In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger published a study that touched on an interesting phenomenon. Participants in the study took a test that focused on logical reasoning, grammar, and social skills. When asked how well they did on the test, participants who had the worst score and those who had average scores both overestimated how well they did on the test. However, what was interesting about the results was how large that overestimation of their performance was for those who scored worst on the test compared to those who had average scores.
On average, for those with bad or average test scores, the worse a person was at the test, the greater was his overestimation of his performance and the more he thought that he was better than he really was. The bad test taker thought that he did far better than his actual test result. Those with average test results also thought that their test score was better than it actually was, but the gap between how they thought that they did on the test and how they actually did was smaller. So the really bad test takers overestimated how well they did on the test to a greater degree than the average test taker.
It seems that actually learning the subject material and thus scoring better on the test seems to have had the effect of reducing the person's overconfidence and exaggerated sense of how competent he was. His initial unwarranted self-confidence or exaggerated self-perception was deflated and gave way to a more accurate view of just how skilled or knowledgeable he was. So, on average, the people who had the worst test scores were most out of touch with the reality of how well they did on the test. The more ignorant someone was, the more he was unaware of his ignorance and the greater was his overestimation of his performance. That is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Some consider the Dunning-Kruger effect to also include what happens with those who had the best scores on the test. Unlike those with average and bad test results who thought that they did better on the test than they actually did, on average, those with the best test scores underestimated how well they did on the test. Those with the best results thought that they did worse on the test than they actually did. That is what some would consider to be the opposite side of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The master or expert thinks that he is less skilled or knowledgeable than he really is.
This other side of the Dunning-Kruger results provides a notable insight. A person who has achieved mastery of a skill or area of expertise can find it so simple that he would overestimate how easy it would be for others to learn that skill. In light of that, the expert might then deem it less necessary to help others in the learning process because he thinks that his expertise is not needed as much in light of how easy (he thinks) it would be for others to learn.
In a later publication, Erik Helzer and the same David Dunning indicated that the Dunning-Kruger effect "suggests that poor performers are not in a position to recognize the shortcomings in their performance." The effect has been tested and found in various other fields. In this essay, I contend that it applies particularly in the case of the typical unbeliever's evaluation of his own spirituality. It is the Dunning-Kruger spirituality of the non-Christian. There are three ways in which this plays out in the unbeliever's life in comparison to the life of the Christian.
The Absentee Spirituality of the Unbeliever
The first way in which the unbeliever has an exaggerated view of his own spirituality is that he does not acknowledge that there is an external standard of good and bad spirituality to which he must conform and to which he is personally accountable. In effect, this is absentee spirituality, the spiritual equivalent of a kid not showing up to school while he insists to his parents that he goes every day. This is most common in those who call themselves atheists or agnostics, and one of the most popular claims from such persons is that Christianity is a crutch for the weak. Believers talk so much about how they need God. They talk of how weak they are, how they never would have made it through life without Him. The skeptic looks at all this self-flagellation and finds it strange. He gets through life just fine without acting as if he were in a relationship with God. He has no need of God. Bad things happen in his life, but he makes it through well enough. To him, the talk of needing God just sounds pathetic, and Christians look like wimps. He prides himself on how strong he is, that he weathers life's storms without needing the crutch of religion. It just shows how much stronger and better he is compared to the believer.
While one might initially be excused for thinking that such a quick judgment about the relative strength of Christians in comparison to skeptics and agnostics is correct, some deeper reflection on the topic shows that this quick judgment about the strength or weakness of the Christian compared to the unbeliever is in fact the exact opposite of the truth. What separates the Christian from the skeptic here is a fivefold conviction:
1. That there is an external standard of right and wrong that stands above the believer and that dispenses judgment or approbation.
2. That the believer is to strive with all his might to meet and live up to that standard.
3. That the believer is personally accountable to God himself in the person of Jesus Christ, who came to earth from heaven, took on flesh and blood by becoming a man, died for sinners to make a way for them to be saved, ascended to heaven, will return again to earth one day, and will judge the living and the dead.
4. That he will judge all that they have done with perfect justice, including all the secret intentions of their hearts.
5. That the fellowship, love, and glory of Jesus Christ are more pleasurable and beautiful than anything else in the universe.
