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“Are all false teachers equally culpable?”

The apostle Paul makes an interesting comment in his second letter to Timothy. He writes, “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and impostors will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.” This is in harmony with his teaching in Romans about the debased mind. If you want to know what going from bad to worse looks like, Romans 1 is the place to find it.

For those who haven’t read it, a debased mind is what you get when God has basically given up on you.

A Mind That Doesn’t Work as Designed

The word translated “debased” or “reprobate” in Romans is adokimos, properly used of metals and coins unfit for use, and which one throws away. Quality control would not allow adokimos coins in circulation. The mint would reject them. Likewise, nobody would deliberately build an adokimos bridge. You’d end up sinking in the bay instead of driving into San Francisco in style.

Now try applying this principle to the human mind. That’s a scary thought. Not just one useless bridge, but a whole generation of adokimos engineers who just keep replicating the same failing structures because all the schools in which they learned their craft were equally adokimos. Not just a single adokimos coin to be kept out of circulation, oh no. The entire mint is worthless, and the basis for a functional economy no longer exists.

A debased or reprobate mind is an intellect that doesn’t work as designed. It is seriously defective. Teachers with reprobate minds produce students whose thinking does not align with reality.

Intellectually Twisted

That is where we are today. Our culture is broken, not just in little ways but in every way. By broken, I mean our institutions no longer effectively serve their most basic intended functions. They churn out rebels against God who have become intellectually twisted, and some of these people invariably end up in our churches. The question before us today is whether every false teacher we encounter in church is really of this intellectually twisted type and, secondarily, whether they will all be treated equally at the penalty stage of the Great White Throne. I am inclined to say not. Here’s my logic, and you may agree or disagree as you see fit.

When humanity fell in the Garden of Eden, two parties participated in that fall: Adam and Eve. Paul writes that they participated in different ways:

“Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”

My point is not that being susceptible to deception, as Eve was, is a state more worthy of condemnation than that of rebelling with one’s eyes wide open, as Adam did. It is likely the other way around. No, my primary interest in revisiting the Fall in this context is that the Lord elected to deal with the two types of sin differently. Because the woman proved susceptible to deception, God put both Eve and all her daughters under the authority of the man, giving her a specific role to play throughout history by which she may be blessed. Man lost his authority over creation but not over the woman, though that authority would not go uncontested. All this can be confirmed by reading Genesis 3.

Applying the Fall to the False

My intent here is not to re-litigate the relationship between the sexes prior to or after the fall of man. We have done that elsewhere. We are talking about the culpability of different types of false teachers. Paul’s comments about Adam and Eve in 1 Timothy are interesting because they show us that God punishes sin resulting from deception differently than sin resulting from informed rebellion, which in turn implies a difference in culpability. If a judge gives one person a three-year sentence for breaking the law and another person a seven-year sentence for the same violation, he is telling everyone in the courtroom and the world that motivation matters to the Court. A sinner’s state of mind matters to God.

The Lord Jesus reinforces this idea when the Pharisees inquired of him, “Are we also blind?” He replied, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.” There is a distinction in culpability between those who know what they are doing and those who don’t. Again, the Law of Moses reinforces this idea, making a distinction at the penalty stage between sins committed unintentionally and those committed “with a high hand”, or intentionally, in full knowledge of what the sinner was doing. The two states of mind are not the same, and the writers of scripture account for this reality throughout.

Better Than Culpable

With that in mind, I suggest that the culpability of false teachers who know what they are doing exceeds that of false teachers who have drunk their own Kool-Aid and don’t know which end is up. At very least, their guilt is different.

Better still, teachers who hold firmly to the truth don’t have to worry about culpability at all.