Learning From Pagans
We need to stop pretending we have nothing to learn from Pagans, but we need to be smart about how we do it.
The first time I ever tried to work on my car’s brakes I made a stupid and costly mistake: I installed a brake pad backwards. Instead of the brake pad contacting the rotor, the metal bracket on the back ground against my rotor, ruining both and I had to buy a new set of pads and a new rotor. Obviously I didn’t intend to put it in backwards and if I had noticed, I would have flipped it around, but I missed it. Oh, well. Mistakes happen, right? I told a few friends, they laughed at me, and I moved on. Since then, I have installed more brakes, replaced rotors, calipers, and flushed brake lines, all without making more serious mistakes.
This is what we usually mean when we talk about making mistakes: isolated instances of human fallibility. We don’t usually make a big deal about people making these kinds of mistakes even when they are costly because the only way to avoid them is to practice, develop better systems, and check your work.
Mistakes are totally different from chronic problems. When the same types of problems routinely resurface year after year and decade after decade, we are not dealing merely with human fallibility. If we were, the issues would gradually work themselves out with experience, just like I got better at working on brakes after making a few mistakes. Chronic problems go much deeper.
When I think about the current state of Christians and churches, I see plenty of chronic problems. I don’t want to sit around bashing them, but I do want to figure out why we have not solved these chronic problems and see if we can at least get on the right track. For example, I have heard conservative Christian ministers chuckle and say things like, “Denominations go liberal after a while and you have to make a new one.” If that’s really what you believe, it should be treated as an absolute emergency, an existential threat, and it should define what you work on for over the next few decades. It shouldn’t be a passing side comment.
It is tempting to propose the “Sunday School” answer: our problems are not “mistakes” but a “sin problem.” Naturally, the solution proposed is to repent, preach the gospel, read our Bibles, and pray more, all of which are important to be doing consistently, and we all have room to improve, but I don’t think this fully explains what we are seeing. Maybe sin is the root issue or plays an important role, but the simple exhortations to repent, read your Bible, and pray more are by definition not working if the same chronic problems continue to happen. For all of history people have had a “sin problem,” but not all people in all times and places have the same dysfunctions, both in type and degree.
It’s common to get this completely backwards. You hear from the news about some freak accident or crime, and people demand that we change laws or put new systems in place to solve them. Meanwhile, when you observe the chronic problems that completely undermine our civilization, they say, “That’s just how things are, there is nothing we can do about that, we just need to work harder, and teach kids better.”
If Christians want to be more effective and live better lives than we do now, we need to be able to solve the besetting problems we routinely face and that is going to take us learning to think and act fundamentally differently than we are doing now.
After all, the literal meaning of “repent” is to change one’s mind.
Forgotten Revelation
I recently caused a minor stir for saying positive things about Andrew Tate. I took it for granted that Christians understood Islam, greed, and managing camgirls are all bad, but was surprised to learn that Christians believed we have nothing to learn from immoral people. If we had nothing to learn from immoral people, the best people in class for any given subject or skill would also be the most moral and Christian. Are the best guitarists Christian? What about investors? Mathematicians? Strategists? Sure, it is possible to get ahead by immorality, but be honest. Is morality really the thing preventing you from being best in class at everything?
Many will say, “The Bible is sufficient! We don’t need to go to the world.” Meanwhile, the Bible tells me that I can learn wisdom from watching ants1. Strict biblicism2 is self-defeating since the Bible itself doesn’t call for biblicism. More than that, biblicism denies human nature, which was designed by God to observe the world around him, draw true conclusions, and praise God for what he saw. The same God who gave us the Bible has revealed a universe full of knowledge and wisdom that is ours for the taking if we only ask him and seek it out.
Jesus told a parable in Luke 16 where Christians are supposed to learn from the positive characteristics of a dishonest manager. In his parable, the manager lies and cheats in a clever way for purely selfish purposes. The manager’s actions were clearly sinful, but they showed shrewdness: he understood human nature, took bold decisive action, made clever use of the resources at his disposal, had an honest self-assessment of his capabilities, and was able to hatch a plan to save his own skin using only his wits and someone else’s stuff. Jesus’s point was, “Imagine if Christians were this driven and clever in the ways they maneuvered their daily lives and resources in service of God.”
To put it simply, we have a lot to learn from pagans3, and we have God’s permission to do it.
How Pagans Find Insight
In the abstract, it can be hard to understand why pagans might be wiser than Christians in some respects. The Proverbs tell us the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, so how can those who are not God-fearing have wisdom?
The answer is that they can observe the world and use their human reason too.
Pagans too stare at the stars with wonder and try to predict and calculate their movements. They can watch the helicopter seeds which fall from the maple sprout and grow. Pagans grow food and design systems to irrigate their crops. Pagans have to govern nations, go to war to defend themselves, find ways to maintain social cohesion, and develop technology. Pagans study geometry, philosophy, literature, and medicine.
They lack the true spiritual wisdom of Christ, but with respect to specific domains they have the capacity for impressive accomplishments.
One may answer, “But they can’t logically account for it without God! But they don’t know the true essence of why these things exist!”
But this never stopped them from finding true knowledge anyway.
In fact, sometimes being a Christian brings doctrinal and cultural commitments that blind one from seeing things that are otherwise readily observable.
Some Examples of Pagan Insight
A Christian doctrine of marriage, true in itself, supported by a Christian culture that has developed organically over centuries may lead to worse marriage advice than a pagan. Where a Christian might say, “In Christ she is a new creation and as a husband I must wash her in the word,” a pagan may say, “Watch out for a woman whose mother is crazy,” or “You can’t turn a ho into a housewife.” The pagan’s wisdom is compatible with Christianity, but Christians won’t naturally think to go there when it’s a cultural taboo and so will inadvertently neglect even the biblical principles a man ought to use when qualifying a woman for marriage. Why do Christians ignore, for example, the warnings Proverbs gives against a nagging wife, promiscuous women, women whose “feet do not stay at home,” and the exhortations of the New Testament letters for women to be silent in church and submissive to their own husbands when considering entering marriage? We have blind spots.