These last two factors are what unite most unbelievers together with skeptics and those who call themselves atheists. The professed worldview of those who call themselves atheists gives no logical basis outside of pragmatism to adhere to any system of morality as if it were objective. Skeptics don't have any firm convictions that would impel them to such moral submission. What both of them share with most unbelievers is a lack of personal accountability to a man who lived, died, rose from the dead, and will return one day to judge the living and the dead. That personal accountability to God himself will be important later on for what it means about how Christians attempt to live up to the moral standard. Here what is important is the self-interested incentive it gives to the believer not to disregard the external standard of what counts as spiritually good and spiritually bad.
What further separates the Christian from most non-believers is the personal fellowship, love and glory of Jesus Christ that causes them to seek to please Jesus as their highest priority, which means living a holy life. If we consider the Christian, his seeking to adhere to some external standard of what is spiritually good is not merely a brazen attempt to snag the religious equivalent of Monopoly's get-out-of-jail free card. It is an attempt to restore the sweetness of communion with Jesus. It says in the Bible that without holiness no one will see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14). The Christian knows this by firsthand experience. When he sins, he senses the rupture in his communion with God, such that he is distanced in his intimate knowledge of his savior and creator, and it pains him. To him, repentance from sin is not only a matter of a clean conscience, nor simply escaping hell, but it is being restored in his fellowship with the Lord such that his vision of God is no longer clouded by sin as it had been. Although it will be a lifelong battle, the Christian is continually seeking to fight temptation to sin and to flee from it.
The unbeliever's lack of personal divine accountability and his not having tasted that the Lord is good mean that the skeptic and typical unbeliever have little or no positive incentive to conform their lives to an external standard of morality outside of earthly pragmatic self-interest. According to what the skeptic and the so-called atheist would say about the world, there is not a strong case for them to even fight in their own lives for something that even approximates the believer's battle to live a holy and righteous life. Therefore, the unbeliever does not engage in that fight. So when we come to compare the Christian with the unbeliever, we see the Dunning-Kruger effect in the contrast between an absolute beginner (the skeptic) who has never even picked up a weapon to join in the battle for holiness, and the ordinary believer who for months or years has been honing his skills in the victories and defeats of that very same battle. The one with no experience in the war for holiness thinks that he is morally strong, while the veteran is open about how morally weak he is.
This difference between the war-weary spiritual veteran and the inexperienced braggadocio is of great significance to what we should think of the two persons. It is easy to sit in the audience of the coliseum and criticize a gladiator for how weak he is while he is getting beat down by a legendary opponent, or scoff at the feebleness of an army as it retreats from the field of battle. But someone will have little idea of the weakness that grips a gladiator in one-on-one combat, or the horrors that paralyze the body and mind on the battlefield, if one has never encountered it oneself. It is in this regard that C. S. Lewis aptly summarized how the person who has never seriously fought for holiness knows little or nothing about his own weakness.
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.
The problem with the unbeliever is that he simply lacks the incentive to battle against temptation. If he does not believe in eternal punishment, that belief is not pushing him to flee from sin to a savior. The unbeliever also does not have a sweet fellowship with his savior that gets broken when he sins. The Christian does have that tender relationship of love with his savior, and so he flees from and battles against sin because that is the only way that he will maintain his unbroken, sweet communion with his savior.
In short, the believer has both a negative and a positive incentive to battle against sin. The unbeliever has neither. Thus, the unbeliever knows little or nothing of his spiritual weakness. The believer has at least strengthened his spiritual body and sharpened his spiritual mind in the course of his fights against temptation, and so has spiritual strength and wits that the unbeliever does not have. But those battles at times left the believer knowing first-hand how utterly weak he is when he tried to stand up to the spiritual powers of the devil and of temptation. Then, though having developed a strength and tactical strategy in the battle for holiness that the unbeliever has never had, he yet complains of his real weakness while the unbeliever prides himself on an imaginary strength. The inexperienced unbeliever thus boasts of his nonexistent resiliency while the battle-hardened believer ignores his hard-won fortitude and acumen and laments his weakness. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect in the spirituality of the non-Christian and the believer.
