NOTES for 2 Кор 10:17-18
Paul's words about man, who glories himself, can show themselves at first sight trivial: because all know that boasting is stupid and absurd, that it leads to nothing good. But, on the other hand, rises the question of what we usually call "a deserved and objective evaluation": because it would seem, everyone has right on it, why then man cannot give himself such an evaluation? The most wide-spread and most obvious answer is the following: the fallen man is not objective in general, and especially in his own evaluation. It is of course really so, but then hardly we can also consider the evaluation of a large number of persons, the evaluation of the society as objective: from the set, no matter how extensive, one shall not make the non objective evaluations objective evaluations.
As an objective evaluator there is only God, who knows each such as nobody else knows himself. Such reasonings are known for a long time, and there would have been nothing new also probably in them. If it was not only one "but": Paul speaks about the Christian life, and thus, about the life of the Kingdom. And in the Kingdom, eulogy and evaluation play not at all the same role as in the not transformed world: because in the not transformed world the initial sense of any evaluation is the information, by the evaluation we judge man and his works.
But in the Kingdom the works speak in fact of themselves, because there, there is nobody and nothing, which can seem not oneself, there is no break between the outward and the essence there. And the evaluation of God already becomes in the Kingdom not an eulogy or a blame, as we understand both today, but the measure of His participation in the life and the works, for which He "glorifies" the inhabitant of the Kingdom.