Holding Our Ground: The Christian Response to Error
When countering error, conscientious advocates of biblical truth can all too easily arrive at extremes that caricature the positions they mean to defend. Rather than clarifying issues, such efforts leave God’s people with a partial, misshapen account of the truth they sorely need—better off, no doubt, than they were without it but still poorly equipped and unsettled.
They can go wrong, first, by failure to recognize more than one side of a two-sided truth. The common term for a two-sided truth is paradox, ordinarily defined as "a seeming contradiction." Some paradoxes express things not difficult to understand. When Jesus told His disciples that the wide gate opens toward destruction and the narrow gate toward life, the contradiction was simply between the factual truth and their ingrained way of thinking, between reality and appearance. To resolve the paradox required only relinquishing a misperception, replacing ignorance with knowledge. The paradox was simply an arresting packaging of a truth.
But when Jesus spoke of the need for a grain of wheat to fall into the ground and die in order to produce new life, the apparent contradiction was in the very nature of the truth itself—indeed in the actual structure of the reality being represented. The idea that death must precede life is a startling truth, observable in nature but darkly mysterious as a universal principle—one that operates in both physical and spiritual domains. It requires special explanation in order to be understood.
Take, for example, the double sense of nature in Scripture. The biblical thinker has an ingrained suspicion of things natural, as indeed he should. "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (I Corinthians 1:14). The natural man in Scripture is spiritually blind and morally corrupt, caught up in his own purposes and importance. The opposite of the natural man is the spiritual, the perceptions and desires of regenerated man, whose entire being and course of life express the God-life within him.
On the other hand, we are given to understand also in Scripture that the natural is approved of God whereas the unnatural is disapproved. Paul speaks of reprobate persons who lack natural affection (Romans 1:31; II Timothy 3:3), some of whom in their depravity even "did change the natural use into that which is against nature" (Romans 1:26). He reminds the Corinthians that nature teaches a man the shamefulness of his having long hair (I Corinthians 11:14). In these passages the opposite of the natural is not the spiritual but the perverse. Can it be that human nature is both bad and good? We are taught that the sin-flawed inherited nature—Satan’s and our doing—is to be condemned and suppressed, whereas the created nature—God’s doing—is to be affirmed and developed in His redemptive plan.
Paradoxes then can be merely verbal mechanisms, such as that of the two gates, or they can be of the actual substance of the idea, such as that of the grain of wheat. The latter kind are either easily resolvable, such as the double meaning of nature, or ultimately unresolvable. The unresolvable includes some of the most important truths we have. The method of the paradox is to lead us, in the effort of resolving it, to a valuable insight, formulating a truth for us in a richly memorable way.
Arguments in defense of truth go awry also because of a second tendency: forming a position diametrically opposite the erroneous one, forgetting that error is not always 180 degrees from the truth. Error may lie 90 degrees off the truth or even be sitting on truth’s borders. If truth, let us say, is north by the compass, error is not always due south; it may be east or west, even northwest, and even in not-so-rare instances north-northwest.
To be in accord with divinely revealed truth, our positions must be formed naturally from Scripture, not counterrelationally to the error we mean to combat. The fact that a position was held by Freud does not mean it was in every respect wrong. Freud was not the first to propose that there are depths in the human mind. The idea is prominent in Plato. It is everywhere in Scripture itself. "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord," searching all his innermost parts (Proverbs 20:27). God knows our thoughts and purposes "afar off"—before we ourselves are even aware of them (Ps. 139:2). The brain is a multitasking marvel, and beyond that is the mysterious interplay of its synapses and the soul.
In opposing Deweyism—self-directedness in progressive education—we need not reject every idea of John Dewey. Jesus used a variety of teaching methods with His disciples, including some associated with progressive education. He employed, for example, the method of learning-by-doing when He sent the twelve out to preach two by two. Their experience was conducted under His oversight and structured toward a purpose. They reported to Him when they returned and received further instruction.
Reactional thinking is a special danger in deadly serious controversy. When reacting to a position that is mostly wrong but partially right, we may find ourselves proposing one that is mostly right but partially wrong, a mirror image in reverse of the one opposed and both inaccurate. How useless would be a weathervane whose base pivoted with it, turning in its entirety to confront the wind so that north showed always opposite to the way the wind was blowing.