The Cafeteria Spirituality of the Fake Christian and the Unbeliever
The second way in which we can observe the Dunning-Kruger spirituality of the non-Christian is in what they define as spiritually good and spiritually bad. Here the problem is not the unbeliever's refusal to acknowledge that there are some external moral standards to which he should submit himself. Rather, it is defining what specifically those standards are. Unbelievers may be happy to accept some moral demands, but they have their sacred cows that cannot be sacrificed. In contemporary Western society, the most sacred cow is perhaps sexual liberation, the freedom to have sex with whomever one pleases whenever one wants. But there can be other sacred cows, and often it depends on the individual in question.
The problem of Christianity for all unbelievers is that it is the most stringent ethical system in existence, calling on all to die to the lusts and ambitions of their flesh and live their lives for the glory of God. External conformity to many of God's commands seems reasonable enough in society so long as those particular commands do not impinge on or require the death of what the apostle Paul called the flesh. But the pervasive nature of the Bible's commands and its authoritative stance leave no room to make exceptions.
This is where the typical unbeliever's spirituality differs from the true believer. The unbeliever does want to make exceptions. If he is religious and comes from a Christian religious background, he may seek to associate with other people who call themselves Christians, but he will only do so if they conveniently pick and choose what commands of God from the Bible that they have to follow, and what commands they can leave out. This is what happens in most liberal denominations that want to sanctify contemporary culture's obsession with and widespread approval of heterosexual sex outside of marriage and of homosexual sex. They will follow the Bible in other areas, but they will find some excuse not to follow the Bible when it comes to sexuality.
Of course, they will not characterize it that way. Instead, they will offer some justification for why the Bible does not really require sexual abstinence outside of heterosexual marriage. But the effect is the same. It is a cafeteria religion in which they seem to obey some rules to which it seems sufficiently easy to conform outwardly, but they will simply ignore the commands that are really hard to obey. Those hard rules would require them to resist the strong temptations to sins that they love.
The person who does not pretend to be a Christian has a much easier job in filling his plate with cafeteria spirituality. He has no supposed holy book that requires him to engage in mental or verbal gymnastics to avoid its demands. For his spirituality, he can simply pick and choose whatever moral principles and inspiring social media quotes he wants to follow, and simply make temporary exceptions for himself when he wants to break one or more of them.
If one compares these unbelievers and fake Christians with a true Christian, the difference is in what they define as sin. They simply surrender to the sins whose temptation is really hard to resist, and they baptize their sinful acquiescence by saying that it is not really sin. What this means is that they really do not come to know how weak they are spiritually. They have a higher estimation of their spiritual strength because they do not engage the strongest enemies in the war. They surrender to them. By contrast, the true Christian does fight against all sins, and his battle against the strongest of temptations makes him realize how strong the foe of sin really is. The more he sees its strength, the more he seems weak in comparison. He becomes spiritually stronger in his resistance, but the end result is his decrying even more vehemently how great his weakness is.
We thus come to the Dunning-Kruger effect in the life of the unbeliever and the false believer in comparison to the life of the true Christian. The true Christian confesses yet more of his weakness even as he grows spiritually stronger in his battling against all sin. Meanwhile, the unbeliever and false believer think themselves spiritually stronger than they actually are and look with scorn on the true believer's self-confessed weakness simply because the unbeliever and the false believer surrender to the strongest of sins instead of resisting them.
The External Spirituality of the Unbeliever and the Internal Spirituality of the Christian
The third and final area in which the Dunning-Kruger spirituality of the non-Christian shows itself is in how the unbeliever defines what is spiritually good and spiritually bad. There are three key differences in how the unbeliever defines what is spiritually good and bad when compared to the believer. The first has to do with judging by external actions versus internal intentions. If you were to ask an unbeliever to suppose that the entire world were created from nothing by an omnipotent creator who will judge all humanity, and then were to ask the unbeliever what his fate should be on that final day of judgement, perhaps the most common response would involve the unbeliever pointing to various external actions that he has taken over the course of his life that he thinks are worthy of praise and commendation. If he did something particularly helpful to someone, for example, he might say that he has done his good deed for the day.