The pagan, though lacking his own valid doctrine of marriage, has different blind spots than the Christian. The pagan may say, “Make sure to move in together before getting married,” despite the fact that this is both sinful fornication and statistically it has worse marriage outcomes. Nevertheless, the insights of the pagan have the capacity to sharpen the believer.
Even the attacks of pagans can be employed to sharpen the Christian because these attacks often reveal our blind spots.
Friedrich Nietzsche accused Christianity of teaching a “slave morality,4” in that it universalizes the values of the weak into moral goods for all time. For example, treating the rich and powerful as bad and the poor and humble as good. You can certainly find these themes in the Bible (especially the Beatitudes, Luke, James, etc.). A Christian could superficially dismiss them by simply saying, “Well, God said it, so it’s true regardless of what a philosopher complains about,” but if you’re able to apply the same discernment, you can work out the hypothetical situation and genuinely consider the Nietzschean objection.
Have we not all met men whose Christian morality motivated them to accept abuse, manipulation, and humiliation? Can we see the way that a “slave morality” might be employed to discourage ambition, wealth creation, defending legitimate boundaries, or organizing and disciplining subordinates? Why does God command the cluster of virtues that Nietzsche calls “slave morality?” Because God is Love.
To conform to God’s character, one must love like God which includes the noble condescension to lessers as God does to his lessers, and in recognition and gratitude for what one has received from God, to show similar mercy and humility towards others. Biblical morality is never in service of letting evil win. We can recount the examples of the noble rich in the Bible: Job, Abraham, Solomon, Philemon, and Lydia. We can recount the warnings the proverbs give against the ignoble poor. We can recount the way that Jesus refused to allow his boundaries to be crossed, like when people tried to interrupt his teaching, get him to judge their personal cases, or take him off mission - even when he would ultimately submit to crucifixion. The “slave morality” prompt invites us to transcend our blind spots and become better students of the Bible and more effective in the world.
How To Use Wisdom From Pagans
Regardless of when a Christian comes to faith, he will need to build up his own robust knowledge of Christian doctrine: the contents of the Bible, knowledge of the gospel, Christian morality, cosmology, anthropology, and theology proper. This is a task that can be substantially formed in a matter of a few years of dedicated and intentional learning but its refinement will be a life long process. This process is the foundation of learning discernment and gaining competence to subject all ideas to the standard of God’s word.
Mundane Knowledge
The majority of knowledge we can glean from pagans will be of a mundane and common nature and so it can be used immediately. Math, grammar, music lessons, job experience, and most knowledge of a technical, practical, or mechanical nature will carry minimal concerns. We might exercise some caution to avoid notoriously bad people and corrupting company, but generally speaking we would do well to benefit as much as possible from our pagan neighbors. This type of knowledge directly relates to our worldly success and there are no disadvantages to gaining it.
Forbidden Knowledge
Forbidden, occultist, profane, or debauched ideas have no value for Christians and must be totally rejected, with the only exception being to understand them well enough to pull others out of the hellfire. Eve did not gain any wisdom from the Serpent in the Garden of Eden from entertaining his lies. Christians must take care never to flirt with disobedience or unfaithfulness itself. The legitimate wisdom we can receive from pagans is by virtue of their humanity, not their paganism. You don’t need to drink the whole ocean to know it is salty, and you don’t need to swim in a sewer to know it is putrid. Reject sinful curiosity regarding evil which is a common motivator for exploration in pornography, witchcraft, and false religion.
Analytical Knowledge
Analytical knowledge is aimed at understanding. This is the type of knowledge most likely to facilitate “breakthrough” thinking by way of a shifted paradigm. Sometimes we need ideas from another setting to break out of the cultural blinders that keep us stuck in the same ruts.
I opened this article with a comparison between mistakes and chronic problems, and chronic problems are those most likely to only be fixable with a shifted paradigm. Start asking the questions:
“What am I missing here?”
“Why has this problem been recurring the way it has?”
“Why don’t other people have this problem, who are those people, and what is different about them?”
“Who is successful and what explains their success?”
“What differentiates the people who succeed from those who don’t when trying the same thing?”
In the process of asking questions like these, you may find answers in unexpected places. Lean into that and investigate further.
We all have a “working understanding” of “how things work.” When our expectations are violated, we have found an important candidate for serious study.
For example, if your understanding is, “It is knowledge of Christ that prompts Christians to succeed in the following way,” but then you observe that a similar pattern applies to Muslims who don’t have the Holy Spirit or an accurate knowledge of Christ, don’t immediately dismiss the observation. Ask further questions. Getting defensive only prevents you from reaching a better understanding.
Conclusion
Our chronic problems require a change of mind. Rather than becoming untethered and driven about by every wind of doctrine or novel idea, we need to start asking deeper questions and look for better answers. We need to be more honest, humble, observant, and clear thinking than we are used to being. Far from encouraging unfaithfulness, we will find forgotten wisdom and groundbreaking discoveries. We will get out of the ruts that our pride or ignorance have left us, and we will have more to contribute to one another. The church is in a difficult place right now, but it’s never been a better time for us to start making great strides towards the future.
“The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight” - Proverbs 4:7
Proverbs 6:6-9
See the article from Reformed Classicalist for a helpful summary of biblicism: https://www.reformedclassicalist.com/home/biblicism
When I say pagan in this article, I am speaking generically about any type of non-Christian, not necessarily people with an overtly polytheistic religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality