Christians are “mature” in the sense that they have come to terms with the message of the cross, while all others, by definition, have not. The message of Christ crucified is the only fundamental dividing line in the human race.
Paul’s point is then reasonably clear. Just as our “message of wisdom” is “not the wisdom of this age” (2:6), so those who accept God’s message of wisdom do not belong to this age. In fact, “the wisdom of this age,” even if the rulers of this age espouse it, remains without eternal value. The rulers themselves “are coming to nothing” (2:6). Why then should Christians be infatuated with paper heroes who win the passing applause of a dying world, but who from an eternal perspective are without significance? They remind the reader of those the psalmist describes: not only will the wicked perish, but “the way of the wicked will perish” (Ps. 1:6).
The “rulers of this age” is not here a reference to demons or even restrictively to political leaders, but rather to those who rule the outlook and values of any age—the “wise man,” the “scholar,” and the “philosopher” of 1:20 and the “wise,” the “influential,” and those “of noble birth” of 1:26. They are the best the world can advance, yet they oppose the message of the cross. Why then should we side with them as to what is important?
Their wisdom is without ultimate value. It is not what we proclaim. “No,” Paul writes, accenting the difference between the “rulers” and what Christians cherish, “we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began” (2:7). This “wisdom,” the wisdom of the cross, is characterized by three things.
First, it is, literally, “wisdom in a mystery,” what the New International Version calls “God’s wisdom” (2:7). It is wisdom “that has been hidden” for a long time, but that has now been revealed. That is the dominant meaning of mystery in the New Testament (often rendered “secret” or “secret things” in the NIV). That means that Paul thinks of the message of the cross as something that had been hidden in the past, but that has now been revealed.
We need to think rather carefully about this. The New Testament writers are constantly saying that the coming of Jesus Christ and the good news he brings have been prophesied in the ancient Scriptures. Here and in many other places, Paul (and some other New Testament writers too, for that matter) argues that the coming of Jesus Christ and the good news he brings have been hidden in the past but are now revealed. How can exactly the same gospel be said, on the one hand, to have been prophesied and now fulfilled, and on the other, to have been hidden but now revealed?
The question is not an easy one and is tied to some of the most disputed matters in the history of the church. I cannot probe these things here. But I do note that in one remarkable passage Paul dares to bring both of these themes together. At the end of Romans, he writes,
Now to him who is able to establish you by my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all nations might believe and obey him—to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen. (Rom. 16:25–27, emphasis added)
This is astonishing. At one and the same time, Paul says that the gospel has been “hidden for long ages past,” yet now that it has been revealed and made known this act of disclosure is through the prophetic writings! So is it hidden or not?7 If it has been hidden, how can it be made known through the Scriptures? If it is now made known through the Scriptures, how can one reasonably say that it has been hidden, when the Old Testament Scriptures have been around for a long time?
Paul’s point, I think, is that believing the Old Testament Scriptures are true is not enough. After all, until he became a Christian, Paul himself passionately believed in what we would today call the Old Testament—but that did not ensure that he found there the message of the crucified Messiah. It was not until he met the resurrected Jesus on the Damascus road that he was forced to reexamine the entire structure of his beliefs. And then he read the Old Testament with new eyes. I briefly traced some of that thought in the first chapter of this book.
The point is that however much the Old Testament points to Jesus, much of this prophecy is in veiled terms—in types and shadows and structures of thought. The sacrificial system prepares the way for the supreme sacrifice; the office of high priest anticipates the supreme intermediary between God and sinful human beings, the man Christ Jesus; the Passover displays God’s wrath and provides a picture of the ultimate Passover Lamb whose blood averts that wrath; the announcement of a new covenant (Jer. 31) and a new priesthood (Ps. 110) pronounce the obsolescence in principle of the old covenant and priesthood. Hypothetically, if there had been some perfect people around to observe what was going on, people with an unblemished heart for God, they might well have observed the patterns and understood the plan. But the world has been peopled with sinners since the fall, and the Old Testament Scriptures God gave were often in some measure misunderstood. That there was human fault in this misunderstanding is presupposed by Jesus himself when he berates his followers: “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” (Luke 24:25–26). Yet at the same time, these matters had to be veiled. If the prophecies about Jesus had all been crystal clear and absolutely specific and univocal, one could not imagine how the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate and Herod could have so radically misunderstood what they were doing. True, they should have understood anyway. But, Paul says, empirically none of them did: “None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (2:8). Thus, it was God’s wise plan to have wicked human beings effect his own good purposes of redemption; it was his matchless grace and wisdom that provided revelation clear enough to be understood after the events to which it pointed had occurred, but veiled enough that rebellious sinners would in some measure misinterpret it and put it together in wrong ways.