What is noticeable about the response of the typical unbeliever to such a question (and also the response of some professing Catholics and Protestants) is that no attempt is made to give anything other than a list of external actions done by the person, as if the moral character of an action can be determined simply by an external description of the act without any further information. He will say that he bought a sandwich for a homeless man, or gave money to a local soup kitchen, and it is simply assumed that God views such actions favorably. He will recount how he coached a son's baseball team, helped an elderly woman across a street, or replaced the flat tire of a driver stuck on the side of the road. These are supposedly good deeds in themselves. The good moral character of what the person did can supposedly be determined simply by knowing what the external action was, regardless of what was happening in the person's heart and regardless of what his interior intentions were. The person accordingly thinks that such external actions will be counted in his favor on judgment day.
However, this approach to judging the spirituality of a person and the morality of his actions is contrary to what Jesus taught. In his teaching, morally wrong actions can often be discerned by merely looking at the outward behavior, since there is no circumstance in which sins are morally acceptable. For example, there is no case in which willful adultery is ever anything other than a sin, and so there is no internal rationale that would ever justify it.
But the situation regarding seemingly good actions is different. There, a seemingly good outward action can be the result of an evil intention, in which case God does not consider the act to be good, but he rather counts it as evil. The classic passage in the teaching of Jesus for this perspective is found in the sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. In chapter 6 of Matthew, Jesus points to the action of giving to the poor to be seen by men, and the action of praying in public to be seen by men, as two examples in which a man will receive no reward from the Father in heaven. That is, the seemingly outward "good" act of giving money to the poor or praying are not acts that God considers as morally good if the act is born from a heart that loves the praise of men and does the act primarily for the purpose of receiving man's praise.
Before being able to declare that an act is morally good in a way that Jesus considers spiritually good or commendable, one must first ask the question of why and consider the question of intent. Why did the man give money to the poor? If it is because he loved the praise of men, and saw using his gift to the poor as a way to cause others to think more highly of him, then his giving is an act of loving himself by means of the poor rather than an act of actually loving the poor.
The Parasitic Enmeshment of Biblical (Internal) Spirituality
This necessity of asking why someone does something before rendering a judgment about whether the person is spiritually good or bad is problematic for the typical unbeliever and for the skeptic, because evaluating the intention of a person in doing an act is parasitically enmeshed with the rest of the person's life. Here we come to the second key difference in how the unbeliever defines bad or good spirituality compared to what Jesus taught. The unbeliever thinks that the spiritual or moral character of an action can be evaluated without considering the person's spiritual and moral commitments for all other areas of his life.
To take an extreme but illustrative example, we might suppose that the man giving money to the poor was a ruthless mobster who had murdered scores of not only men, but also women and children when the respective husbands and fathers stood in the way of the mobster. Killing the women and children was his means of punishing the father or husband. Now suppose the mobster were to give money to an orphanage helping fatherless children. Should we conclude that he truly loves children or that God viewed his donation as a morally good act? Of course not. The man has not repented of his murders of children and women, and he would commit those murders again if another noble man stepped up to oppose his empire of crime. Whatever the mobster's motivation in his donation to the orphanage, it can not be true love of children, nor can it be a love of what is right, for his lack of repentance from his past murders of women and children, and his willingness to do it again, show that he does not love those children nor love what is right.
The point from this example is that when it comes to the evaluation of whether a person's intentions are either good or evil, the presence of intentional persistent evil in one area of the person's life invalidates the hypothesis that in some other area he is acting righteously or that he is spiritually good. That is why the Bible insists that without holiness, no one will see God (Hebrews 12:14). It is why Jesus taught that one cannot serve two masters (Mt. 6:24; Lk. 16:13-15), and why his brother taught that if one breaks the law of God at one point, one breaks all of it. (James 2:10) Accepted persistent sin in one area of a person's life infects his spirituality and the moral character of actions in every other area of his life until he comes to repentance for all his sins. As long as the unbeliever does not repent of any and all sin, he can never be spiritually good, and none of his actions can be morally good.
The Inclusion of Hypothetical Situations in Biblical (Internal) Spirituality
What Jesus taught about truly good spirituality goes further than this, and thus we come to the third difference in how the unbeliever defines good and bad spirituality compared to the believer. What Jesus taught about truly good spirituality extends even to what someone would do in different situations. In the sermon on the mount, he went beyond the command simply not to murder, and indicated that a man who hates his brother would be subject to judgment. He went beyond the command simply not to commit adultery, and indicated that anyone who looked at a woman lustfully had already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Mt. 5:28) What he teaches here is a spirituality in which one becomes morally guilty of a sin if one would commit that sin in other circumstances, whether or not one has yet carried out the sin in the external world.
