First Sunday in Lent
February 21, 1858
“Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?”—2 Corinthians xiii. 5.
The passage: Paul tells the Corinthians to examine themselves, to see whether they are in the faith, and to prove themselves; and asks whether they know that Jesus Christ is in them — unless they fail the test.
We don’t usually think about where the word “reprobate” comes from. But ordinary speech keeps its true sense better than theology does. When we call a man an utter reprobate in common talk, we mean that various attempts have been made to reform him, and all have failed — he has been tried and found worthless. Some theologians give the word almost the opposite meaning: a reprobate, for them, is one God has condemned without trial at all, born into the world with a mark of condemnation already known to his Maker, gradually discovered by the man himself, and finally declared to the whole world.
Our translators kept the word’s root sense here. They clearly meant “reprobate” to correspond to “prove,” capturing the relation in the Greek between δοκιμάζετε and ἀδόκιμοι. We must keep that relation to keep the sense of the passage. Paul’s other uses of ἀδόκιμος bear this out: in Hebrews, ground that has drunk the rain and yields only thorns is called ἀδόκιμος; Paul disciplines his body lest, having preached to others, he himself become ἀδόκιμος; in Romans, those who refuse to retain God in their knowledge are given over to an ἀδόκιμον νοῦν. In each case a trial has occurred, and the result is worthlessness — but the kind of worthlessness matches the kind of thing tested. Ground proved is simply found barren; a moral being proved worthless in this way has lost the power of moral discernment, the power to prove himself at all. This sense must not be forgotten here.
I. We forget it if we miss Paul’s first words. Substitute “examine yourselves, whether you have a right to be in the faith” for “examine yourselves, whether you are in the faith,” and you alter the passage at its root. Paul is not telling the Corinthians to check whether they’ve passed through experiences entitling them to call themselves believers, whether they have warrant to claim their baptismal privileges. He is saying: test yourselves strictly on whether you are actually claiming these privileges, actually believing what you profess to believe. That is the natural meaning of “if you are in the faith.” The Corinthians would have real cause to complain if Paul meant that perhaps, after all, they had no right to apply to themselves the promises of the Gospel he had preached to them — that God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the Law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. If he meant them to examine whether these universal-sounding words included or excluded them, he owed them some means of finding the limits — some way of knowing who was cut off from blessings he had spent his life declaring meant for every race, every intellectual and moral condition. And he would not have said “examine yourselves”; he would have said, “examine the terms of God’s covenant for flaws, to see whether you fall under some exemption from its general amnesty, whether you are truly admitted as citizens or still held as bondmen on some pretext.” And he would then have had to explain how, if the examination proved they lay outside divine mercy, they were to bring forth the fruits he demanded of them — since by his own teaching they needed faith in God, and God working in them, in order to bear fruit at all. If the trial only convinced them of their evil state, what hand could raise them out of it, if God’s hand were not held out to them, if they stood in no relation to Him whatever?
All these monstrous contradictions — worse in experience and moral effect than even in logic — come not from taking Paul’s words literally, but from fearing to, from unwillingness to obey them as they stand. If he meant simply that they ought to be in the faith, to call on God as Father and acknowledge themselves His children, he is consistent with himself. The old Prophets told Israel they were forever forgetting the Covenant, distrusting the God who called them to trust Him; and Paul told the Corinthians that all Jewish history was an example for them, upon whom the ends of the world had come. They were just as liable to forget the new and better covenant as their forefathers were to forget the old one — as likely to think themselves not God’s children as those under the Law were to think themselves not His servants. The consequences would be the same in kind, worse in degree: heartlessness, idolatry, division, self-exaltation alternating with despair. It was needful for them to examine themselves for signs, inward and outward, that this indifference and forgetfulness was creeping upon them — whether the loss of brotherly feeling toward men accompanied a loss of filial feeling toward God.
Such a trial would be, strictly, a trial of themselves — not of God’s words or deeds, which were assumed to bear the largest, most gracious meaning; not of other men, whose inner state they could barely know; but of their own very selves. This was all the more necessary given the nature of the New Covenant and their relation to it. It was to their own spirits that God had spoken; with their spirits He had established fellowship. He had redeemed them from the dominion of visible things precisely to set up His kingdom within them.
