Over last weekend, I wrote a post on my personal blog titled ?Knowledge as Idol.? I want to say a little more about that here on the Institute blog. (You may want to read that post here first).
Here?s a rather simple and alarming line from Elton Trueblood about knowledge:
?Sin, from the first, instead of being cured by knowledge is intrinsically linked with knowledge.? (Trueblood, Elton. Signs of Hope. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1950, p. 59.)
We seem to think that growing in biblical knowledge, doctrinal knowledge or theological knowledge is an automatic preventative to sin, but actually the first-century Pharisees managed to couple just such knowledge with deep sins of the heart. There is a loving knowledge that runs deeper than mere idea knowledge or conceptual knowledge. Some will react to this for the very reason that they know, intuitively perhaps, that they do not have much of this sort of knowledge. Perhaps they determine that their failure to have it is evidence that is somehow unavailable to them. This is an argument from ignorance.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a symbol for our tendency to overvalue our own knowledge and undervalue the loving knowledge of God. Adam and Eve sacrificed the latter for the former. I wonder how often we have made the same choice.
