Sunday, August 30, 2009

1 Corinthians 6.2

The apostle Paul writes:

“Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters?”

That is curious. Self-proclaimed Christians today cannot agree on ethical matters such as those of “social justice” and capital punishment, much less theological matters.

4 comments:

D.B. said...

This would be after we've been changed, though, right? Cause, yeah, I am not seeing good things if we are all sinful folks. Hey, I am reading Christless Christianity by Michael Horton of White Hourse Inn. Pretty good stuff. Doesn't look good for modern American Evangelicalism. :-)

Kwame E. said...

Remind me later to read the book or look into it, cuz it's probably good.

Anyway, Paul says "Are ye unworthy..." and so uses a present tense verb as opposed to a futurate one in speaking of people's being worthy or competent to judge small matters. So I'm still left scratching my head.

Christine Ericson said...

Hm, it sounds more like a rhetorical question to me. If we will end up judging the whole world, can we not make righteous decisions in little matters? God gave us the Holy Spirit to provide us with a moral code along side the Bible. So I'd say, "yes we can make those decisions."

Kwame E. said...

There’s no doubt that it is a rhetorical question.

The point is this: if the apostle Paul informs us that believers are capable or worthy of making judgments on small matters, then he has said something more or less paradoxical and borderline unbelievable. This is because we can stop and reflect on ourselves and Christians around us and observe that Christians are variably: a) dumb; and b) undumb, but error-prone nonetheless and often cannot agree on moral and theological matters, even though all these folks are intelligent and gifted.

So the question is: How exactly can one reconcile these two truths?