Wisdom with Errors

It takes wisdom to deal with errors or to know how to respond or not respond to errors in the church. Always in scripture there are two principles: unity and truth.

One proverb tells us to "answer a fool according to his error or he will be wise in his own eyes" another tells us to "not answer a fool according to his folly or he will be wise in his own eyes." Which is it? Of course it is a call to wisdom.

All errors are not the same. Some errors are very dangerous and some errors are of almost no importance at all.

We need wisdom when we see errors and issues in life. Certain interpretations of passages of scripture while wrong may be of little interest in arguing over.

Often you will find a person read into a piece of scripture a point which is not in the scripture text, but found throughout scripture itself. It would be a great folly to have a large disagreement over something which is a misinterpretation of a scriptural text, but in line with the whole teaching of scripture.

Even some errors spoken which are out of accord with scripture are of little interest. Not everything is equally important.

But some errors are of great importance. Issues around the nature of God, the nature of man, sin, the trinity, grace, and gospel are very central. Everything in the bible is of importance, but not everything of importance is equally important.

Question as Rhetoric

Often strings of questions are rhetorical tools and tend be too uncharitable in debate. The nature of a question is that it requests and answers.

Usually strings of questions are rhetorical tools meant to trap and not question while providing little the debate oneself. You see questions contain assumptions within.

I am convinced the truth shines in the light. To obscure ones position behind a mound of questions forcing the person you are debating with to only speak and providing nothing to the debate is hiding in the shadows.

You see truth must be based on content. To try to undermine positions without content is uninteresting. You see to prick a position to point out an oddity is of little use.

You see worldviews are filled with many oddities and to point out this or that issue with a theology without positively presenting an appealing worldview oneself is uninteresting and unhelpful.

In theological debates I believe positions should be positively expounded. Too many debates now days tend to be point out errors in that or that without positively placing another system in place.

To point out an error or hole and offer of replacement view is of course interesting. The negative is also answered with a positive articulation. But the purely negative articulation against a theology or worldview is uninteresting.

At times journalism in Christianity suffers from offering negative without positive. Whatever is good and holy is what we should thing of.

Sometimes pastors or theologians will fail and make a careless comment or questionable but not terrible decision and there is much discussion of the issue without clear reason. Why are we focusing on the error of this person? It is often relatively small and yet much discussion happens.

But where is the positive take? You see we often become theological gossipers guilty of more law-breaking than the pastor in his small failure.

To me there is a need for charity. You see many of us in our own work make errors. Carelessness or say ill thought out ideas. And yet as a work tends to be private there is not much to do about our actions.

You see we should be treated as we want to be treated and not expound an unrealistic Hollywood gossip tendency onto high profile pastors and theologians.

Theological Tolerance vs. Theological Lack of Tolerance

It's interesting that in Scripture we find a wide range of responses to the different errors that men have made theologically. Job clearly made some theological errors, but the Lord affirmed that there was no one who followed him as Job did.

The Pharisees made errors which seemed to be terminally fatal without significant repentance. I don't want to dwell into theological errors, but simply state that theological errors become more dangerous the closer they get to the heart of the Christian message.

Errors related to the gospel are far more dangerous in general than issues about style of worship or other perceived errors. We can easily find errors in our church which are of a degree which are not important.

Some errors are worth fighting over and some are not. It is a wisdom issue, but we must always remember that the closer the error is to the heart of the Gospel the more likely it is worth discussing.