“… God chose the foolish things – the lowly and despised things – of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”
Today a Christian friend of mine (“M”) shared this passage from Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.
It is at very least a provocative statement – and I immediately burrowed into Bible commentaries and different translations to find out as much as I could. In the back of my mind I could hear the caustic Cioran and Nietzche attacking Saint Paul’s radical up-ending of conventional wisdom; but finally I decided just to set the words down, to let them speak for themselves. There is a passage in the Gospel of Saint Luke in which Jesus says, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.” Again there is this paradox of the folly of wisdom.
Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary:
“God did not choose philosophers, nor orators, nor statesmen, nor men of wealth, and power, and interest in the world, to publish the gospel of grace and peace.”
