Guest, Dr. Matt Colvin

A frequent objection against the practice of having young children participate in the Lord’s Supper is that they are unable to perform the action which Paul enjoins in 1 Corinthians 11:28, “let a man examine himself”, in Greek, “dokimazeto anthropos heauton.” Why are they unable? George Knight III claims: “Paul gives no specific guidelines for this action of examining oneself.” He believes, however, that “the only guidance that we can ascertain is the meaning of the verb ‘examine.'” Knight’s interpretation of this verb is that “Every person individually is to look into his own being (emphasis mine – MC) to determine if he or she is taking the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner” (“1 Cor. 11:17-34: The Lord’s Supper” in The Auburn Avenue Theology: Pros and Cons, ed. E. Calvin Beisner, p. 287)

In what follows, I aim to show that Knight is wrong about all these points. First, I want to argue, as a point of Greek lexicography, that he is mistaken about the meaning of the verb “dokimazo”, and therefore also about the guidance which he derives from it. I believe it is a mistake to say that Paul gives no guidelines for how “dokimazo” is to be performed: rather, the context makes clear what the Christians in Corinth were to do. As an example of such contextually supplied content for the test of “dokimazo”, I argue on exegetical grounds that Paul’s use of the same verb in 2 Cor. 13, which is often urged as a corroborating introspective instance, is in fact demonstrably objective, and consists in the performance of actions understood from the context.

First, lexicography. “Dokimazo” does not mean “to look into one’s own being”. I can turn up no such usage in either the LSJ nor the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. All the instances I can unearth are unequivocally objective and outward. Demosthenes 18.266 says “I am being examined for a crown,” and then talks about how he is judicially innocent of all crimes. This is not introspective. Again, in Plato’s Laws, 759D, some officers called “Expounders” are being examined. The scrutiny in question, the test indicated by “dokimazo”, is “to see that a man is healthy and legitimate, reared in a family whose moral standards could hardly be higher, and that he himself and his father and mother have lived unpolluted by homicide and all such offences against heaven.” In other words, it is again objective, not a matter of “looking into one’s being.” Again, in Thucydides 6.53, we see criminal informers being tested; in this case, “dokimazo” indicates a double-checking of the facts of their reports. Or in Xenophon, Memorabilia VI.1, we find talk of testing friends, where the test involves asking whether a person is “master of his appetites, not under the dominion, that is, of his belly, not addicted to the wine-cup or to lechery or sleep or idleness” and whether he is a debtor or quarrelsome.

But I cannot find a single occurrence of the word where it might mean “look into a man’s being.” On the face of things, it seems impossible that in 1 Cor. 11, the fact that a reflexive pronoun is the object should suddenly mean that introspection is the means by which “dokimazeto seauton” is accomplished. Paul himself uses the verb as the culmination of a series of expressions denoting public and objective revelation in 1 Cor. 3:13: ‘The work of each one will become manifest, for the day will make it clear, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test (“dokimasei”) each one’s work, [to prove] what kind it is. Indeed, a survey of the uses of the word in Greek literature lends great plausibility to the suggestion of the OPC Majority report on paedocommunion, Tim Gallant’s book Feed My Lambs, and various other sources, that the test in view in 1 Cor. 11 is whether one is living in love and unity with one’s fellow believers. This would be, again, objectively knowable and would seem to involve no introspection — in short, a requirement that babies do not even have the ability to break yet.

Knight and other credocommunionists seem not to feel the weight of this lexical argument, however. They believe that an introspective meaning for “dokimazo” can be adduced from the pages of Scripture itself. 2 Cor. 13:5 is the passage they cite as corroboration for their reading of “dokimazo” in 1 Cor. 11:28. It reads:

Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test (δοκιμάζετε)yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? — unless indeed you are disqualified (ἀδόκιμοι).

“See?” the credocommunionist says. “You have to see whether you’re in the faith, by checking whether Christ is in you. That’s introspection!” The most persuasive way to overthrow this introspectionist understanding of the verse is to show that it does not even fit the context of 2 Cor. 12-13, let alone 1 Cor. 11. The verse is part of a larger argument of a particularly poignant and elegant character — and this argument of Paul’s is only comprehensible if δοκιμάζω and its cognates have reference to objective matters mentioned in the immediate context, and not to introspection. In what follows, I will analyze 2 Cor. 13.

First, the general scene. We may begin by noting that 2 Cor. was written by Paul at a time when his credentials as an apostle were under attack by enemies in Corinth who were promoting false doctrines of hyper-spirituality and consequent antinomianism. This is the letter in which Paul is driven to his “insane” boasting about his service to Christ. The apostle is heartbroken. He loves the Corinthians, and hates having to discipline them and make them sorrowful (2 Cor. 2:1-2). But he is nonetheless motivated by a fierce and jealous love for them: he wants them, not their possessions (2 Cor. 12:14). He is heartbroken because his love for them is not reciprocated. They question the genuineness of his apostolic authority, so that he has to assert it.

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