This is reversal of the typical spirituality and moral assessment of the unbeliever and skeptic. They tend to judge a person as spiritually good or bad solely on what acts they performed in the external world in the past, regardless of the internal intentions of their minds and hearts. Jesus judges a person spiritually bad or good depending on what would happen now if the secret intentions of their hearts were carried out in the real world in different circumstances, regardless of whether the person had carried out the act in the external world in the present circumstances.
The spirituality that Jesus teaches here is the correct one. If one man was so angry with someone else that he wanted to stab him to death in a dark alley where he would not be seen and thus not get caught, but he does not do so because two police officers happen to be present, God rightfully considers that man to be a murderer, stopped from carrying out his evil intentions by the non-praiseworthy motivation of not being sent to jail. The same is true for many other sins, including adultery. Someone who does not have sex with another man's wife only because he is afraid of his good reputation being lost only needs to be put in a situation in which he is convinced that no one else will ever find out, and he would commit that sin. God considers him already guilty of adultery, and the assessment of any other choice that he makes in other areas is infected by that willingness to commit adultery, such that nothing else he does is spiritually good in the eyes of God so long as there is some circumstance in which he would commit adultery.
I have just covered three aspects of what Jesus taught that make Christianity a system of measuring the spirituality of a man and his moral character that is stricter than any other religion on earth, and far stricter than the typical unbeliever's methods of judging spirituality and the moral character of actions simply by the external act itself. These three factors all deal directly with how one defines what counts as bad or good spirituality and how one defines what sin is.
If I may summarize those three factors, the first is that one cannot define an action or someone's spirituality as good simply on the basis of what he has done externally, but one must also consider what were the internal, secret intentions and motivations of the person doing the act. The second factor is that a willingness to sin or do wrong in one area affects all other areas of that person's spirituality, such that he cannot be spiritually good or do a morally good act while he does not repent of sin in any other area of his life. The third factor is that the spirituality of a person and the moral character of his actions should be judged by including what he would do in different circumstances. That means that he could lead a seemingly upright moral life on the outside while he is viewed as wicked and detestable in the eyes of God.
When one compares the Christian with the unbeliever in light of these three factors, there is a great difference between the believer and the unbeliever concerning how one defines what is spiritually good and spiritually bad. The unbeliever defines good and bad spirituality by external actions already committed in the external world regardless of secret intentions of the heart and regardless of whether he is unrepentant of sin elsewhere in his life. In contrast, Jesus defined good and bad spirituality based on the secret intentions of the heart that one has carried out or would carry out in the present situation and in alternative hypothetical situations, with the requirement that in order for an act to be spiritually good, one must reject sin in all other areas of life.
These three factors that define Christianity's moral system and its spirituality are crucial to evaluating the believer's confession of weakness and the unbeliever's claims to be strong. When they are applied to the lives of the Christian and the unbeliever, the end result would be a reversal of the simple, quick judgment that the believer is weak and the unbeliever is strong. And so, for a third time, we would come to see the Dunning-Kruger effect in the life of the Christian compared to the life of the unbeliever. The unbeliever is the weaker of the two persons while thinking himself the stronger, while the believer is the stronger of the two persons while confessing his great weakness.
How Christian spirituality exposes weakness and frees from bondage
Why is this so? Why is it that adopting the Christian system of spirituality causes that person to feel weak? The answer is that this sets the standard so tremendously high that the believer feels incapable of ever meeting it on his own. Imagine a typical adult being thrown into the boxing ring with Mike Tyson when Tyson was in his prime, or being matched to play one-on-one in basketball with Michael Jordan when he was at the height of his game, or being asked to climb one of the tallest, most-difficult face cliffs in the world without training. Such a person would feel laughably weak, unskilled, or unprepared in the face of such a task. That is the situation into which the Christian system of spirituality throws the believer.
