Luther: Preface to 1 Corinthians

Came across this in my devotions this morning, and it spoke to me.

In this epistle St. Paul exhorts the Corinthians to be one in faith and love, and to see to it that they learn well the chief thing, namely, that Christ is our salvation, the thing over which all reason and wisdom stumbles.

For it was as in our day, when the gospel has come to light. There are many mad saints (we call them factious spirits, fanatics, and heretics) who have become wise and learned all too quickly and, because of their great knowledge and wisdom, cannot live in harmony with anybody. One wants to go this way, another that way, as though it would be a great shame if each were not to undertake something special and to put forth his own wisdom. No one can make them out to be fools—though at bottom they neither know nor understand anything about that which is really the chief thing, even though they jabber much about it with their mouths.

So it was with St. Paul too. He had taught his Corinthians Christian faith and freedom from the law. But then the mad saints came along, and the immature know-it-alls. They broke up the unity of the doctrine and caused division among the believers. One claimed to belong to Paul, the other to Apollos; one to Peter, the other to Christ. One wanted circumcision, the other not; one wanted marriage, the other not; one wanted to eat food offered to idols, the other not. Some wanted to be outwardly free [leiblich frey]; some of the women wanted to go with uncovered hair, and so on. They went so far that one man abused his liberty and married his father’s wife, some did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, and some thought lightly of the sacrament.

In short, things got so wild and disorderly that everyone wanted to be the expert and do the teaching and make what he pleased of the gospel, the sacrament, and faith. Meanwhile they let the main thing drop—namely, that Christ is our salvation, righteousness, and redemption—as if they had long since outgrown it. This truth can never remain intact when people begin to imagine they are wise and know it all.

This is exactly what is now happening to us. Now that we, by God’s grace, have opened the gospel to the Germans, everyone claims that he is the top expert and alone has the Holy Spirit—as if the gospel had been preached in order that in it we should show off our cleverness and reason, and strive for a reputation. Those Corinthians may well be an example or illustration of our people in these days, who also certainly need an epistle of this kind. But this is the way things have to go with the gospel; mad saints and immature know-it-alls have to create disturbances and offenses, so that those who are “tested,” as St. Paul also says here [I Cor. 3:13], may be revealed.

Therefore St. Paul most severely rebukes and condemns this shameful wisdom, and makes these connoisseur saints out to be fools. He says outright that they know nothing of Christ, or of the Spirit and gifts of God given to us in Christ, and that they had better begin to learn. It takes spiritual folk to understand this. The desire to be wise and the pretense of cleverness in the gospel are the very things that really give offense and hinder the knowledge of Christ and God, and create disturbances and contentions. This clever wisdom and reason can well serve to make for nothing but mad saints and wild Christians. Yet such people can never know our Lord Christ, unless they first become fools again and humbly let themselves be taught and led by the simple word of God.

Luther, Martin: Pelikan, Jaroslav Jan (Hrsg.) ; Oswald, Hilton C. (Hrsg.) ; Lehmann, Helmut T. (Hrsg.): Luther's Works, Vol. 35 : Word and Sacrament I. Philadelphia : Fortress Press, 1999, c1960 (Luther's Works 35), S. 35:III-382