So the “message of wisdom,” the message of the cross that we proclaim, is “God’s secret wisdom,” a wisdom that was in large measure hidden for long ages until the Messiah was crucified.
Second, this wisdom has always been God’s plan, and he destined it “for our glory before time began” (2:7). Paul would not want any of his readers to think that, just because it has in some measure been hidden in the past, its present unveiling therefore marks it as brand new, some fresh departure in the mind of God. Far from it. In God’s mind it stretches back “before time began.” And it was God himself who decided to bring it to full disclosure now; in short, he “destined [it] for our glory.”
This is a wonderful thought, and one to which other New Testament writers allude. Peter said that it was revealed to Old Testament Scripture writers “that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel” (1 Pet. 1:12). Jesus Christ “was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake” (1 Pet. 1:20). At one level, even some of the moral lessons derivable from the sad accounts of human failure and defection under the old covenant are for our good: “These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11). The great heroes of faith under the old covenant did not themselves receive what had been promised; “God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect” (Heb. 11:40).
Implicitly, of course, this means it is the most astonishing folly for the Corinthians to adopt the positions espoused by the esteemed authorities of a culture that does not know God. God has purposed to bring his plan of redemption to fruition in the lives of all believers who live this side of the cross. Why then should they depreciate this matchless heritage from God Almighty by becoming infatuated with the faddish fancies of the cross-denying opinion-makers who belong to an age that is passing away? It is all so ironic and tragic.
In fact, the irony begins with Jesus’s brutal death. The authorities who crucified Jesus were in fact, quite unwittingly, carrying out God’s purposes. As the praying Christians put it in Acts 4, “indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen” (Acts 4:27–28). They thought they were doing away with a messianic pretender; in fact, they were illegally and immorally executing “the Lord of glory.” They thought they were so wise, so politically astute; in fact, by their folly they brought to pass, in God’s perfect providence, his own wise plan—the very plan that they dismissed as foolishness. Amazing grace: in God’s wise purposes, they killed the Lord of life.
Paul concludes his point by citing Scripture, apparently an amalgam from Isaiah 64:4 and 65:17 in the Greek Old Testament he was using. “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (2:9). Of course not, since God’s wise plan was at that point still “secret,” still “in a mystery,” largely hidden. “But”8 now “God has revealed it to us” (2:10).
So although these words are often quoted at funerals to refer to what glories await the believer after death (which is surely a good thought), Paul uses these words to refer to what has been hidden in the past but is now revealed to believers.
Again, then, we discover how wretchedly foolish it is to honor with our allegiance the siren opinion-makers of our day, if they have no real understanding of the cross. To us has been given the fantastic privilege of benefiting from God’s immeasurably wise plan of redemption. Shall we sell this awesome heritage for a mess of faddish pottage?
There is no deep and stable spirituality that does not acknowledge what an utterly profound privilege it is to know God and be reconciled to him by the crucified Messiah.
But there is a third element that characterizes the wisdom of God. Paul barely refers to it, and then it takes over in his presentation and becomes the locus of the second contrast. It is this: Even though God has now so definitively brought his all-wise plan to fruition in the gospel of the crucified Messiah, people still do not believe. They still do not see that his plan is wise. If we the “mature” have come to grasp it, it is because “God has revealed it to us by his Spirit” (2:10).
In other words, there has not only been an objective, public act of divine self-disclosure in the crucifixion of God’s own Son, but there must also be a private work of God, by his Spirit, in the mind and heart of the individual. That is what distinguishes the believer from the unbeliever, the “mature” from the people of this age and the rulers of this age. If we “see” the truth of the gospel, therefore, it has nothing to do with our brilliance or insight; it has to do with the Spirit of God. If we should express unqualified gratitude to God for the gift of his Son, we should express no less gratitude to God for the gift of the Spirit who enables us to grasp the gospel of his Son.