To see why, consider how deeply this system penetrates the psyche of the believer. He cannot simply conform to external standards of behavior. He must ask whether he conforms for the right reasons, and that is a question of values. Moreover, it is not just a question of values, but a question of relative and ultimate values. What does his heart love most? If we were to consider the Biblical standard that one should not lie, it is not enough for him to say that he loves truth-telling. It must also be asked whether he loves anything else more than telling the truth. We might suppose that he loved money and the comforts and pleasures that it can buy, and he were offered one billion dollars to tell a supposedly small white lie that (he was convinced) would never be discovered by others. He would then be faced with the question of what he loves more - telling the truth or a massive amount of money and its attendant comforts and pleasures. The Christian system of spirituality measures the man's spirituality and his moral character in the here and now by what he would do if he were put in that alternative, hypothetical situation.
In light of that standard of judgment, there is no hope for anyone to have the moral strength in himself to live up to the demands of the spirituality that Jesus taught. This can be seen in even starker relief if we were to change the hypothetical to one in which the entirety of this world's pleasures, comforts, riches, and blessings were placed on one side, and committing a seemingly tiny sin were placed on the other. Imagine being vilified in the world as a moral monster for crimes that one did not commit, being threatened with beatings and isolation from family and friends, and being offered seemingly limitless wealth and pleasures and comforts, and the only thing one has to do to stop the punishment and receive the riches and pleasures is commit a single seemingly small sin. Most people confronted with a situation even a fraction as bad as that would choose to give up and commit the sin. They would sign the false confession, or do whatever other bad thing was that their captors wanted. That choice is understandable (but still not right).
Every one of us has something and/or someone we love the most, something that commands our highest allegiance. But whatever and/or whoever that love is for, to the unbeliever who does not serve and love a creator who is outside this universe, that unbeliever's greatest love or allegiance will be for or to something inside this universe. Since their greatest love is not something outside the universe but something inside of it, there is some hypothetical scenario in which what they love can be threatened and taken away unless the person commits a sin. Jesus touched on this idea when he said:
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. -Matthew 6:19-21
If your greatest love is money or material possessions, then moth or rust or some evil government can come in and destroy what you love or take it away, or someone can threaten to take it away unless you commit some sin. If your greatest love is your wife or your kids, some violent man or a gang or a government can threaten to kill them unless you do some wrong act. The Biblical Christian recognizes this, and so recognizes that he cannot be spiritually good at all unless his greatest love is beyond this world, something that can never be taken away. But the unbeliever ignores this fact, and so does not recognize his moral poverty in the way that the Christian does.
But how could it be that someone could love something outside of this world? We live in this world, seeing with our eyes, hearing with our ears, touching with our hands. The only way that we would ever come to love someone outside this world is if that person revealed himself to us inside this world. Otherwise, we would be stuck having something inside this world as our greatest love, something that could be threatened and for which we would put aside what is right simply to continue having that thing.
This is where we come to the Christian message not only that in fact, God did reveal himself to us such that we can know him and love him, but that we are enslaved to sin unless he performs a miraculous act in our hearts that causes us to love him above everything that this world has to offer. The unbeliever has never taken up a battle for holiness because he is a slave to sin, and he will never break free from that slavery to sin unless God opens the sinner's eyes to the glory and majesty and beauty of God such that the sinner comes to love God more than anything in this world. It was in light of this that the apostle Paul was able to characterize humanity as being enslaved either to sin or to righteousness. He says:
Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. -Romans 6:19-23
In Paul's mind, we are either slaves to sin, which leads to death, or slaves of righteousness. The apostle Peter had a similar view to Paul in 2 Peter chapter two, where he says the following of false teachers:
by appealing to the lustful desires of the flesh, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for “a man is a slave to whatever has has mastered him.” -2 Peter 2:18-19
Both Peter and Paul would agree that the unbeliever is a slave to sin. Of course, many unbelievers would reject the idea that they are slaves to sin, but this is because their system of spirituality is different from and inferior to the spirituality that Jesus taught and that we find in the Bible. The unbeliever follows a Dunning-Kruger spirituality that judges a person's goodness or badness simply by reference to external actions, or that makes up its own rules about what counts as spiritually good or bad. But if the person's spirituality and actions were judged according to the ethical system that Jesus taught, a system which God confirmed when he raised Jesus from the dead, that person not only falls hopelessly short of having any amount of righteousness, but also lacks the power to even break free from and fight against his enslavement to sin and the flesh. The Biblical system of spirituality by works is so ruthlessly exacting and unwaveringly pervasive that no sinner will ever meet its demands. That is why the Christian bemoans his weakness and cries out with the apostle Paul, 'Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?' (Romans 7:24).
