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
appeal to and best develop all.
Paul thanked God for their gift of utterance. Perhaps had he lived
now, within sound of an utterance dizzying and ceaseless as the roar
of Niagara, he might have had a word to say in praise of silence.
There is more than a risk nowadays that talk take the place of thought
on the one hand and of action on the other. But it could not fail to
occur to Paul that this Greek utterance, with the instrument it had in
the Greek language, was a great gift to the Church. In no other
language could he have found such adequate, intelligible, and
beautiful expression for the new ideas to which Christianity gave
birth. And in this new gift of utterance among the Corinthians he may
have seen promise of a rapid and effective propagation of the Gospel.
For indeed there are few more valuable gifts the Church can receive
than utterance. Legitimately may we hope for the Church when she so
apprehends her own wealth in Christ as to be stirred to invite all the
world to share with her, when through all her members she feels the
pressure of thoughts that demand utterance, or when there arise in her
even one or two persons with the rare faculty of swaying large
audiences, and touching the common human heart, and lodging in the
public mind some germinant ideas. New epochs in the Church's life are
made by the men who speak, not to satisfy the expectation of an
audience, but because they are driven by an inward compelling force,
not because they are called upon to say something, but because they
have that in them which they must say.
But utterance is well backed by knowledge. Not always has it been
remembered that Paul recognises knowledge as a gift of God. Often, on
the contrary, has the determination to satisfy the intellect with
Christian truth been reprehended as idle and even wicked. To the
Corinthians the Christian revelation was new, and inquiring minds,
could not but endeavour to harmonize the various facts it conveyed.
This attempt to understand Christianity was approved. The exercise of
the human reason upon Divine things was encouraged. The faith which
accepted testimony was a gift of God, but so also was the knowledge
which sought to recommend the contents of this testimony to the human
mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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