2 Corinthians 1:12-13
Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, in holiness and sincerity that are from God. We have done so not according to worldly wisdom but according to God’s grace. For we do not write you anything you cannot read or understand.
It stands to reason that those using worldly knowledge feel that their ways are not simple or easily understood. I see this in many religions and ways of life. In the religion of Islam, one must know Arabic to truly understand the Quran. The eightfold path leads to enlightenment, a secretive knowledge that you must work very hard for. Scholars and scientists earn their way to the top of the totem by studying extremely hard.
Paul says that the people in Corinth will know that they conduct themselves in a holy and sincere way without worldly knowledge because they can read and understand his letters.
I would like to examine why simplicity is holy.
In the King James Version, the verse says in simplicity rather than in holiness. The Greek translated by strong is: singleness, simplicity, sincerity, mental honesty; a) the virtue of one who is free from pretense and hypocrisy 2) not self-seeking, openness of heart manifesting itself by generosity.
This seems like a great definition of humility to me. One who is free of pretense and hypocrisy, one who is open and honest. It also seems like a sort of innocence, as you would see in a bluntly honest young child. Although holy is a hard term to define as one cannot capture a hardly-understood virtue with linguistics, one way to define it would be a sort of innocence- not in the sense that it is naive or blind, per say, but in the sense that to be holy, you are pure, blameless and set apart. In other words- you haven’t gotten your hands dirty, and you have done so intentionally. But not in a legalistic way, a way that points out how clean you are, but in a way that is not self-seeking. It may not even occur to the honest young child that there is something to be gained in pointing out a truth, a holy person is holy by nature. They abstain simply because that is who they are and don’t think anything of it.
If it is true that a crucial aspect of holiness is simplicity, than the church has a lot to learn. We often act as if you must be some special person to understand the gospel. We separate the experienced from the new believers because they aren’t on the same level. And while that is a reality- Paul says some Christians are ready for meat while other must drink milk first- I’m not sure weeding out the baby Christians is in line with this passage of Corinthians. If we are speaking about the gospel in ways they cannot understand, and these letters that Paul says everyone can understand, then we are doing something very wrong.
Paul says that it is a symbol of their godly wisdom, or as the NIV puts it- “not with fleshly wisdom but by the grace of God” that everyone gets what they talk about. Does it not follow that if those around us are too inexperienced to comprehend our messages, than we are relying on our worldy wisdom rather than on God’s grace to teach them?