Fortunately, there is a way out for such a person, but there is only one. Yes, God must do a miracle of changing the sinner's heart such that the sinner loves God more than anything and everything in this world. But God also made it possible to be forgiven from sin and escape its punishment by faith rather than works because God himself became a human and lived a perfect sinless life that did meet the demands of a spirituality of justification by works. He died a criminal's death on a cross for sinners and took their punishment on himself so that he could forgive them while still being just. This atoning death for sinners meant that they could be freed from the condemnation for their sins by believing in Jesus Christ rather than by the old system of spirituality by works and external supposedly good deeds. This faith is actually the logical consequence of that miraculous act of regeneration that God must do in the sinner's heart that causes the sinner to love God more than anything and everything in the entire world. And it is through this faith, not by works, that a person is saved from condemnation for his sins. Thus, the apostle Paul says in Ephesians 2:8-9:
It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. -Ephesians 2:8-9
This salvation by a faith-producing new birth is directly relevant to the question of whether the Christian is weaker or stronger spiritually than the unbeliever. As a first consideration, if the true definition of spirituality is that a person lives in accord with the Spirit of God, only the Christian is born again by the Spirit of God, with that same spirit then living inside the believer, prompting and guiding the believer to do as the Spirit wills. Second, the heart of the Christian has been changed such that he now loves God above all this world has to offer, and the believer now also has an unending source of love from a savior who loved him so much that he died for him while he was yet a sinner (Romans 5:8). This means that he is no longer enslaved by the loves of this world's pleasures or chained to seek for love in someone here on earth. He therefore has the freedom and the incentive to resist this world's temptations to sin that the unbeliever will never have, and he has a freedom from love of the praise of men that liberates him from sacrificing what is right in order to please men.
So in the world of resistance to sin, it is not simply that the believer has long been engaged in a battle against sin that the unbeliever has never truly entered. It is also that the believer has an incentive to flee sin and the power to escape its enslavement that the unbeliever will never have. Of the two persons, it would perhaps not even be accurate to say that the believer is stronger than the unbeliever, as that would imply that the unbeliever has some strength at all. It would be more accurate to say that the believer has the strength and the incentive to overcome temptation to sin and hold fast to what is right, while the unbeliever is still enslaved to sin and controlled by man.
That is the irony of the Dunning-Kruger spirituality of the non-Christian. He looks down his nose in disdain at the believer's groveling about on the ground in self-professed moral weakness, proud that he is such a good and strong person morally. However, if he had adopted the Bible's true system of spirituality, he would see that he was a slave to sin, unable to free himself from its grasp, while the believer he had ridiculed was standing strong in a noble fight against a dragon of fleshly temptation and demonic onslaught. The believer often finds himself knocked down by the dragon's fiery breath or thrown to the ground by a sweep of its massive tail, and he complains at his puny limbs compared to the gigantic beast before him, but he rises again and holds his ground still stronger the next time.
Any man finding himself engaged in such an epic battle, when called upon by his master to retreat into a castle magically protected from the dragon's flames and claws, would find no shame in taking safe refuge in its walls for the night, before he heads out again the next day to fight for his master's kingdom. Were that castle to have a magician capable of healing the knight's wounds, it would not be a defect of the magician or the knight to accept the healing. Such a magician is what Jesus is to the believer, and his magic is great indeed.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1st letter of John 1:9-10)
How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! (Hebrews 9:14)
He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. (Book of Isaiah 53:5)
Look at what great spells are cast on behalf of the believer, merely by coming to the castle's magician. His wounds find the healing of forgiveness. He is cleansed from unrighteousness and a guilty conscience, and he finds peace, motivation, self-esteem, and a zeal to give his life in service to others. He is liberated from the dragging weight of guilt and freed to have abundant joy.
