1 Corinthians 2:14

1 Corinthians 2:14. But the natural man a phrase on the sense of which it would be vain to expect light from the classical writers, who had no conception of the spiritual things intended here. In Greek writings, the noun, from which the adjective here used is formed, means ‘the animal soul,' or that life which man has in common with all animals. Hence it came to signify the appetite or passion of man's lower nature, as distinguished from his higher reason or ‘spirit.' So understood, ‘the natural man' of our passage would mean no more than the man governed by sensual appetite, or the inferior impulses of his nature. And this is the sense in which it is taken by all interpreters of a shallow school of theology. But it is far beneath the apostle's meaning. With him “the natural man” is he who in spiritual things has only his natural human faculties to guide him, without spiritual perception or apprehension, but not necessarily the slave of grovelling impulses. True it is, that all unrenewed, unspiritual men, even the best and most refined, being dominated by sensible things, may thus far be said to be under the dominion of the lower part of their nature; for the true capacities of their higher nature can only be drawn forth when they become “new creatures.” But it is simply the absence of this life which is denoted by the phrase “the natural man.” receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness onto him since he wants the capacity to apprehend them: and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged they are to him as light to the blind-born. But it is an utter perversion of such statements to maintain, as fanatics do, that there is in the natural man any organic constitutional incapacity of spiritual perception, requiring to be created in them by the Holy Ghost. For maintaining this an eminent Lutheran professor of divinity, soon after Luther's death, had to be deposed. The uniform teaching of Scripture is, that the change effected in regeneration is a purely moral and spiritual one.