And that brings us to the second contrast.
Second Contrast: The Spirit of God and the Spirit of the World (2:10b–13)
We have learned that those who receive God’s wisdom, the message of the cross, are distinguished from “this age” by the Spirit of God, who reveals this wisdom to them. But why should this sort of “outside” help be needed? “Knowledge is knowledge,” someone might say. “If God has disclosed himself in real events in real history, why should he still be so inaccessible to some people? Despite all they say, aren’t Christians making an appeal to an esoteric, non-testable kind of knowledge that not everyone can enjoy?”
But note how the question has been put. It has been cast exclusively in terms of empirical knowledge—like the kind of knowledge that is based on repeatable experiments in a chemistry laboratory. But all of us are intuitively aware of other dimensions of “knowledge.” For instance, our observation of a concrete historical event at which we were present, or our knowledge of people, or of a specific person, is tied to personal experience of a sort that is not strictly repeatable. How much more difficult is it to understand exactly what is meant by “knowing” God—a Being on a different order from the horizontal relationships that ordinarily occupy us?
Add one more factor: the problem is not only that God is much greater than we are, but that we are so rebellious that we distort much of the information about himself that he has graciously provided. If we are deeply infected with “the spirit of the world” (v. 12), if “human wisdom” (v. 13) is what we normally lean on, we must recognize, shamefacedly, that in 1 Corinthians 1–2 Paul does not give us a very high estimate of such “advantages.”
Paul’s point, then, is that the possibility of knowing God and of understanding his ways does not belong to any human being as an essential component of his or her being. The distance is too great; our self-centeredness is too deep. And nothing in “the wisdom of this age” (v. 6) can help us.
A wisdom proper to this age is . . . one that arises out of and is marked by rebellion against God; it represents (however splendid and spiritual—or scientific—it may appear) the creature’s attempt to secure his position over against the Creator; in a word it is (as far as men are concerned) man-centered.9
What is required, then, is revelation. The agent who brings such revelation to us is the Spirit of God.
Among “knowing” beings—humans, angels, God—there are high barriers that keep one knowing being from understanding fully what another knowing being is thinking about. No matter how well I know you, I will never know all your thoughts; no matter how well you know me, you will never know all of mine. How much less shall we understand the thoughts of the angel Gabriel when, say, he spoke to Mary (Luke 1:26–38). However, the one “knowing being” who knows all thoughts, even the thoughts of God, is God himself. Or, to put it another way, “The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God” (2:10b).
The word spirit, of course, is flexible in the Bible. It can be used to refer to the “interior” of a human being, the “inmost part”—almost equivalent to mind. Thus when Paul asks, “For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him?” (2:11), he means that the thoughts of an individual human being are in large measure masked to all other human beings. Only the one person really knows what that one person is thinking. Of course, this is a human limitation: “Who among men knows the thoughts” of another? God faces no such limitations as he searches our thoughts; we certainly face that limitation when we try to discern one another’s thoughts, let alone his. Using the same language of “spirit,” Paul drives his point home: “In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God” (v. 11). That means that if we are to understand God, to think his thoughts after him, truly to “know” him, we are going to have to receive the Spirit of God. We simply cannot find him by ourselves.
But we Christians have received the Spirit of God; that is what constitutes us Christians. “We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God” (2:12), and the purpose of this gift is “that we may understand what God has freely given us” (2:12). Now we see the two primary dimensions of revelation very clearly. The first is in the public arena. The words “what God has freely given us” refer to the cross of the Messiah and all that he has achieved for us. These things come to us out of God’s matchless grace; he “has freely given” his people these gifts. The cross achieves the redemption of the people of God; it also displays God’s unfathomable wisdom, bringing to open display a plan that had mercifully been “hidden” in ages past. But the sad fact is that even so we would not have understood “what God has freely given us.” Such understanding is dependent on a second dimension of revelation, one that takes place within the individual. Without it, no one would ever have understood what God had revealed of himself and of his wisdom in the public arena. Our obtuseness, our deep self-centeredness, our love of pomp and power and prestige, simply would not have allowed us to understand the cross or our need of it. In short, our very lostness demanded the work of the Spirit of God, to the end that we might “understand what God has freely given us” (2:12).
