We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. 4 We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. 5 We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ. 6 And after you have become fully obedient, we will punish everyone who remains disobedient. NLT

In this passage Paul shows that the battle for repentance (the struggle against wrong thinking; the fight to capture every thought and make it obey Christ) is to be waged not only outside the church, but also within it. He makes it clear that he is ‘all in’: fully committed to the purity of the church, and therefore to discipline.

‘The battle for the mind remains central to the church’s task, in this and every age. But it doesn’t just have to be fought by Christians against those outside the church. It has to be fought inside the church as well, and that’s what Paul is beginning once more to do in this section of the letter. He now knows that the church as a whole is well disposed towards him (7.5-16). But there are still some teachers who might be inclined to rebel, to say about him what they’d always said: that he wasn’t half as good a speaker as he was a writer, and that, though he sounded imposing when he was far away, he was actually insignificant in person. He was, in any case, just another human being doing what all human beings do, not a truly ‘spiritual’ person as some of them claimed to be.

The point of this present passage is to say: if that’s the challenge, I’m ready to take it on. My whole ministry, after all, is all about opposing proud arguments that set themselves up against the true knowledge of God. If that’s my speciality in my teaching towards outsiders, do you suppose I won’t do the same if I’m confronted by people in the church itself?’ Tom Wright