Theological Stumbling

And how we can avoid it

Jesus is serious about the content of Christian teaching. He requires us to teach in such a way as to lead people into a living and saving relationship with him. Thus we read in Matthew 18:6-7,

If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!

Jesus’ warning is dire. What we teach matters. Some teachings lead to life while others lead to death. If we put a stumbling block in front of people who are on the path to life, Jesus says, we’re committing a grave sin. The “little ones,” or those who are not yet mature in their faith, are particularly vulnerable to stumbling.

We do well, then, to consider some of the ways in which we might cause these little ones to stumble. Billy Abraham outlines four of these in volume 3 of his four-part work, Divine Agency and Divine Action (Oxford, 2018):

There are, no doubt, many ways in which we can cause one of these little ones to fall or stumble. We can cause them to stumble by ridiculing them in public, by shaming them into thinking they are stupid or naïve. Or we can cause them to stumble by our sin, leading them to doubt if holiness is really possible or to give up on the church as crucial to the work of God. Or we can cause them to stumble by confusing them, by rambling all over the place in our teaching. In this instance, we cause them to fall by our own intellectual laziness and indifference. We fail to think things through, throw out a few theological platitudes, and then find other things to do. Or we can cause them to stumble by introducing all sorts of false ideas about God and about ourselves. In other words, we become incompetent theologians, teachers who are entirely sincere and well-intentioned but who ultimately shoot wide of the truth and thus mislead the rational sheep of Christ in faith and practice. The words of our Lord strike me as applying to all of these cases and more (39).

Let’s take these in order:

1. We can cause them to stumble by ridiculing them in public, by shaming them into thinking they are stupid or naïve.

Since the first days of the faith, some people have intentionally tried to make Christians look stupid or silly. The “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins are recent examples. Logic, reason, and moral intuition, they say, compel us to reject belief in God, let alone the broader set of beliefs that constitutes Christian doctrine. Nevertheless, their arguments have not always been as rational as they would like us to believe. Apologists like William Lane Craig and Peter Kreeft have made clear the problems with the arguments of atheists old and new.

At times, opponents of Christian belief hold it up to ridicule, with the rhetorical effect that some who are insecure in their faith might be shamed into giving it up. Ridicule of Christians is quite common online, including among former Christians who have “deconstructed.” Their arguments are not usually compelling. In fact, they can be quite unsophisticated. Nevertheless, they don’t need airtight arguments if they can accomplish their goals through rhetoric and shame.

2. Or we can cause them to stumble by our sin, leading them to doubt if holiness is really possible or to give up on the church as crucial to the work of God.

The obvious culprits here are high-profile Christians who are caught in immoral behavior. These become fodder for Christianity’s cultured despisers. “See,” they proclaim, “these Christians don’t even abide by the things they teach. Why should you?” At a more personal level, perhaps one’s pastor or Sunday school teacher has a moral failing of some kind. One might be compelled to wonder about the truth of the church’s teaching about holiness and sin. If you have a position of visible Christian leadership, you have the responsibility to show the truth and depth of your commitment by the way you live.

Another factor at play here, however, is what I have come to call the “motivated faultfinder.” These are folks whose online platform is built on finding and exposing the shortcomings of churches and church leaders. Let me be clear: I fully support measures of accountability when our leaders fall into sin through moral failings or false teaching. Yet when one’s platform depends upon identifying areas of failing in the church—when the public display of the church’s failings becomes a vocation—manifold dangers lie ahead. It’s one thing to have a neighborhood watch. It’s another to have a neighborhood watch that gains notoriety and funding whenever it finds something wrong. I have more to say about this, but that’s for another time. The point is, such platforms can serve the good function of creating some accountability in the church, but they can also serve the negative function of creating stumbling blocks when public criticism is unnecessary, unwarranted, or simply self-serving.

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3. Or we can cause them to stumble by confusing them, by rambling all over the place in our teaching. In this instance, we cause them to fall by our own intellectual laziness and indifference. We fail to think things through, throw out a few theological platitudes, and then find other things to do.

If you’ve spent much time in the academy, you’ve heard these kinds of presentations. The presenters are unclear in terms of their own conclusions, and that lack of clarity comes through. Listeners may feel the problem lies with their inability to comprehend the depth and breadth of the presentation, but in most cases the fault is not their own. If I am making a presentation and the listeners are unable to grasp my content, the problem is likely with the “what” or “how” of my communication. I have witnessed several occasions in which I felt that academic presenters were masking their own lack of clarity in obscure and technical language, giving the appearance of intellectual depth where there was actually very little. When communicating the content of the gospel, it is important to speak in ways that are accessible to one’s audience.

This doesn’t mean we should “dumb down” our content. In my experience, people are able to grasp complex ideas if I’m communicating competently. Skilled communicators can make difficult concepts comprehensible to non-specialists. Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron is a master of this, as was the late Tim Keller. The purpose of communication should be to facilitate understanding. If we speak about the gospel in ways that are confusing, we may cause stumbling among the faithful. We may in fact prevent people from receiving the gospel from the outset.

4. Or we can cause them to stumble by introducing all sorts of false ideas about God and about ourselves. In other words, we become incompetent theologians, teachers who are entirely sincere and well-intentioned but who ultimately shoot wide of the truth and thus mislead the rational sheep of Christ in faith and practice.

Put simply, we can become false teachers. False teachers are often sincere. Once can be simultaneously sincere and wrong. Sincerity is not enough. This is why we rely not only on our own wisdom, but the wisdom of the saints who came before us. In the consensual tradition of Christian faith—those beliefs that Christians have confessed across the ages and throughout the globe—we have access to insights of dizzying breadth and depth. The consensual tradition provides guardrails against ideas that are outside the boundaries of God’s self-revelation.

There are many forms of and reasons for false teaching. Particularly since the early nineteenth century, many theologians have offered their own theological proposals and readings of Scripture over against the consensual tradition. The liberal theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thought that the faith of Scripture and creed was outdated. It reflected an ancient worldview, they insisted, and they felt they were in a position to reconstruct Christian theology from the ground up. Their formulations involved new understandings of God, the work of God, salvation, the authority of Scripture, and the ethical obligations of the Christian life.

These alternative proposals for the basic content of Christian faith never really caught on except within segments within the church in North America and Western Europe. They did take root deeply in the Protestant mainline, and we see the results: unmitigated decline and ever-greater irrelevance. God has not blessed these revisionist notions of Christian doctrine, perhaps out of mercy for those little ones who would stumble over them.

Liberal theology arose out of the intellectual demands of modernity. Another set of demands, however, has also commonly skewed our teaching about Jesus and the salvation he offers: politics. Put simply, we want Jesus to be on our team, and he becomes a wax nose we fasten into any form that suits us. Christians will unavoidably have opinions about the righteousness of particular political positions, but we must make sure it is Jesus who is guiding our politics, and not our politics determining our vision of Jesus. The political refashioning of Jesus is a common pitfall in the church today, and it has been common in other eras as well. Wherever it appears, it is a cause of stumbling.

There are many ways to cause other people to stumble in the Christian life. Those who are new to the faith or unsure of its truthfulness are the most vulnerable. Christ is clear, however: if we cause one of these “little ones” to stumble, we will be held to account. Jesus cares what we teach and what we believe, and if he cares about this so much, perhaps we should as well.