Sinning Does Not Make You an Expert and Why Evangelicals Think it Does

One of the weirder impulses in evangelicalism today is the idea that sinning makes you an expert. At the heart of this issue is the weaker brother and sister arguments in Paul (mostly from 1 Cor. 8 and 10 and Romans 14).

So how do we think sinning makes you an expert?

Think about the absurd stories that get shared around Halloween on social media, where someone says something like, “I have a friend who was involved in witchcraft who just became a Christian and was shocked that Christians celebrate Halloween. He says that they have no idea what they are getting into and shouldn’t be celebrating it because it is demonic.”

In many ways, this is a great example of what Paul says about the weaker brother or sister in 1 Corinthians 8. In this section we see a new convert who isn’t sure what to do about meat sold at the meat market out of fear that he might accidentally eat meat that was sacrificed at a pagan sacrificial service. He is troubled that he may unknowingly participate once again in the pagan rituals he left behind when he converted to Christianity.

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Paul’s response is to re-ground them in the truth:

“Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “an idol has no real existence,” and that “there is no God but one.” For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” 1 Corinthians 8:4-6.

Paul then goes on to explain: “However, not all possess this knowledge. But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled” (1 Cor. 8:7).

Notice the reason the weaker brother doesn’t have knowledge is because of his “former association” with idols. There is a kind of implicit and experiential knowledge that he has internalized through sinning that has inhibited his ability to know the truth.

This is why many recent converts don’t share the same freedom that people who have grown up in the faith do. It is not that this freedom has been held back from them, but that they need to have this relational and experiential knowledge transformed, or else they will continue to defile their conscience.

Perhaps more important and less obvious, the answer to the weaker brothers lack of knowledge is not to merely teach him information, because information is not the primarily problem. The knowledge he fails to have was hard-earned through his “former association” with idols; this is experiential knowing.

Just as his experience in sinning was a relational and experiential training in a kind of “knowing,” his transformation must also be a maturation that is experiential and relational (while also including information). This means that the weaker brother needs to see that he is not an expert and that his pre-converted sin does not give him a leg-up on mature Christians as to “what is really going on in the world.”

But it is this very notion that evangelicals are so often duped by.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard things like:

• Yoga isn’t really stretching. Christians don’t really know what they are opening themselves up to by stretching in those sorts of ways.

• Christians shouldn’t believe in meditation because I have a friend who just converted from the new age who told me what is really going on when we meditate.

Sadly, I could go on and on. In fact, in many ways, instead of naming weaker brothers and sisters as “weaker,” evangelicals are more likely to just platform them, failing to remember that Scripture warns us against pushing people beyond their maturity and knowledge into places of leadership and teaching.

Think about how many people’s platforms are based on their sin. I cannot tell you how many Christians I have met who were duped by radically progressive ideologies, realize their mistake, and then immediately see themselves as prophets of the truth. But when they do so, what is platforming them really is the fact that they were duped, and their new found zeal is animated by that fact. In a quest to not be duped again, they immediately become supposed experts on what Christian truth requires.

I don’t have the space here to get into all of the specifics of what Paul says in response to these sorts of things, which would get us into the nature of the conscience and the nature of Christian freedom (I have a chapter on the conscience in When God Seems Distant for those who are interested).

But importantly, we do have Paul’s pastoral wisdom on what happens when weaker brothers and sisters raise these sorts of issues in the church. For most of the Christians in Corinth, perhaps, they hadn’t considered that they might be participating in demonic sacrifice when they went down to the meat market for some nice steak! But now they wonder.

Here is what Paul says to them: “Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience.”

Paul’s pastoral wisdom is basically, “For goodness sake, stop asking questions. You have the truth. You know who God is.”

But he, of course, does not end there. It turns out that our freedom in these things is not just freedom to be able to do something you want to do. Mature Christian freedom is freedom to care well for our weaker brothers and sisters.

But let me also suggest that one way we sin against our weaker brothers and sisters, and maybe even destroy them (as Paul warns), is to platform them. In doing so, we have not wrestled through the implications of allowing them to believe that their sin gains them expertise in the reality of things.

It does not.

We don’t go to the sexually deviant to figure out what sexual sin is and what sexual health entails.

We don’t go to new age converts to discern boundaries in spiritual formation.

We don’t go to a recent convert from paganism to discern proper worship.

Sin does not make you an expert in anything other than what is unreal and untrue, and the truth is not discerned or advanced by how you were ignorant of it.

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