What a great God we have! Not only does he redeem us through the ignominious crucifixion of his much-loved Son, but he sends us his Spirit to enable us to understand what he has done. So obtuse and blind are we that we would not have begun to grasp “what God has freely given us” unless God had taken this additional step.
But it is this same Spirit who has prompted Paul to preach the message the way he has. This message, writes Paul, “is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words” (2:13). The Greek of this last clause is difficult,10 but the New International Version has probably got it right: “expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.” But what does this mean? It surely means something like this: In his ministry, Paul, prompted by the Spirit, found himself explaining spiritual things (the message of the cross, brought home to people by the Spirit, v. 12) in spiritual words—that is, in words appropriate to the nature of the message. In other words, Paul insists it is the Holy Spirit himself who has taught him to avoid the “wisdom of word” that empties the cross of its power (1:17) and who has led him to eschew the kind of fancy, rhetorical preaching characterized by “wise and persuasive words” (2:1–5).
Above all, then, Paul focuses on the message of the cross. The spirit of the world cannot make sense of it; the Spirit of God enables those who have this Spirit to understand it. That same Spirit prompts the spiritually-minded, like Paul, to preach it and teach it in appropriate ways. They will strenuously avoid all ostentatious display; they will abandon all cheap manipulation; they will be happy to embrace the scandal of the cross, for the cross is what has redeemed them. They will be wary of “gospel” preaching that talks much about God meeting our needs and enabling us to feel fulfilled, if it is not squarely anchored in the message of the cross. They will want to use plain, clear, forceful, truthful, frank, compassionate, compelling, cross-centered speech—“spiritual” language that is appropriate to the spiritual message they are bearing. For they recognize that the Spirit of God who has opened their eyes to embrace the cross has also taught them to proclaim “Christ crucified” in a way that conforms with the humbling immensity of the message.
Third Contrast: The “Natural” Person and the “Spiritual” Person (2:14–16)
One might be forgiven for thinking that Paul has dealt with these fundamental contrasts long enough. He has contrasted those who receive God’s wisdom with those who do not (2:6–10a); he has contrasted the Spirit of God with the spirit of the world (2:10b–13). Why this further step? Might it not be a bit redundant?
But Paul wants to make sure that his readers fully grasp their utter dependence on the Holy Spirit, for nothing else will so quickly humble their endless pretensions to greatness and all the divisiveness, self-centeredness, and lovelessness that follow hard on the heels of such puffery. That is why the apostle takes this further step.
What Paul does, then, is contrast “the man without the Spirit” (v. 14; some translations render this “the natural man”) with “the spiritual man” (v. 15). By the time he has finished with this contrast he will have made it very clear why we must have the Holy Spirit if we are to make sense of the gospel at all. Paul says two things about those who do not have the Spirit, about these “natural” people.
First, he insists that they do not “accept the things that come from the Spirit of God” for a very simple reason: such things “are foolishness” to them. At this point Paul is not insisting that human beings without the Spirit are unable to grasp spiritual things (though that is exactly what he will say in a moment), but that empirically they do not do so. How can they? One does not clamor to embrace what one finds foolish. What they find foolish, in the context of chapters 1–2, is the message of Christ crucified, “the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe” (1:21). These wonderful, life-transforming, redeeming things from the Spirit of God are dismissed as folly, for they are predicated on a crucified Messiah who does not easily fit into the triumphalistic biases of autonomous human beings. This is nothing other than the conclusion of 1:18–25 and of 2:10b–13.
Second, Paul insists that human beings “cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (2:14, emphasis added). This is the complementary truth to verse 12. There we were told that the Spirit was given to us (i.e., to believers) so “that we may understand what God has freely given us.” Here Paul rules out the possibility that anyone could possibly understand this without the Spirit’s aid. The focus is on our utter inability.
I remember giving a copy of John Stott’s Basic Christianity to a bright graduate student at Cambridge University about twenty years ago. Some months later I followed up on her to find out what she had made of the book. She said she had read it right through and had been so suspicious that she had actually looked up many of the references in the Bible to make sure that the author wasn’t trying to slip something past her. She had come to a conclusion: this Christianity business was OK for good people, but it wasn’t for her.
Isn’t that astonishing? How could an intelligent graduate student so completely miss what Stott was talking about? Somehow none of it had come together for her. The things of God remained foolishness to her, because they are spiritually discerned.
Often, of course, God uses varied and long-term means to bring about understanding. I and others talked with her at length about the gospel, and eventually she became a Christian. But I have talked with many who have not become Christians. What is the distinguishing factor between those with whom I have talked who have become believers, like this young woman, and those with whom I have talked who remain unbelievers? The ultimate distinction is in the gift of the Spirit. Various Christian workers may do their bit, but, to use the analogy that Paul himself deploys in the next chapter, a Paul may sow the seed and an Apollos may water it, but only God can make the plant grow and bring forth fruit (3:7).
What we must constantly remember is that this human inability to understand spiritual things is a culpable inability. It is not that God makes us constitutionally unable to understand him, and then toys with us for his own amusement. Rather, he has made us for himself, but we have run from him. The heart of our lostness is our profound self-focus. We do not want to know him, if knowing him is on his terms. We are happy to have a god we can more or less manipulate; we do not want a god to whom we admit that we are rebels in heart and mind, that we do not deserve his favor, and that our only hope is in his pardoning and transforming grace. We certainly cannot fathom a powerful Creator who takes the place of an odious criminal in order to save us from the judgment we deserve.
Or, more precisely, we cannot fathom such things unless we have the Spirit of God. That is what it means, in this context, to be a “spiritual man” (v. 15). The spiritual person is simply the person with the Spirit of God. The Spirit opens up entire vistas of understanding that would otherwise remain opaque to us. “The spiritual man [i.e., the person with the Spirit] makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment” (2:15).
Unfortunately, this verse has been ripped out of its context to justify the most appalling arrogance. Some people think of themselves as especially spiritual and discerning Christians and judge that this verse authorizes them, the elite of the elect, to make well-nigh infallible judgments across a broad range of matters. Moreover, they insist, they are so spiritual that others do not have the right to judge them. After all, does not the apostle say that the “spiritual man” is “not subject to any man’s judgment”?
This simply will not do. In the context, the “spiritual man” is the person with the Holy Spirit, over against “the man without the Spirit.” The “spiritual man,” in short, is the Christian, not a member of an elite coterie of Christians. When Paul says that “the spiritual man makes judgments about all things,” in this context he cannot possibly take “all things” absolutely—as if the spiritual person, the Christian, is particularly equipped to judge the scientific evidence for a particular quark or wonderfully suited to assess the latest cortisone technique for relieving bursitis. The categories of the context must prevail. “As someone has said, ‘The profane person cannot understand holiness; but the holy person can well understand the depths of evil.’ Those whose lives are invaded by the Spirit of God can discern all things, including those without the Spirit; but the inverse is not possible.”11 In short, when Paul says, “The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment” (2:15, emphasis added), “all things” covers the range of moral and spiritual experience from the rawest paganism to what it means to be a Christian. The Christian has lived in both worlds and can speak of both from experience, from observation, and from a genuine grasp of the Word of God. But the person without the Spirit cannot properly assess what goes on in the spiritual realm—any more than a person who is color-blind is qualified to make nice distinctions in the dramatic hues of a sunset or a rainbow, any more than a person born deaf is qualified to comment on the harmony of Beethoven’s Fifth or on the voice and technique of Pavarotti.
It is important to think through the implications of this verse. Christians in contemporary Western society are constantly being told that they are ignorant, narrow, and incapable of understanding the real world. Paul says the opposite: Christians are as capable as other sinners of understanding the complex and interwoven nature of sin, of grasping the ways in which “wannabe” autonomous human beings reason, and of explaining what the world looks like to modern pagans in our post-modern world. But because they have received the Spirit of God, they are also capable of saying something wise and true about the way the world appears to God. They can talk about the beauty of holiness, about God’s plan of redemption and reconciliation, about the judgment to come and the nature of our desperate plight. In sum, they can talk about Christ crucified. They can talk passionately, committedly, out of the cleansing experience of being forgiven on the ground of another’s death, which was offered up in love for a rebel. They can explain how great a difference that makes as they think of the future and plan their priorities. They can explore together (even if they do not always agree) what a truly Christian society would look like. And, empowered by the Spirit, they can in some measure show by their lives what such a society looks like, as redeemed men and women “are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Eph. 2:22). And all this makes them much more comprehensive in outlook than their pagan peers. The really narrow perspective is maintained by the sinner who has never tasted grace, by the fallen human being who has never enjoyed transforming insight, afforded by the Holy Spirit, into God’s wise purposes.
