Have We Idolized Reason? - Loving Theology

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| Modern Idolatry series |

We don’t often find ourselves tempted to bow down to a wooden statue but make no mistake, idolatry is very much alive and well in our culture. Idolatry happens any time that we allow something other than God to take on one of His roles in our life. As I’ve said before, because God plays so many roles in our lives, the temptations for idolatry are endless.

In this series we identified one of the most important roles that God has in our life: the definer of good and evil. In fact, we saw that the sin in the Garden was exactly this form of idolatry. When Eve chose to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she did so to become “like God, knowing good and evil”. Every time we sin, we choose our own evaluation of good and evil over God’s, repeating the serpent’s words: “I will not surely die”. In this way, this form of idolatry is perhaps the most fundamental: making an appearance every time we sin.

Studying the knowledge of good and evil (a subject called ethics) sounds virtuous on the surface, but the story in the Garden demonstrates that it leads to death. Today we’re going to explore why our reason cannot define good and evil for us.

The Problem with Ethics

I can recall sitting in my college ethics class discussing how to make the right decision. The purpose of the class was to present tools we could use to help us decide between right and wrong. The main tool we were given was analysis (reason). We were taught to consider everyone who was affected by the decision and to weigh how the decision would affect them.

Here’s the problem: This type of analysis is where we use reason and knowledge to decide between good and evil. Sound familiar? It’s when we chose our own knowledge of good and evil, that we chose sin for the first time. Fundamentally, this is because we are choosing to reject God and put ourselves in His place. To make matters worse, when we choose for ourselves what is good and evil, the only possible option is that we will get it wrong. Why? Because we are not God.

To make matters worse, when we choose for ourselves what is good and evil, the only possible option is that we will get it wrong. Why? Because we are not God.

When we rely on our own definition of good and evil, we often so badly misunderstand something that’s good (beneficial) that it becomes evil (harmful). When we serve as our own guide, something valuable becomes harmful because wisdom is simply beyond our grasp. Let me give one example:

When Freedom Becomes Evil

Freedom is a good thing, but, as I said above, when we use our own reason to decide right and wrong, we inevitably get it wrong. Because freedom might be the most elevated virtue in the US, an overemphasis of this probably serves as the most common basis for the mistakes we make when we try to reason our way to good and evil. Let me illustrate what I mean.

A Victimless Crime?

Why do people call prostitution a victimless crime? The reasoning goes something like this: no one is being forced to do it, so no one is being harmed. We are holding the virtue of freedom so high that if it wasn’t violated (no one was forced) then, we reason, no evil occurred. Yet the truth is that both of them are victims of this crime. In the context of discussing prostitution, Paul urges us about the damage that sexual immorality does:

Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.
1 Corinthians 6:18

Let me take this same illustration one step further: pornography. I’m all too familiar with this deception, having fallen into it often. There was a time when I used my reason to justify watching pornography, falsely believing that if no one was being forced to do anything, then no one was being hurt, so it was not evil. Make no mistake, Paul’s warning about sexual immorality absolutely includes pornography. He destroys our justification that we aren’t hurting anyone when he explains that we are hurting ourselves (sinning against our own body). Just because it didn’t violate anyone’s “freedom” doesn’t mean it wasn’t evil.

This should sound a lot like what we talked about last time (from Isaiah 5). When we use our own reason, we look at something that’s bitter (causes us harm) like pornography and call it sweet (pleasurable).

The Inadequacy of Our Reason

We are not alone in making this mistake, however. The apostles often wrote to correct those who had become too focused on freedom. When the Corinthians overemphasized this, Paul explained how what they called freedom was not what God called freedom, but slavery:

You say, “I am allowed to do anything”—but not everything is good for you. And even though “I am allowed to do anything,” I must not become a slave to anything.
1 Corinthians 6:12 NLT, emphasis added

Similarly, Peter warned about people who emphasized freedom to the point that it became their bondage. To our point here, these were false teachers (people who used reason to convince others):

“They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved.”
2 Peter 2:19

This verse shows us what happens when we reason our way to morality. We get it so backward that what we call freedom, God calls slavery. To take this even further, when God teaches us about true freedom He has to illustrate it as slavery because of how limited our reason really is.

To take this even further, when God teaches us about true freedom He has to illustrating it as slavery because of how limited our reason really is.

“…having been set free from sin … become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. … For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. … But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God…”
Romans 6:18-22

The Examples are Endless

Understanding freedom is not the only place where our reason falls short. The Bible is full of these paradoxes (things that rationally seem like a contradiction). Just to name a few: works and faith (like we discussed in the first post of this series), strength by our weakness, losing our life to save it, or even the more foundational things like the Trinity or the divinity and humanity of Christ. You see, God’s wisdom often seems irrational to us because our reason was never able to be our God, teaching us truth, defining for us good and evil. Furthermore, it’s not only our reason that tries to take God’s place as the definer of good and evil. We can so subtly begin to look to society to tell us when we’re right or wrong. Next time we’ll take a look at one of these examples where society tries to take God’s place in our lives. Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss it!