Latest / Clear Path Christianity / Why BAD Theology Starts with BAD Epistemology || CPC Podcast Ep. 10
Transcript
- Cole Crone: One type of question that I consistently failed to ask is in the area that philosophers call epistemology. Epistemology is ⁓ a branch of philosophy that is concerned with how we know what we know. Now, every cult counterfeit Christianity there sounds really, really convincing until you start asking epistemological questions or you start asking questions that are getting to the heart ⁓ how they know what claim to know. When you start to really drill down and try to find an epistemological you find that there's sand rather than bedrock. And so in this episode, we're gonna look at why bad theology almost always begins bad epistemology. So the first point that I wanna make is that I've made in... Pretty much every episode of this podcast and will probably continue to make in every episode going forward. And that is that God expects us to be discerning, asking questions, having doubts, talking about those doubts, having questions answered, testing truth claims. sorts of things are. are things that we are encouraged to do, or that we should be encouraged to do. The Bible never commands blind belief. Blind faith is not taught in the Bible anywhere. That is a false dichotomy that has been consistently placed between faith and reason, faith and science, or these of false dichotomies. Fideism, or pure faith, blind faith, was condemned the Christian church. relatively early on. That is not the expectation of Christianity. Rather, the Bible commands us to test beliefs, to have beliefs that are tested beliefs. Let's look at some biblical data that we've looked at many times before, and as I said, we'll probably look at many more times. First John 4.1, beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 1 Thessalonians 5, 21 says this, test all things, hold fast to what is good. And finally, we have the example to us in the book of Acts, Acts 17, 10, and 11, the example of the Bereans. Then the brethren immediately Paul and Silas away by night to Berea. When they arrived, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. These, speaking of the Bereans, were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica. How so? In that they received the word with all readiness. and search the scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. So the Bereans are contrasted to the Thessalonians in that they are actually willing to look to the scriptures to actually discern whether or not the apostolic teaching that they're getting is actually valid and they're comparing that apostolic teaching to the scriptures. My point in this first section is to say this, if even apostolic teaching was meant to be examined, then no modern leader is above scrutiny. what we find is that many high control groups teach that testing is okay, if they teach that testing is okay. They will teach that testing is only okay as long as you come to their conclusions. it's actually not real testing because the expectation is that once tested, ⁓ will con you continue to agree them. my point here is that ⁓ in the Bible, ⁓ even apostolic teaching was to examined. Therefore no modern claim. within a particular religious group claiming to be Christian is exempt from that same testing. Again, biblical faith is not the absence of thinking. Rather, it is the result of a tested truth. the point I want to make is that every worldview has an authority and that authority is what governs what is true and what is not true. are facts and what are non-facts? And I'm just going to provide a very simplistic and very memorable framework that will provide what I think to be what I believe to be the four main sources of authority, the four main types of authority. number one is ⁓ authority. So you will say, I that. Murder is wrong. Why? Well, I just, I believe that it is, I feel like homophobia is wrong. Why? I like the way it makes me feel. So all of truth claims are predicated on what you as an individual think or feel. Number two is ⁓ leader-based authority. So That this is where you go he or she. Fill in the blank leader says that this is true or that is true. if you're a member of the Manson family, you believed his helter skelter, apocalyptic vision of this race war between black and white. And, and because he said it, you believed it to be true. that would be an example of, of a leader based authority. The truth claims of Charles Manson are, if you're a member of the Manson family, truth claims that are true because he said it. Third, you have community based authority, which comes in the form of, we have always believed that in my case, where I came from, going to the hospital is wrong. And because we have always believed it, we have always taught it, is true. That you shouldn't take people to, you shouldn't go to the hospital. ⁓ doesn't have to be something that's necessarily bad, but it's because it's grounded in the community that it is an authority. And then fourth and finally, you have revelation, which is ⁓ in a divine source. ⁓ God, scripture. In the case of Christianity, it's a bit of both. You have God giving us his ⁓ And so this is, know, example of, well, the Bible says so. The Bible comes from God. God as creator is the ultimate authority. Therefore, what the Bible says we take to be an authority. So the question for this piece not whether or not you have an authority. It's whether your authority can be questioned and verified. So this next piece, we're gonna look at epistemological red flags. If truth claims are ⁓ on or on authority looks like these examples I'm to give you, ⁓ this is ⁓ very weak ⁓ epistemic justification. Epistemic justification is just the foundation or the grounding upon which you build or you base truth claims. So let's look at the first one. Circular authority. Now, circular authority sounds something like this. ⁓ X is true because our authority says it's true and our authority says it's true because X says so. Let me give you a few tangible examples. Our prophet is from God because he told us he is. You see, you're like, well, ⁓ but you believe that he is because he told you so you see that's a circle. this is the logical fallacy of circular reasoning, You have no outside way of verifying the claims at Or, our true church is the one true church because we say so. Because we say so, we're the one true church, right? This is the thing where I came from. And so there's this, there's this circle. So if your group can only prove itself by appealing to itself, then it can never be wrong. So there's, there's no way to actually test truth claims. because the authority is circular. Number two is an immunity to falsification. a ⁓ definition of how you might know that an epistemological foundation is ⁓ And that is that nothing could ever prove it wrong. If you can't think of ⁓ that would make you disbelieve the truth claims ⁓ your particular worldview, ⁓ then it is by definition immune to falsification. And falsification is just, is there a way to actually test it, prove whether or not it is actually accurate? So here are some examples and I've heard most of these or I heard most of these growing up. So let's look at a few of these. ⁓ False prophecy equals you misunderstood the prophecy. see? So when the thing doesn't take place, it's because not because the epistemic ⁓ foundation is weak, the way by which we make truth claims is false. It can't be that. It has to be that there's something wrong with you. Or if there is a contradiction, an internal contradiction within the system, again, it isn't that the foundation by which we ground truth is wrong. It's not that our epistemic justification is bad. It's that you lack spiritual insight. That's why you think there's a contradiction here. ⁓ if you present evidence against the particular worldview and you are told that you are being deceived, do you see how each of these, the epistemological the ⁓ epistemic ⁓ is And then it's flipped on the questioner rather than being a valid critique of the system of the means of attaining knowledge and truth. there's a problem with the questioner. we want to ask this question. What would count as evidence that this system is false? If your honest answer is nothing, that is a crisis point. If a belief cannot be questioned, then it cannot be trusted. Because how do you know that you're to trust it if you aren't able to actually question it? And third, we have ⁓ from external correction. And this is going to look like, or might look like a rejection of history, a rejection of the historical development of a particular worldview. It might look like a rejection of a broader, the broader community, which creates this insularity within the group. It could be a, an outright rejection of scholarship. anything that creates this isolation from an ex from all external critique. And we want to remember I've said this a lot of times on this podcast. And again, probably will continue to say this a lot as we move forward, but truth invites examination. while error requires some kind of isolation. If you cut yourself off from correction, you also cut yourself off from access to the truth. So, we're talking ⁓ Christianity and this is a Christian we're gonna look at what historic Christianity shares. And by historic Christianity, I mean the three main historic or expressions of Christianity. Eastern Orthodoxy and its branches, Catholicism and Protestantism and various expressions. first thing is, that public revelation is over ⁓ secret Gnosticism, ⁓ secret knowledge was a big part of the Gnostic movements in the early church. ⁓ And because can't falsify secret knowledge, there's no way to test secret knowledge to know whether it's from God. Again, first John four one, test the spirits. If you can't test the spirits, then what do you have? You're just taking someone's word for it. the gospel is proclaimed openly and not hidden behind codes or elite insights. St. Irenaeus actually wrote the book against heresies to combat a lot of these ideas. 1500 years ago. If your group makes an exclusivity claim of some kind, they better have a lot of evidence. They better have a lot of evidence by which to make those sorts of exclusivity claims. So groups that rely on, truths or to what the Bible really means. or only our group of, know, behind this institutional label really understand truth and you just need to trust them. That's not what historic Christianity has ever looked like. And if your group looks like that, you should be asking more questions. The second thing that Christianity shares is that there's this idea of continuity over reinvention. I've said this before and I will probably say it again. The one thing that ⁓ 2000 year old religion should not be known for ⁓ innovation. So if your group teaches that true Christianity started in the 1800s, that should be a red flag. You should go, well, what about the 1800 years before that? That was not something that I ever thought. My group started in the 1800s and I never thought that that was fishy. So I'm here to share that experience with you so that maybe your spidey senses will be a little sharper than mine were growing up. Or might be in a group that teaches that a new prophet or board of directors has gotten new access to truth is now able to correct all of the bad, ⁓ false doctrines that came before. Or if group claims to be some kind of new restoration, again, Christianity is a 2000 year old religion. Why didn't we get your insights prior to the 1800s? if your theology requires that the entire church was wrong for 1800-ish years, you can call that restoration, but what you're actually proclaiming is something more akin to replacement. And so you have to have... good epistemic justification for making such a truth claim. Number three is scripture is interpreted within a recognizable framework. So scripture is central and not privately redefined in isolation. That's when we get into trouble, is when we take scripture that is supposed to be ⁓ discussed and interpreted openly within a body of individuals, and rather we take it and we isolate a small group, and that small group gets to authoritatively say what the scripture means. And then they impose that onto everyone else without any kind of ⁓ epistemic justification, with any way of actually demonstrating how we know what they're claiming to know. I'm probably going to make everybody mad, but that's fine. I want challenge two