From this perspective, it is idiotic—that is not too strong a word—to extol the world’s perspective and secretly lust after its limited vision. That is what the Corinthians were apparently doing; that is what we are in danger of doing every time we adopt our world’s shibboleths, dote on its heroes, admire its transient stars, seek its admiration, and play to its applause.
Paul brings his argument to a close with a biblical quotation drawn from Isaiah 40:13: “For who has known the mind12 of the Lord that he may instruct him?” (1 Cor. 2:16). In Paul’s context, the quotation cuts two ways. On the one hand, it is an important reminder that no one can successfully probe the depths of God’s thoughts, let alone match wits with God. In our finiteness and fallenness, we will not by ourselves know the mind of the Lord. We will judge his wisdom folly; we will not assign the crucified Messiah his proper place. Unless the Spirit enlightens us, God’s thoughts will remain deeply alien to us.
But on the other hand, Paul says, “we have the mind of Christ” (2:16b). This is another way of saying that we have received the Spirit of God (vv. 11–12) and have therefore understood something of God’s wisdom, the wisdom of the cross. That sets us apart from the world. And therefore implicitly the world will not understand us either. So Paul is using this quotation from Isaiah 40 to support his claim in the preceding verse: “The spiritual man . . . is not subject to any man’s judgment.” He does not mean that Christians have nothing to learn from non-Christians, or that Christians are always above correction and rebuke (even from those who are not believers). He means, rather, that the mind of Christ is alien to the unbeliever, and insofar as we have the mind of Christ we will be alien to the unbeliever as well.
This passage reminds us of Jesus’s words:
If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember the words I spoke to you: “No servant is greater than his master.” If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the One who sent me. (John 15:18–21)
In short, the gulf between the spiritual person and the person without the Spirit is immense; the chasm between “the world” and the people of God is unbridgeable, apart from the Spirit of God. It is therefore unbearably tragic when Christians begin to covet the plaudits of this world gone astray.
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever. (1 John 2:15–17)
Concluding Reflections
There are several important practical lessons that the church must learn from this passage. Two of them are particularly important for the contemporary Western church.
What it means to be “spiritual” is profoundly tied to the cross, and to nothing else. More precisely, to be spiritual, in this passage, is to enjoy the gift of the Holy Spirit—and this means understanding and appropriating the message of the cross, “God’s secret wisdom.” For Paul, being spiritual does not lead to one-upmanship, to inner circles of specially endowed saints, to spiritual elitism. In this passage there is only one fundamental division in the human race. On the one side are those without the Spirit, who are in consequence culpably ignorant of the message of the crucified Messiah; on the other side are those with the Spirit, who in consequence grasp the message of the cross.
This is not to deny that there may be gradations of maturity among the spiritual. In fact, Paul will introduce something along this line in the next chapter. But those who are more mature in the Christian way cannot claim to be “more spiritual,” in the sense that they belong to a separate category of believers. They do not have the right to claim special insight beyond the grasp of ordinary Christians. The spiritual person is simply a believer, one who has closed with the message of the cross. Indeed, those who are most mature are most grateful for the cross and keep coming back to it as the measure of God’s love for them and the supreme standard of personal self-denial.
Consistency demands that such a person reject the wisdom of the world and embrace “God’s secret wisdom” without reservation. Where “wisdom,” as in these chapters, is conceived to be a public philosophy of life and not simply healthy endowments of common sense or the like, there are only two alternatives: ultimately wisdom is from the world and is opposed by God, or it is God-given and tied to the cross. There is no middle ground. Those who try to create some middle ground by imitating the Corinthians—who confessed the Jesus of the cross but whose hearts were constantly drawn to one or another of the public philosophies and values of the day—will gain nothing but the rebuke of Scripture.