II. So Paul goes on: “Or know ye not your own selves, that Christ is in you?” Many readers seem to suppose this question has no direct link to the command before it, as though “your own selves” were now a subject rather than, as before, an object. Such a separation would ruin the sense of the passage.
Paul has spoken of self-examination; now he speaks of the self-knowledge that justifies it, that makes it a reasonable, possible exercise. This deserves attention — it touches us all personally, and has caused no small perplexity.
Pick up almost any religious book — especially any written for Lent — and you find exhortations to self-examination, with rules meant to help us do it. Our consciences agree it’s reasonable: we’re liable to grievous moral falls if we don’t watch our steps, and we fail to claim our dignity as spiritual beings if we’re ignorant of our own spirit’s movements. The advice comes from real experience and would help us, if only we could use it. But when we try, a terrible contradiction appears. We set out to be honest, and the attempt seems to make us dishonest. In this trial we conduct, are not plaintiff, defendant, witness, and judge all the same person? Are we really proving ourselves, really passing judgment? Are we not continually bribed to overlook what deserves condemnation, while feeling excessive remorse over trifles? Are we not losing our very sense of right and wrong — learning to magnify, to minimize, to distort — through the very process meant to secure a just view of ourselves?
And then another doubt arises. Is this self-consciousness even a good thing? Doesn’t it hinder action, sap energy, breed a mawkish, indelicate urge to expose our most secret selves, even publicly? The rage for that kind of confession is less common in England now than some years back, though not extinct. But in how many other ways do men show they feel this self-consciousness as a disease that will destroy them unless cured! It drives numbers to the feet of the spiritual director. It tempts others into speculations about the “I” and the “not I,” where “I” means everyone but the philosopher playing the puzzle, and “not I” means nothing at all. And multitudes who find comfort in neither expedient try instead to go numb in a whirl of business or pleasure, losing the pressure of life in a dance of death.
I cannot deny there is a Self-Consciousness — cultivated by religious as well as philosophical teachers and books — that has just this evil character and these evil results. But I believe that Self-Consciousness is the very opposite of the Self-Knowledge said to descend from Heaven, and that the Self-Knowledge Paul means here is the one real deliverance from it. The old Greek teacher thought he could free his young fellow-citizens from the philosophical tangles ensnaring their consciences and intellects only by leading them to Self-Knowledge. His path was questioning about common things and the words people used every day. But he believed he had reached his own knowledge only through an ever-present daemon — distinct from himself, a faithful monitor warning of dangers, rebuking follies, showing him how to rise above accident and circumstance and his own narrow notions to grasp what truly is and abides. That faith gave his own mind sincerity and gave him power over others; he was sure that they too, if they tried to act rightly, would find such a guide.
This faith of Socrates, true as the simplicity and manliness of his life and death suggest it was, demands an expounder. Who can tell us of this unseen guide — what he does for each of us, whether he cares only for a few favored souls or for the whole race? Paul boldly answers these demands. He speaks the Name of the invisible Lord and Teacher of his own spirit, and says to every man: He is the Lord and Teacher of your spirit too. He says this One has come into the world, taken human nature, died a human death, risen as Man, ascended as Man, and lives now as Man at God’s right hand. He says to the Corinthians: “Know ye not your own selves, that Jesus Christ is in you?”
Here is the true Self-Knowledge, the thing that makes Self-Examination real and not a fiction. Plaintiff, defendant, and judge are no longer the same. A Judge stands at the doors of our hearts, who discerns their thoughts and intents, who knows our most solitary acts and secret thoughts, who distinguishes with infallible insight the precious from the vile, the treacherous from the sincere — who wants us to distinguish them too, and is continually inspiring in us love for the one and hatred for the other. To confess Him as our Lawgiver and Judge is to confess One who cannot be misled by pretensions or won by self-flattery — yet who has no wish to condemn us, who never charges us with wrong except to show us the way out of it, never shows us fallen without helping us rise, never convinces us we are sunk in death without offering the promise of life.
So Paul uses striking language about Self-Consciousness when describing our relation to Christ: dying to ourselves, rising again as new creatures in Him. He does not present this death as some mystical process of annihilation, nor this resurrection as one soul’s high effort grasping at a blessing beyond ordinary reach. He teaches that this is our proper, human state. The revelation of Christ was nothing less than the revelation of a universal Brother of men, in whom each man has his life, apart from whom each man has only death. So he tells every baptized person that, since by a single act Christ has owned them as brothers, of the race whose Head He is, they are to count themselves dead to sin but alive to God — to rise as redeemed, regenerate people, enter the hard fight of life in that strength, and in that name repulse all the enemies that have overpowered them and will daily threaten to overpower them again.
