1 Corinthians 2:15

1 Corinthians 2:15

(with 1 Timothy 3:15)

The religious or spiritual man, then, is characterised not by taking his judgment from other men, not by living on a decision formed by others, but by a personal private judgment of his own. Religious truth, like other truth, nay, much more than other truth, is a personal conviction, and not merely a conviction, but a judgment, part of the man's own rational being the very life of his rational being that in which he looks out upon and judges of men and things, when he is most conscious of exercising his own faculties. Nay, more than this, he holds this truth, not merely on his personal private judgment, but with a certain strenuous insistance upon its independence in the face of other men, even within the Church.

I. What is the antithesis to this tenure in conscious personal and rational judgment of religious truth? It cannot be, what is impossible, that we should hold a body of truth on the external authority of the Church, while it does not commend itself to our own individual judgment. To refuse to exercise our own faculties of judgment, to take things generally, and merely passively on the external authority whether of science or of the Church, is not to be humble, but to be ignorant and to ignore a primary duty.

II. But it is only in our shallowest moments that we shall suppose this repudiation of absolute and unconditional authority which leaves room for an exercise of our judgment, to involve in any sense the repudiation of authority at all, or the denial that truth should be held finally, on mere external authority, to involve the rejection of external authority from its proper place in the formation of our minds. Indeed, those portions of the truth which do not come under the verification of our own faculties must permanently be held on external authority, but the authority itself must then come under verification. It is, for example, only reason to take on the authority of Christ truths about the future which cannot come under our present cognisance, if we have reason to believe that they come under His. The place of authority, then, is primarily and mainly in helping us to form our judgment. Our judgment ought not to be formed in an isolated individualistic manner. It is out of committing ourselves to authority that right reason normally and naturally grows. Each man is not meant to start afresh. Reverence as well as thought must go to the making of a true judgment. To receive in the Church of Christ in earliest years in education, at the time of our confirmation a body of truth, and a system of practice emphasising and embodying holiness of life, to receive it on her loving authority, and to grow up, as our faculty develops, into the intellectual recognition of her truths and practices on our own judgment this is the normal growth of man.

III. The scheme of Christian truth coheres. To a Christian believer who has advanced to any measure of understanding the whole is one and indissoluble. He recognises that it would be unreasonable to pick and choose; he recognises the coherence of the same sort of means by which we recognise the similar connection, far beyond our personal knowledge, in the department of science. Thus he abides under the shelter of the whole creed. He takes it on trust as a whole. The Christian Church seems to his spiritual faculties eminently trustworthy. He waits while the Spirit leads him into all the truth. That is, he waits while, in the growing experience of life, in the vicissitudes of failure and success, of joy and suffering, of growth and manhood, point by point, the truth becomes realised to his experience and his understanding. We teach children a language greater than childhood's wants will justify, the language of grown men, knowing that they will grow up to want it; and God deals with us thus in His Church in that sphere of our life where experience is slow in coming, where indeed all life is childhood in relation to immortal manhood.

C. Gore, Oxford Review,Jan. 28th, 1885.