This lesson is especially important when so many Christians today identify themselves with some “single issue” (a concept drawn from politics) other than the cross, other than the gospel. It is not that they deny the gospel. If pressed, they will emphatically endorse it. But their point of self-identification, the focus of their minds and hearts, what occupies their interest and energy, is something else: a style of worship, the abortion issue, homeschooling, the gift of prophecy, pop sociology, a certain brand of counseling, or whatever. Of course, all of these issues have their own importance. Doubtless we need some Christians working on them full time. But even those who are so engaged must do so as an extension of the gospel, as an extension of the message of the cross. They must take special pains to avoid giving any impression that being really spiritual or really insightful or really wise turns on an appropriate response to their issue.
I have heard a Mennonite leader assess his own movement in this way. One generation of Mennonites cherished the gospel and believed that the entailment of the gospel lay in certain social and political commitments. The next generation assumed the gospel and emphasized the social and political commitments. The present generation identifies itself with the social and political commitments, while the gospel is variously confessed or disowned; it no longer lies at the heart of the belief system of some who call themselves Mennonites.
Whether or not this is a fair reading of the Mennonites, it is certainly a salutary warning for evangelicals at large. We are already at the stage where many evangelical leaders simply assume the message of the cross but no longer lay much emphasis on it. Their focus is elsewhere. And a few, it seems to me, are in danger of distancing themselves from major components of the message of the cross, while still operating within the context of evangelicalism. It is at least possible that we are the generation of believers who will destroy much of historic Christianity from within—not, in the first instance, by rancid unbelief, but by raising relatively peripheral questions to the place where, functionally, they displace what is central. And what shall the end of this drift be?
We must come back to the cross, and to God’s plan of redemption that centers on the cross, and make that the point of our self-identification. We must consciously resist all blandishments from movements and philosophies and value systems that tolerate the cross, or even nominally promote it, but in reality displace it. We must recognize that what it means to be wise, what it means to be spiritual, is to embrace, by the help of God’s Spirit, the message of the crucified Messiah.
Still, we must insist, no less strongly than Paul, that this insight into the message of the cross cannot be gained apart from the work of the Spirit. How shall we respond, then, to those who say this sounds too much like an esoteric approach to knowledge—one that can safely put aside disciplined exegesis, the words and contexts of biblical books, the hard work of study and thought, and exchange it all for some subjective claim to being led by the Spirit? Should we safeguard ourselves from this charge by siding with those who say that the Spirit does not enable us to understand the text, but simply to apply it to ourselves?
This extreme response is no less problematic than the subjectivism it seeks to avoid. Against the evil of some vague, mystical approach to biblical exegesis, it restricts the role of the Spirit to mere application—though, on the face of it, 1 Corinthians 2:14 demands something stronger than that.
It will help us to think clearly about this issue if we recognize that 1 Corinthians 2 is not concerned with the mechanics of how people understand their Bibles generally, or with the quality of a particular scholar’s exegesis of some specific Hebrew text. In any case, it is apparent to anyone who has read widely in the field that frequently a self-confessed unbeliever produces excellent exegesis of one passage of the Bible or another—much better than that produced by those with less training but who by the grace of God genuinely possess his Spirit. But Paul is not addressing general questions of epistemology. He is not even addressing how one comes to a knowledge of what some specific passage of Scripture really means. His focus is the fundamental message of the crucified Messiah. And this, he insists, is fundamentally incomprehensible to the mind without the Spirit.
But (someone might say) surely there are some people who can articulate the message of the cross but who don’t believe it. In that sense, they do understand it; they simply do not believe it. All they need to do is apply it to themselves. So in that case, isn’t the Spirit’s role reduced to mere application after all?
This, I suspect, erects a false dichotomy between understanding and application. Paul is not saying that no one among the Jews and the Gentiles of his own day understood the cross at any level. Some of them, including Paul (Saul) himself before his conversion, doubtless knew enough of what Christians believed about the cross that they could summarize it accurately. In that sense they “understood” the message of the cross. But does anyone truly understand the message of the cross apart from brokenness, contrition, repentance, and faith? To repeat rather mechanically the nature of the transaction that Christians think took place at Golgotha is one thing; to look at God and his holiness, and people and their sin, from the perspective of the cross, is life changing. What Paul says, then, is that our self-centeredness, our sin, is so deep that we cannot truly see the cross for what it is, apart from the work of the Spirit. What the Spirit accomplishes in us is more than mere application of truth already grasped. Paul’s point is that truly grasping the truth of the cross and being transformed cannot be separated—and both are utterly dependent on the work of the Spirit.
