This classic tale raises question about self-deception, conformity, and obedience to authority.
An Emperor of a city is fond of clothes. Two imposter weavers enter his city and tell him they will create a suit for him that would be invisible to stupid people. The weavers only pretend to weave the suit and present the fake suit to everyone in the city. Everyone who looks upon the suit is troubled by what they cannot see, and whether they are inadequate or not. Everyone lies and says they can see the suit. A child breaks everyone’s delusion by shouting out, “the Emperor is not wearing anything at all!”
I am not making any claims about Paul’s motivations. Everything he says or does could be fueled by religious experience or delusion he has about a fledgling Christ Cult. Or it could be Paul understood human psychology and took advantage of it.
But as we can see in the children’s story Emperor’s New Clothes, the two weavers in their fraud associated their amazing clothing to with a feature of only being visible to not stupid people.
Lets take a look at what Paul does, that no other prophet had ever done before…
1 Corinthians
4 My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5 so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power…….
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. 13 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words.[c] 14 The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit
Here are my questions.
Do you see a similar connection between the two stories in the way that the Weavers and Paul invent some feature to make “special” in humans that allows them to see something no one else can? When one looks for the prophet’s utilizing a spirit power and teaching people to use their spirit power to search for truths in the old testament, one comes up blank.
When Paul says “ 14 The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness“, how can that apply to teachers of the law? If teachers of the law see nothing foolish about the 628,000 words of the Old Testament and teach these revelations as the word of God, can Paul really make this claim?
Roger Mills
Article URL : https://www.prindleinstitute.org/books/the-emperors-new-clothes/