Where Errant Philosphies Come From

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines -- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a poet and essayist of the 19th century. He was trained as a Unitarian minister but became the originator and a leader of the Transcendentalist movement. Transcendentalism defied the church of their day, denying that the church would have the truth, and asking instead, "What is truth?" Oh, and did I mention ... Emerson was bisexual.

Michel Foucault was one of the leading modern spokesmen for post-modernism. Born in 1926, he died in 1984. His works included works on the treatment of the insane, the development of the medical profession, and the power of knowledge. He argued that there should be no age boundaries between consensual sexual partners and that governments controlled their people by controlling their sexual relations (a concept he called "biopower"), and "participated in the subcultures of anonymous gay sex and sadomasochism" in San Francisco. He died a of AIDS-related illness in Paris.

Books have been written on this topic with better information than I have. Do heretical ideas come about by a pure search for truth, or is their origin elsewhere? Here's the process that one might normally think is the case. A person is thinking and considering and looking and, in that process, they come to the conclusion that morality is irrelevant. Having come to that conclusion, they then discard their sense of morality and become immoral ... consistent with their belief. Now, that's all well and good, a reasonable idea, except that it's counter to the biblical version.

Here's how the biblical version goes. Man intrinsically knows there is a God, but suppresses that knowledge. Having suppressed that, he sinks into a worship of the creature, a replacing of God with the creature. The creature becomes the most important thing. Having replaced God with the creature, he indulges his desires. That is, since he is the most important thing, what he wants is the most important thing. Having indulged his desires for sin, his mental processes become twisted, producing false philosophies and theologies that will encourage others to follow in the same path. (See Rom. 1:18-32.)

People would like to think that it is an honest mistake. They've just come to a wrong conclusion, and that wrong conclusion leads them into sin. Unfortunately, the Bible says that they are in sin, and that sin leads them to the wrong conclusion to defend their sin. In other words, too often our morality tends to dictate our theology instead of vice versa. The upshot of this is that, while we certainly need to address wrong conclusions, the real problem isn't altered by the simple refutation of error. We can come up with right answers and scintillating logic and even what appears to be irrefutable proof, but as long as the sin problem isn't addressed, there will be no change, since the sin problem is the basis for the erroneous thinking.

I've said it before. I'll say it again. We need to contend for the faith, to defend the truth, to be ready always to give an answer. But let's not forget that the real problem for humans is not that they're thinking incorrectly. The real answer is not that they're ignorant or confused. The real problem is that they're dead, and no amount of education fixes that. Only the Gospel, including the problem of sin and the remedy for sin, and the work of the Holy Spirit in the listener can fix this situation. We need to stand for truth, but let's not do it at the expense of presenting the Gospel. No one has ever been argued into the kingdom. That takes an act of God.