"PUFFED UP" IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

The root verb in the Greek translated in this manner is physioo, which is derived from the noun physa, meaning “bellows.” It only appears seven times in the New Testament, at I Corinthians 4:6,18,19; 5:2; 8:1; 13:4; Colossians 2:18. Since most of these occurrences are found in I Corinthians, Marsh notes that it indicates “the extent to which the sin of pride had gripped the Corinthian church.” He also brings out the fact that the word was “used by later Greek writers for intellectual pride and rhetorical display.” Lowery agrees and brings out some more of the historical background: “This was a difficult lesson, for the Greeks believed humility was a despicable trait of a slave, a sign of weakness, not a characteristic of great men (Plato, Laws, 6, 774c)...The Corinthians had no monopoly on pride though they seemed to.”

Since pride is a sin we Christians today are not immune from, it should be instructive to look at the seven passages indicated above to see what lessons we can learn from them.

I Corinthians 4:6

This verse comes soon after advising the church members not to boast about their human leaders (I Cor. 3:21), a condition which was causing division in the congregation. Paul expresses the desire that “none of you will be puffed up in favor of one against another.” The reason he gives is that everything we have received is a gift and nothing in which we can take personal pride.

After my many years in several different congregations and denominations, I have seen this sort of divisive attitude play itself out numerous times and even been on the receiving side of it more than once. The congregation in which I was raised used to be very proud of the fact that we only had the name of Christ in our title, unlike the Wesleyans, Calvinists, and Lutherans. We tended to ignore passages such as I Corinthians 1:10-13 in which even the “Christ party” is condemned for its superior attitude.

Then there was a neighbor of mine who was a Southern Baptist and looked on me rather condescendingly when I told him I was attending a Christian Church. He typed us as those “who believe in salvation by works.” He would have been shocked to learn that those in the church I grew up in generally assigned all Baptists to hell for their heretical belief of not taking the ordinance of baptism seriously enough

And one of my Catholic roommates in graduate school used to love telling of the time he was trying to find the location of a wedding in another town. He went up to a church building where a man was standing outside and asked if it was the Church of Christ. The man quite indignantly replied, “No, this isn't the Church of Christ; it is the Church of God!” In my friend's eyes this was a good example of the fragmented state of the Protestantism. I didn't bother telling him that I was always taught that the Roman Catholic church was the whore of Babylon of Revelation.

Then there was a Bible church I attended where the pastor bragged from the pulpit that we possessed the “perfect theology, the perfect method of Bible interpretation, and the perfect form of church government.” Actually, their required doctrinal statement was so complete and detailed that it is highly doubtful that Christ would have been admitted as a member. And I could go on with many more examples of a “puffed up” attitude that looks down on those who are our Christian brothers and sisters.

I Corinthians 4:18-19

In these verses he warns those in the church who had become arrogant in Paul's absence and set themselves up as judges against him that he will soon come to set them straight. Even worse are those who, in C.S. Lewis' words, “put God in the dock” and have the gall to act as judges over Him and His Word. As Grosheide asks, “But where is their power, i.e. in this context, not the power to perform miracles but the power of a genuine Christian life? Paul will ask for their works at his arrival and he assumes that he will not find them.”

I Corinthians 5:2

By contrast, here Paul mentions the things we can justly boast about, namely, we can boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God through the grace offered by Jesus Christ, and we can boast of our sufferings. What a contrast to the attitude of a sincere but brand-new Christian with whom I was a close friend. He mistakenly told me he knew I must be closer to God than he was because the external circumstances of his life appeared to be more chaotic than mine was at the moment. I had to tell him that I was probably the one who should be more worried than he if that were the case.

