“For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to
the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but
have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments
and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”
A “lofty opinion” is a theological argument that is too big
for its boots. The Greek word from which we get the expression is hypsÅma, which means an elevated
structure. Rightly recognizing the apostle is speaking of metaphorical heights,
other English translations use the expression “pretension” or “presumption”, “proud
obstacle” or “speculation”.
Out of Our Lane
We can easily see how that happens. In arguing, we get out
of our lane. We are so sure of the validity of the theological point we are
trying to make that we trot out absolutely anything that seems to us to support
it. So the recently-discovered and dubious meanderings of some obscure
historian are cited as counterevidence to something the word of God says
plainly and repeatedly. Or else we produce the one contrary grammarian who
thinks the Greek word on which the significance of the passage seems to turn means
something quite different from all his peers. Or else we produce from our own imaginations
a contrived hypothetical scenario in which the direct commands of God are made
to appear unfair or ridiculous provided X, Y and Z were all to take place,
though we cannot produce a single example of such things ever occurring. Our
opinion lacks both orthodoxy and spiritual authority, so we “raise it up”, attempting
to make our intellectual Tower of Babel appear more impressive than conclusions
arrived at by way of sound, ordinary principles of interpretation, logic and evidence.
In doing so, we are not merely fighting about technicalities
with theologians, we are raising up our own, very human and fallible opinions against
the knowledge of God in disobedience to Christ and in defiance of his
continuous example of humble submission to his Father’s word and will.
Attacking the Character of God
How so? Well, every refusal to hear what God has really said
amounts to a repudiation of his character. It is a claim that God is not what
he says he is, or is what he says he isn’t. It is a very personal and
poorly-considered attack on the Almighty.
If, in defiance of the clear teaching of the word of God, we
make him out to be indifferent to particular kinds of sexual sin because we
ourselves want to be able to engage in them, we have not merely gone up against
hundreds of years of church tradition or against the personal opinions of other
men like ourselves. No, we have made God out to be something he is not. We have
raised up our lofty opinion against the knowledge of God. We are obdurately
refusing to see him as he is, in order to remake him in our own image.
If, disregarding the witness of the gospels, we make Jesus out
to be primarily an agent of political change; or if we make him out to be a man
who, unlike ourselves, was unaware that the first eleven chapters of Genesis
are mythological, or perhaps simply didn’t care; or if we insist that he
emphasized rights over responsibilities — if we do any of these things and
many others, we are not simply offering legitimate alternative historical viewpoints
for the more intellectual students of scripture to bat around over tea, we are
raising up our lofty opinion against the knowledge of Christ. We are refusing
to know God as he has revealed himself to be. We are wilfully disobedient.
Paul says, in effect, “We destroy such things. We fight our
theological battles like warriors of old, and take the losers home enslaved.”
Not only that, it’s for their own good.
Taking Every Thought Captive?
But how does that work exactly? How do you “take every
thought captive”? History shows us that good theological arguments do not
always beat out the bad ones. Sometimes the bad ones appear to win. A church
gets “converged”, occupied with social justice at the expense of truth and
obedience to the word of God. A false doctrine taught by one man gets so completely
accepted by his congregation that twenty years later nobody even thinks to
question it.
Not every thought gets taken captive. Some of them run around
causing havoc for generations or more. This was the case even in the first
century, when the apostle John could write that “Diotrephes ... does
not acknowledge our authority”, when Jude could write that “certain
people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this
condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert
the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and
Lord, Jesus Christ”, and when even Paul could complain that “Alexander the
coppersmith did
me great harm.”
Sometimes the purveyors of lofty opinions don’t appear
terribly demolished, do they?
But I don’t think that’s exactly what Paul was claiming. He
wasn’t insisting that apostolic authority always successfully silenced its
critics, even back then. Nor was he arguing that even the wickedest twister and
perverter of the words of scripture secretly knows he is in the wrong and feels
guilt over what he is doing, though that may well be true.
“All” and “Every”
Words like “all” and “every” sound as if they admit of not
one single exception, but they must be taken in context and used just as we use
them in ordinary language. “Every lofty opinion” and “every thought” may indeed
mean all thoughts conceived by all men in every situation, but that seems incredibly improbable. It simply is
not what we observe.
I think what Paul might be saying here is something like
this: there is not a single species of lofty opinion raised up against the
knowledge of God which cannot be defeated by the Spirit of God. There is no
false doctrine for which God cannot provide us a convincing rejoinder. The
answers are all there for those willing to seek the mind of the Spirit as
expressed in his word. Whether the “lofty opinion” is Theistic Evolution, Gnosticism,
the mythologizing of the Old Testament, the Kenosis Theory, Arianism, “Let
us continue in sin that grace may increase”, or even the assertion that
certain kinds of post-modern sin are not actually sin at all, there is not a single
stray, foolish, contrary, heretical or even frivolous thought which the power
of God available to us in his word has not equipped us to counter. All these
arguments may be demolished — not always, perhaps, to the apparent
satisfaction of the person arguing them, but certainly to the edification of all
third parties present whose Christian maturity and increasing wisdom depend on
the regular appearance of truth in the churches.
Non-Dialectical Demolition
But let us not imagine Paul is saying that bad theology and
intellectual pretenses can only be destroyed with better dialectical arguments,
or only by theologians. God forbid! A dialectical response to a fleshly
argument may itself be made entirely in the flesh (though of course many are
not), and Paul explicitly says, “the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh”. Moreover, at least eighty
percent of Christians will not make it through an extended exegetical discourse
or follow a complex grammatical argument in another language. We should not
expect them to. But so long as we continue to put forward the truth by
exemplifying it in the way we live, lofty opinions, false arguments and stray thoughts
will continue to take a serious hit from the Spirit of God.
The wife who considers it ridiculous that her husband might
be “won
without a word” is silenced when she sees her neighbor practicing the
submissiveness Sarah modeled, and her husband responding favorably. Her
argument is demolished.
The boy in the youth group who claims pre-marital sexual
experiences are a necessary part of learning about the opposite sex is stumped
to find that while the fallout from his own bad choices makes him increasingly miserable, his abstinent
Christian friends are visibly more content, their relationships enviably serene. His argument is demolished.
The woman who left her “uptight” church to enjoy a more “charismatic”
approach can’t help but notice that the openness and spontaneity of
Pentecostalism is often accompanied by other less-desirable features, including
insecurity about salvation when their own emotional journeys fail to meet
expectations. Her argument for the necessity of a spiritual experience to
validate the word of God sustains what will eventually become a fatal injury
when she keeps encountering this loss of confidence over and over among her new
friends.
Doctrine and Practice
Paul himself used both doctrine and practice to demolish
arguments. In the same book of 2nd Corinthians, he encourages sacrificial
giving. For any who might think this unnecessary, he offers a doctrinal reason:
“You know the
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake
he became poor.” As for practice, he commends the churches
in Macedonia as an example. To the same audience, when encouraging
humility, he points to his own example and that of Apollos, with which the
Corinthians were quite familiar, as illustrations. Far from lording it over
them, he can say, “We
labor, working with our own hands.” They knew it was true; they had seen
it. One of the strongest proofs of the truth of good doctrine is that it
actually works in the real world. Good practice demolishes arguments.
When a theological opinion gets too big for its boots and
threatens to push the word of God aside, there is always an answer. It may be
verbal or non-verbal, but if the Spirit of God wants to speak and the servants
of God will give him his rightful place in their hearts and lives, then, like
Goliath, the most high-sounding arguments will eventually fall.
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