Here, then, is the real deliverance from the self-consciousness wise men denounce — and their very denunciations help cultivate it — the self-consciousness we flee from, only to have it rise up in newer, darker shapes wherever we hide. Does some preacher’s accusation torment you, calling you names you think don’t fit? Would the philosophical observer treat you any better — would Rochefoucauld deal more kindly with you, uncover pleasanter facts about you? Be angry at the preacher, be angry at the philosopher, if your anger speaks for your race, if you mean that humanity is libeled when it’s said to be capable only of what is base. But to vindicate humanity’s cause, be true to yourself. The preacher and the sharp-eyed critic torment you because your conscience half agrees with them — because it says, yes, you have felt low, grovelling pleasure even in a friend’s suffering; you are inclined to sacrifice family, country, the whole universe to your own interest; you would, as Adam Smith says, care less for the ruin of an empire than a pain in your own finger. Is there something else in you besides that? Are you sure? Yes — you were told so as a child: that you were a member of Christ, that He was in you. That is still true. That is why you cannot bear to be treated as an alien and outcast, why your blood rises at being told you’re capable only of foul impressions and grovelling motives, incapable of denying yourself for the highest ends. It is a lie. Hold fast that it is. But who told the lie — the preacher? Rochefoucauld? No: you told it, by acting as though you could be nothing better than they say, because you had forgotten what you are. You exchanged the heavenly self-knowledge — that Christ is Head of every man and you a member incorporate in His body — for the earthly self-knowledge that comes only from watching what men do when they act on the dream that each stands apart from his neighbor, that each can work out his own private scheme of existence, that we move amid a whirl of atoms in a chaos, not a universe.
That is the miserable faith we are all naturally prone to, which will certainly overtake and possess us if we have no higher faith to set against it. Let us then examine ourselves, whether we are in that higher faith; let us prove, day by day, our right to remain in it. This examination involves no wretched poring over our own motives. It turns us at once from the accusing spirit — which tells us we are yielding to some vile motive leading to some vile act — to seek instead the inspiration of the One in whom are the springs of all right action. It involves no neglect of plain work for the sake of morbid brooding: it is in work that we learn what we would become without a helper, and learn to trust and depend on Him. The temptations to fretfulness and cowardice, to bitter words, to feed on flattery or malice or lust, to shade the truth in small dealings, to lie for a worldly end or even a godly one, the particular temptations of each trade and calling, of home life, of national life, of church life — these are the schools where men have learned to examine themselves, learned the feebleness of mere rule, the necessity of a living, present Teacher, learned what the old nature is that must be crucified, and what the new, true man is that Christ renews in us day by day.
In that school they have learned the force of the words I began with, “except ye be reprobate” — a meaning more serious and awful, yet far more practical and far less dishonoring to God, than the sense some give it when they apply it to everyone except themselves. Let us apply it strictly to ourselves. By a habit of indifference, thoughtlessness, forgetfulness, we may become ἀδόκιμοι, utterly worthless, even after undergoing all discipline — the sign of that worthlessness being the loss of the power to discern good from evil, the inability to know that mighty truth that Christ is in us, the giver of strength, the hope of glory. To keep this from happening, let us keep assuring ourselves and each other that this is an everlasting truth, one we can act on, one that lets us face the problems of our existence and the world’s without flinching, a truth that gives victory.
If others can teach us some belief that will help us live, we may consider it — but we have no time for endless, wearisome speculation on this point or that. The world moves too fast, and the energies we need for action are visibly wearing themselves out. We need One who can renew them, pour His own divine energy into them, fit us for whatever new condition His world may bring, and fit us to survive its dissolution. We need One who will not hastily cast us off as reprobate for having resisted warning after warning, mercy after mercy, but who will try every method infinite wisdom can devise to bring us under His gracious yoke, to overcome the self-will that is our ruin, to make us like Himself — preparing us for the Day when He, who has been working secretly on our hearts, will be known openly; when He, who for our sakes submitted to be tempted by the Evil Spirit, will be revealed as the Deliverer from all temptation, the Conqueror of all His enemies and ours.