1 Corinthians 2:11

1 Corinthians 2:11

I. To give the adequate history of a religion you must first have believed it. This is our primary datum, and this means surely that the elements of that rational intelligibility, which comes to the surface under the action of the critical reason, are to be found withinthe living material of the belief itself. Reason does not find its ground, its justification, its credibility, its evidence in itself, in its own separate and distinct working; it goes for these to that on which it works. There lies all its intelligibility. The gain achieved by the reason is simply the disclosure that the belief was already rational. All that it discloses was already the life and substance of that effort which we call faith.

II. What an immense task has reason undertaken when it attempts the critical portrayal of a spiritual faith. Yet if religion is the expression, the act of the entire man, and not merely of some peculiar and isolated organ in his being, it is inevitable that reason which is part and parcel of that wholeness which is the man, should have its say about that action in which it itself in its corporate capacity, as bound up with the unity of spirit, has already borne its share. "To write the history of a religion a man must have believed it once." Yes, and if it be needful once, then if the criticism is ever to be other than fragmentary, if it is ever to be vital and fruitful and entire, it cannot but be needful always; for to have lost the belief is, as the formula confesses, to have lost the key to its history. It is surely only in sad irony, bitter mistrust, that it is added, "he must have believed it once, but he must have believed it no longer."

H. Scott Holland, Logic and Life,p. 41.

References: 1 Corinthians 2:11. J. Vaughan, Sermons,7th series, p. 191. 1 Corinthians 2:12. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 264; T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. iv., p. 125; J. Keble, Sermons from Ascensiontide to Trinity,p. 209. 1 Corinthians 2:13. Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., p. 94.