Truth Is a Scalpel. Most People Swing It Like a Sword.
You learn one new thing about theology and suddenly you feel deputized. Someone says Gnosticism and you slide in with, “I’m your huckleberry.”
When you begin to really study good theology, you start seeing bad theology everywhere. The worship leader’s offhand comment (sermonette) between songs. Your aunt’s Facebook post with the praying-hands emoji at the end like that sanctifies it (the equivalent of I said with all due respect). The bestselling book your whole small group is obsessed with, but you know not everyday is Friday. Feels sus, you look around and seem to be the only person in the room who caught it, so the theology cop comes out and before you know it you’re quoting Augustine and accusing folks of Pelagianism.
Or maybe you go the other way. You see something that sounds wrong and stay quiet, because who are you to say anything? You don’t have the seminary degree. You don’t have the verses memorized. So you swallow it and feel vaguely uneasy but you move on.
Here’s the thing, those are two versions of the same issue. Both are what happens when you have strong feelings about truth but not the skill to handle it. That ability is not a super theological power for those with plenty of initials after their name. It’s having Biblical discernment, and to be fair a lot of churches talk about it, but often don’t teach people how to do it.
Paul walked through this two thousand years ago. He wrote to a church full of people who knew a lot and loved poorly, and he gave them one sentence that should be tattooed on the inside of every theology nerd’s bicep instead of γνῶσις in a font they had to ask three people to verify.
“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”1
The danger Paul is addressing isn’t ignorance, but the danger of knowing enough to feel superior to others. And the more you grow in your theological knowledge, the closer you walk along that edge.
Why getting smarter makes you worse at this
There’s a reason the smartest person in the room is so often the most insufferable, and part of it has to do with their actual brain. As you learn, your brain builds shortcuts. Psychologists call them schemas. They let you sort good theology from bad fast, without rebuilding your whole framework every time. That’s an important feature; we need this.
However, the same brain that sorts quickly also wants to be right, so it goes looking for evidence that you are correct. It’s what we call confirmation bias. You notice the article that agrees with you. You skim past the one that doesn’t. Over time you mistake the feeling of being confirmed for the fact of being correct.
You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect too, the idea that people who know a little overestimate how much they actually know. Fair warning: this one is contested now. Some researchers argue the original 1999 Cornell study captured a statistical quirk more than a law of human nature.2 But strip away the famous name and there is a humbler version you have experienced. The first time you read a real theology book, you felt like you cracked the code. Ten books later however you realized how little you actually understood and might even be more confused than before. When it comes to growth there is something we know, but we don’t live like it should be true and it’s that learning is never linear; up and to the right. What we actually experience when we learn is a map that seems to be growing in size with every new thing we discover.
While this is plainly true we keep handing the insight to our smartest people, as if it took a genius to notice them. Socrates gets, “I know that I know nothing.” Aristotle gets, “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Einstein gets, “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” Same insight from three famous signatures. And almost none of it is real.
Socrates never said his version. It’s a compression of something in Plato’s writing, where Socrates decides he is wise only because he refuses to pretend he knows what he doesn’t. Aristotle’s line shows up nowhere in anything he wrote. Einstein’s has no source at all. Someone just needed a brilliant name to sign the receipt. So ask why you believed them anyway? You believed them because they sounded right, and a famous name turned “sounds right” into “must be true.” You probably didn’t check, because you felt confirmed.
Which means the most quoted lines about how little we know are themselves proof of how little we check. That’s the whole trap. Confidence rises faster than competence, and when it comes to studying theology if nobody warns you, you start cutting people with a tool you’ve barely learned to hold.
🔒 The free preview ends here. The rest of this post is the toolkit: the warning signs, the three-question filter I use before I correct anyone, and the four red flags that tell you a teacher has gone off the rails. Paid subscribers, read on or if you’re a Trekkie, “Engage.”