We see the point clearly when we ask why some today who can, formally speaking, articulate the message of the cross, do not themselves become Christians. It is, finally, because they do not think the message is true. And why not? Well, it may be because they think the message a bit barbaric. Or they may find it hard to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Or they may construct a brand of “Christianity” full of altruism and gentleness but conclude that what the New Testament says about the crucified Messiah is an optional extra, a nonessential component of “Christianity.” But in each case they can take this step only if they have bought into some philosophical or theological grid that entitles them to “filter out” the centrality of the message of the cross. In other words, consciously or unconsciously they have bought into one of the “wisdoms” of this world and have therefore not grasped the message of the cross at all. At the deepest level, they have not really understood it. The reason for this failure does not lie in the realm of ostensibly neutral epistemology. It lies, rather, in our deep waywardness, our culpable self-interest, our alienation from God, our corresponding refusal to recognize just how lost we are. To overcome such lostness, we need the power of the Spirit of God. That is why, when it comes to grasping the message of Christ crucified, it is never a matter of “neutral” weighing of evidences.
Truly to grasp that the eternal God, our Maker and Judge, has out of inexpressible grace sent his Son to die the odious death of an abominated criminal in order that we might be forgiven and reconciled to him; that this wise plan was effected by sinful leaders who thought they were controlling events and who were operating out of selfish expediency, while in fact God was bringing about his own good, redemptive purposes; that our only hope of life in the presence of this holy and loving God lies in casting ourselves without reserve on his mercy, receiving in faith the gift of forgiveness purchased at inestimable cost—none of this is possible apart from the work of the Spirit.
And Christians say, with increasing awe and gratitude, “God has revealed it to us by his Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:10a).
Questions for Review and Reflection
7. It is possible to translate the verse slightly differently, but the substance of the tension I have described is not alleviated.
8. Some manuscripts read “For” instead of “But” at the beginning of v. 10. In that case the flow of thought would be a bit different. Verse 10a would then ground the truth that God has prepared these things for those who love him—for God has revealed these things to us by his Spirit. But the general thought is not changed: the things that have not been perceived by human eye, ear, or mind have now been revealed to us. Perhaps I should add that the syntax of the quotation in v. 9 is rather difficult. Translated rather pedantically, it probably runs like this: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no mind has conceived, [is] what God has prepared for those who love him.”
9. C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 70.
10. Greek, all en didaktois pneumatos, pneumatikois pneumatika sugkrinontes. The principal three options are: (1) NIV: “expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words”; (2) NIV margin: “interpreting spiritual truths to spiritual men”; (3) KJV: “comparing spiritual things with spiritual.” The determining interpretative points are two: (a) The meaning of sugkrinontes. This verb is found only three times in the New Testament, both also in Paul (2 Cor. 10:12, used twice), where the context suggests the verb means “to compare.” Many interpreters find that sufficient reason for siding with the KJV, the third option. They insist that the verb never has the sense of “to explain” or “to interpret,” either in classical Greek or, of course, in the two other occurrences of the verb in the New Testament. True enough. But two out of three is not an overwhelming statistical advantage. More importantly, this verb regularly means “to explain” or “to interpret” in the Septuagint, representing the sort of Greek translation of the Old Testament from which Paul quarried not a little of his religious vocabulary. And other things being equal, that is the meaning that makes the most sense here. (b) The meaning of pneumatikois in the last clause. Does it refer to the “words taught by the Spirit” (taking the word as neuter) or to “spiritual people” (taking the word as masculine)? If the latter, perhaps anticipating the argument in v. 14, then the second meaning (NIV margin) is correct. In fact, the syntax strongly favors the first meaning; pneumatikois refers to didaktois pneumatos, justifying the first reading (NIV). If pneumatikois had referred to people, one would have expected an article.
11. Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 118.
12. Although the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, here speaks to the mind of the Lord, this is its rendering of the Hebrew “the spirit of the Lord”—in a usage rather similar to that in 1 Corinthians 2:11.