He charges them with confusing faith in miracles with saving faith.
Then addressing the clause ‘If I were a prophet and that way had all knowledge, it would profit me nothing’, he says, saving knowledge certainly saves. BUT the kind of knowledge given the prophet, for the purpose of mission, does not necessarily save.
[This is beginning to fall merely under the argument of the ‘insufficiency of the charismata,’ old ground for commentators on this passage.
[Does this assertion, as an orthodox listener might suspect, belittle the preaching of the word? Or is it merely a commonplace expression of what everyone knows–that the word preached without the inward witness of the Spirit in the hearer is never effective?
[This would also help account for the fellowship between those of many denominations at Herrnhut–this kind of divine leveling of all human position, human doctrine, and human approaches to religion–this coming together under the rubric of ‘heart’ or ‘love’–a feeling or a condition, not a proposition–the stress on relational adoption, not forensic justification. . . .
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