First Letter to the Corinthians 2

¹ As for me, brothers, when I came to you, it was not with any show of oratory or philosophy, but simply to tell you what God had guaranteed.

² During my stay with you, the only knowledge I claimed to have was about Jesus, and only about him as the crucified Christ.

³ Far from relying on any power of my own, I came among you in great ‘fear and trembling'[*a]

⁴ and in my speeches and the sermons that I gave, there were none of the arguments that belong to philosophy; only a demonstration of the power of the Spirit.

⁵ And I did this so that your faith should not depend on human philosophy but on the power of God.

⁶ But still we have a wisdom to offer those who have reached maturity: not a philosophy of our age, it is true, still less of the masters of our age, which are coming to their end.

⁷ The hidden wisdom of God which we teach in our mysteries is the wisdom that God predestined to be for our glory before the ages began.

⁸ lt is a wisdom that none of the masters of this age have ever known, or they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory;

⁹ we teach what scripture calls: the things that no eye has seen and no ear has heard, things beyond the mind of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him.[*b]

¹⁰ These are the very things that God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit reaches the depths of everything, even the depths of God.

¹¹ After all, the depths of a man can only be known by his own spirit, not by any other man, and in the same way the depths of God can only be known by the Spirit of God.

¹² Now instead of the spirit of the world, we have received the Spirit that comes from God, to teach us to understand the gifts that he has given us.

¹³ Therefore we teach, not in the way in which philosophy is taught, but in the way that the Spirit teaches us: we teach spiritual things spiritually.

¹⁴ An unspiritual person is one who does not accept anything of the Spirit of God: he sees it all as nonsense; it is beyond his understanding because it can only be understood by means of the Spirit.

¹⁵ A spiritual man, on the other hand, is able to judge the value of everything, and his own value is not to be judged by other men.

¹⁶ As scripture says: Who can know the mind of the Lord, so who can teach him ?[*c] But we are those who have the mind of Christ.