I Corinthians 8:1

Another source of puffed-up pride in brought up by Paul in this verse – superior theological understanding. Paul tells the Corinthians that knowledge alone is worthless if it is not coupled with love. As Orr and Walther explain, “there was a sense in which the Corinthians' understanding of their knowledge was valid. Paul insists, however, that the value of such knowledge is limited in that those who possess it have an almost irresistible tendency to become puffed up with pride, to get a feeling of distended theological importance. Those who are confident in their own knowledge may become arrogant and contemptuous of other people, and thus a good thing can be corrupted into a very dangerous thing.” I recognize such an attitude in myself and have even had to tell people who were nice enough to compliment me on a lesson that I much as appreciate their kindness, I would prefer not to hear that since it generally had the effect of inflating my already extended ego even more.

I Corinthians 13:4

This verse appears in the famous “love chapter,” which begins by enumerating the various spiritual gifts in which one may be tempted to take pride. But then Paul bursts his audience's balloon by telling them that it is all in vain in the absence of love, which by contrast is “not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.”

At one church I attended years ago, there was one young man in our young married Sunday school class who had charismatic leanings and fancied himself as spiritually superior to the rest of us, a fact that he made quite obvious. His Pharisaical tendencies became especially obvious one evening in which our group had its quarterly pot luck dinner. It was quite obvious that he was the only one not eating any food. When someone asked him about it, his reply was, “I had a vision from God last night telling me to fast.” That statement was certainly designed to put the rest of us in our places! Fortunately, none of us was particularly impressed by his holier-than-thou attitude, and one person (it might even have been me) just replied, “Good, that will mean more for the rest of us.” Perhaps not a very kind comment, but everyone needs their super-spiritual balloon punctured on occasion.

Colossians 2:18

In this passage, we see somewhat of a contrast from the situation with the Corinthians. Instead of going about bragging of their leaders or spiritual gifts, the Colossians were in danger of being misled by those teachers who were putting them down for their lax attitude toward what they felt to be necessary qualifications to be a true Christian. And these included such peripheral items as fasting, “spiritual” visions and worship experiences while in a exalted state, special days to be observed, etc. All these, Paul exposes as not being advanced spiritual teachings, but “a human way of thinking” instead.

I remember a Sunday school class I was teaching decades ago in which I outlined the various views of the future according to different schools of thought. It was probably pretty obvious which school of thought I leaned toward. It happened to be the oldest view of the four major eschatological views and the one to which our particular denomination had subscribed since its inception. At that point, a young man who was a visitor to our class stood up and shouted, “I don't know how can you call yourself a Christian if you believe that!!”

It turned out that his own view of the future was by far the most recent one, but it happened to be the one in popular favor at the time. It is quite easy to be dogmatic concerning secondary and tertiary church issues if you have only been exposed to a single view in your narrow life, and you may even be correct in your ideas. But such “superior” knowledge is absolutely no excuse for condemning other sincere believers to hell if they do not happen to agree with you. Here are some additional thoughts on this verse:

    “At times their vaunted asceticism produced an arrogance primed for a subtle sexual licentiousness.” (Ellis)

    “Such claims to enter into the very presence of God and hymn him in the company of angels was an idle self-deceit. Anyone who made such a claim was 'puffed up with conceit,' 'putting on airs (psyioo)', a term used by Paul several times to rebuke Corinthian arrogance. Such conceit was 'without cause' and 'to no avail.'” (Dunn)

    “The true test of whether or not one belongs to God's people is neither the observance of dietary laws and Jewish festivals, nor the cultivation of super-spiritual experiences, but whether one belongs to Christ, alive with his life.” (N.T. Wright)

    “Elsewhere Paul commented that an inordinate aspiration to knowledge of divine mysteries serves only to fill the claimant with conceit.” (R.P. Martin)

    “There is an affectation of humility and phony abasement whose ironic truth, as Paul states it, is a puffed up and fleshy mind.” (Seitz)

    “The mind (nous) responds to moral and spiritual insight. The mind of the flesh, as the Greek literally says, is the natural mind unaided by the Holy Spirit. This way of thinking puffs up the worshiper without cause. It produces a false pride which leads to a haughty disposition. Such religious experiences seem (to the natural mind) to be genuine spiritual insight. They even set a standard for measuring all of life's experiences, but they lack authenticity and integrity.” (Melick)