A WARNING
A WARNING
1 CORINTHIANS 12:1-3
Not every claim to religious experience is necessarily Christian.
The Corinthian body of believers were not slow in representing to Paul the special gifts they had received. He acknowledges this fact (1:4-5,7) and calls attention to the church’s eager desire to excel in the gifts of the Spirit (12:31; 14:1,12).
To possess the Holy Spirit’s gifts (charismata is the Greek term) is one thing; to set them in a right order of priority and to use them worthily is another. It is to this second matter that Paul now addresses his words (12:1).
The opening paragraph of 12:1-3 is important because it is the apostle’s reminder that not every claim to religious experience is necessarily Christian. There are good spirits—the Holy Spirit is above all the gracious indwelling power of God in his children (Ephesians 1:13-14; 2 Corinthians 5:5; Romans 8:9-16) as he had already taught them in this letter (3:16; 6:19); and there are demonic spirits (again earlier references may be in his mind, 10:20-21). Where is this distinction most sharply drawn (1 John 4:1-6)? And what test of discrimination is there to be applied?
Paul recalls the preChristian life of his readers (12:2). They were led into error and practiced the worship of mute deities (Psalm 115:4-8) but often pagan divinities induced in their devotees a state of trance and religious rapture. Mystical experience in every age may be explained in various ways—from the sublime experience of the Christian mystic (2 Corinthians 12:2-4) to the victim of the witch doctor’s art, from the practitioner of psychological auto-suggestion, to drug addict. Clearly some criterion of genuineness is needed.
That this need was not an imaginary one is clear from 12:3. In a religious ecstasy some member of the congregation had uttered the oath “Jesus be damned!”—a cry which must have sounded as offensive to Paul as to us today. Worse still, he attributed it to the Spirit; but, Paul sharply retorts, this cannot be the case, for the Holy Spirit leads no one to utter an uncontrolled blasphemous remark. Rather, it is his ministry to inspire the earliest Christian confession of faith “Jesus is Lord,” only by which salvation is known (Romans 10:9; Philippians 2:9-11).