The Expositor's Bible: The First Epistle to the CorinthiansDods, Marcus
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The First Epistle to the Corinthians
Dods, Marcus
Bible. Corinthians, 1st -- Commentaries
Does this then not settle the question? If--the party of liberty might
say--if we are right, if the idol is nothing, and an idol's temple no
more than an ordinary dining-room, does this not settle the whole
matter? By no means, says Paul. "Knowledge puffeth up, but charity
edifieth." You have as yet grasped only one end, and that the weaker
end, of the Christian rule. You must add love, consideration of your
neighbour to your knowledge. Without this, knowledge is unwholesome
and as likely to do harm as to do good. In very similar terms the
founder of the Positive philosophy speaks of the evil results of
loveless knowledge. "I am free to confess," he says, "that hitherto
the Positive spirit has been tainted with the two moral evils which
peculiarly wait on knowledge. It puffs up, and it dries the heart, by
giving free scope to pride and by turning it from love." It is indeed
matter of everyday observation that men of ready insight into moral
and spiritual truth are prone to despise the less enlightened spirits
that stumble among the scruples which, like the bats of the moral
twilight, fly in their faces. The knowledge which is not tempered by
humility and love does harm both to its possessor and to other
Christians; it puffs up its possessor with scorn, and it alienates and
embitters the less enlightened. Knowledge without love, knowledge
which does not take into consideration the difficulties and scruples
of brethren, cannot be admired or commended, for though in itself a
good thing and capable of being used for the advancement of the
Church, knowledge dissociated from charity can do good neither to him
who possesses it nor to the Christian community. However the
possessors of such knowledge vaunt themselves as the men of progress
and the hope of the Church, it is not by knowledge alone the Church
can ever solidly grow. Knowledge does produce an appearance of growth,
a puffing up, an unhealthy, morbid growth, a mushroom, fungous growth;
but that which builds up the Church stone by stone, a strong, enduring
edifice, is love. It is a good thing to have clear views of Christian
liberty, to have definite, firmly held ideas of Christian conduct, to
discard fretting scruples and idle superstitions; add love to this
knowledge, exercise it in a tender, patient, self-denying,
considerate, loving way, and you edify both yourself and the Church:
but exercise it without love, and you become a poor inflated creature,
puffed up with a noxious gas destructive of all higher life in
yourself and in others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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