Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to 2 Corinthians · About this commentary
Our Boasting Is This
2 Corinthians 1:12-14
12 For our boasting is this: the testimony of our conscience that in holiness and sincerity of God, not in fleshly wisdom but in the grace of God, we behaved ourselves in the world, and more abundantly toward you. · WEB
The letter's most loaded word appears here for the first time, and what it points at is a clear conscience rather than an achievement.
For our boasting is this: the testimony of our conscience.
The verb for boasting runs through seventeen verses of this letter, fourteen of them in chapters 10 to 12, where it becomes the instrument of the whole defense. This is where it starts, and the content it is given here governs how the later uses should be read.
What Paul claims is not success. It is the testimony of our conscience — an internal witness, which is the one credential that cannot be produced on demand or checked by anyone else. He then describes the conduct it testifies to in three phrases: in holiness and sincerity of God, not in fleshly wisdom, but in the grace of God.
The middle phrase is the pointed one. Fleshly wisdom is the skill set his rivals were graded on, and he is not claiming to have used it badly. He is claiming not to have used it.
And the scope of the claim is in the world, and more abundantly toward you — the behavior was the same everywhere, only more so with them. A man defending himself against a charge of duplicity is careful to say his conduct did not have a Corinthian version.
Verse 13 answers the same charge from another side: we write no other things to you than what you read or even acknowledge. No hidden layer, nothing meant for insiders. The letters say what they appear to say, which is a claim the next paragraph will need 2 Corinthians 1:18.
Then verse 14 turns the boasting around and makes it mutual: we are your boasting, even as you also are ours, in the day of our Lord Jesus. Each is the other's ground for confidence, and the date given for settling the account is not now. Whatever the congregation currently thinks of him, and whatever he thinks of them, the verdict he appeals to is deferred — which takes the argument out of the room.
settled What this mark means