ends of a spectrum here. On the one hand, have radical individualism. which says, all I need is just me and my Bible. And then we have a controlled interpretation on the other hand, where it's just us and our leaders, I think that the healthy place to be is somewhere in the middle. Because if it's just me and my Bible, then we're reinventing the wheel, theologically speaking, every generation. Rather than, as Sir Isaac Newton said, than seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants, we're actually just reinventing the wheel every generation. And no wonder we have all these teachings that didn't appear in the church for 2000 years, constantly springing up all over. And on the other hand, we don't want a controlled interpretation where there is a ⁓ level group of individuals who get to decide doctrine for everybody. without there being some kind of reason why we ought to trust these people over here, over everyone else. whatever your interpretation of a particular text of scripture ⁓ or private revelation of some kind that you believe you're experiencing, it had better be consistent with the broader witness of the church across time. Because again, if you're, if you're claiming that your movement is a restoration of a movement that was lost, it's not actually a restoration. It's just replacement. And what are you replacing? And what exactly gives you the right to replace? ⁓ what authority? That's the whole thing that we're talking about here. How do we know that the thing that came before needed replacing? So historic Christianity has always emphasized accountability over ⁓ absolute human authority. So if you're in a group where leaders can't be questioned ⁓ can't be examined or truth can't be tested, that should be a big red flag for you. You should be asking why can't this particular leader's authority be How do we know that that particular person is giving us actual truth rather than just their own personal opinion? ⁓ How do we know this particular doctrine is what the church should be teaching or believing? If there's a stark contrast between that teaching and something that has been taught basically since the beginning. ⁓ if, no falsifiability to our claims, if our claims can't be tested against scripture or some source ⁓ of truth, how do we know we know? Again, that's the big question for this episode. How do we know what we know? So let's do, let's do some application. Here are some questions you can always ask yourself. I know we talk typically Christianity on this podcast. The podcast is called clear path Christianity. but I would say that a lot of these are applicable to any particular group that you might find yourself becoming affiliated with. question number one, ⁓ the system allow itself to be tested? Am I, am I allowed to look at a particular truth claim and ask, is this logically coherent? Does this correspond to reality in some way? how do we know ⁓ that this truth claim is true? Second, does the truth claim rely ⁓ ⁓ kind of secret knowledge? Because if truth is being decided behind closed doors, And you're not actually being shown the truth claim was arrived at and the epistemic justification for the truth claim. Then again, you're just ⁓ trusting else you don't want to, you don't want to fall into that trap. Third, does the truth claim isolate us from historical is, this particular truth claim something that the apostles would have believed? if we're talking in terms of Christianity, if you're in a group that is presenting itself as Christianity, we should probably care what Jesus's first followers actually believed. What did they teach? You can look ⁓ at historical record ⁓ of who were actually trained by the apostles. And then the people who were trained by those people and the councils that made authoritative rulings based on those teachings. All this before we even had a canon, a New Testament canon of scripture by which to test things. how did we arrive at these teachings and are we placing ⁓ extra emphasis on these teachings because they're closer to source? Or are we just assuming that they're wrong? because they don't comport with what personal preferences are. And does the claim collapse without its central authority? If you're in group that was founded by a prophet, do all of those claims still hold without that particular prophet? Because if the answer is no, then your entire system hinges on that particular person. And then again, how could that ever be falsified? There'd be no way of knowing. I didn't believe what I believed growing up because it was true. I never asked epistemological questions. I never concerned myself with how do I actually know the things I'm claiming to know? believed the things that I believed because I never questioned ⁓ actually how things could actually be true. How do I actually know the truth claims that I'm believing and, possibly staking my eternal soul on. So the question that could possibly set you free, the types of questions that set me free, isn't just asking questions like, do I believe? But rather I need, I needed to ask questions more akin to, do I have a trustworthy way of knowing what's true? is my epistemic justification ⁓ bedrock or my epistemic justification just sand? if want to build a skyscraper, you don't start building in midair because it's just going to fall. No, you, you dig a hole and you get to hard ground. You put down a foundation, a strong foundation. And then you go up. But if you don't take the time to build that foundation first, everything that you build is just going to come crashing down. And so hopefully this episode has provided you with a possible framework by which you can assess the, the epistemic justification for the truth claims that you are just accepting. At the end of the day, if you don't have a strong enough epistemic justification for your truth claims, then you are, as Jesus said, like a man who builds his house on the sands. And when the winds and the waves come, it sweeps your worldview into the deep. But if you build your house on the solid rock that is Christ, when the winds come and the rains and the waves come crashing into your house, it will remain solid and standing. So I want to get us off the sand and onto the solid rock.