If this is weakness, it is what the world desperately needs, and Jesus was the only human whose sinless life and sacrificial death permits him to offer it. Lest someone complain that a guilty conscience is a figment of our imagination from which we need to be freed by throwing off the shackles of religion, or that I am adopting a merely pragmatic view of Christianity that attempts to argue for its truth from its utility, the resurrection of Jesus is God's own confirmation that what Jesus taught about guilt and sin and forgiveness is true. If I had to choose between trusting a created sinner who does not acknowledge and obey his maker, or believing the creator of the entire universe who loved the world so much that he sent his son to die for sinners (Gospel of John 3:16), I would believe the creator. So should you.
Physical sickness as a test case for the rationale underlying the criticism that **ristianity is a crutch for the weak
While the evidence we have from first-person experience is enough to know that there are objective moral values that stand above us and condemn us for our wrong choices, the testimony of God himself confirms that we are in fact weak. Not only that, but the moral philosophy that I covered earlier, which happens to be that of the Bible, demonstrates our spiritual and moral weakness. That weakness is not an imaginary creation of priests dressed in robes and foisted upon humanity. It is a real fact.
It is thus instructive to observe how we treat weakness in the physical world and to take the unbeliever's criticism that Christianity is a crutch for the weak and see how it would apply to physical ailments. If someone were dying from a disease for which there was an easily administered cure, it would be foolish and harmful to deny the reality of the terminal disease and refuse the cure on the grounds that accepting the cure would be to acknowledge that one was weak and dying. If someone were missing a leg and were able to get around only by a crutch, it would be foolish to refuse to use the crutch on the grounds that using the crutch would require admitting that one was crippled. If anyone is to be ridiculed or condemned, it is the sick person refusing the cure or the cripple foregoing the crutch. The person deserving criticism is the sick person or the cripple who gets no help at all (when it is available).
That is what the unbeliever is doing with his spiritual weakness. He refuses to acknowledge his weakness and disease, and so refuses to accept a cure. Instead, he boasts about how strong he is as he lays there spiritually sick and dying. He is in fact worse than spiritually sick and dying; he is spiritually dead even while he boasts of his strength, but he will not take hold of the spiritual life that is offered to him.
'Christianity is a crutch for the weak' as a descriptive claim about non-spiritual characteristics of Christians
As has been shown, this boasting is unwarranted in regards to morality and spirituality, but let us suppose for a moment that it were about something else. We might imagine two men who by genetics and birth were simply very different physically, such that one was very weak physically and the other strong. If the strong one were to boast in his strength, criticize the weak man for his weakness, and scoff if the weak man used some machine to offset that weakness, what should our reaction be? The apostle Paul's reaction would be to criticize the strong man for his pride in what he was given. Paul says:
Who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not? -1 Cor. 4:7
Paul's questions here cut down any basis for a haughty pride in what we have or do. If you are intelligent, God gave you that. He blessed you genetically such that you were not born with a mental handicap, and your parents likely provided you with an education to grow and develop that intelligence. Are you strong or good-looking? God gave you the constitution or the genetics for that. Are you rich? He provided you with the capacities and opportunities to gain those riches and the blessing of those riches not being wrested from you by some calamity while you built up your wealth. Or you simply inherited your wealth. As I have argued up to this point, we have no basis to boast in ourselves morally and spiritually, but it is also true that all of the other things in which we might boast are dependent on things that we were given. That takes away any grounds for a haughty boasting over others, whether spiritually, morally, or any other area of life. It leaves room only for humility. So if the unbeliever is going to criticize the Christian because of some non-moral and non-spiritual superiority, his boasting is unwarranted and rooted in a sinful pride.
What about the criticism that Christianity makes those who adopt it weaker rather than stronger?
At this point, an unbeliever might claim that his criticism of the Christian is not that the Christian is factually weaker than the unbeliever, but that Christianity itself makes someone weaker than the person would be without it. However, this is simply not true. As I indicated earlier, a person who becomes a Christian is given a love of something beyond this world that provides him the freedom to do what is right even if that right decision costs him dearly. Christianity gives him a moral and spiritual strength that the unbeliever will never have. Further, the fact that the Christian is reconciled with God and enjoys loving fellowship with Him means that the believer has a tremendous love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and perseverance that the unbeliever will never have. (Gal. 5:22-23; James 1:1-4) When the believer is threatened, he has a boldness and courage that he would not otherwise have because he knows that the threat to his life will not take away the eternal life waiting for him in the kingdom of heaven. Also, when the believer fails, his knowledge that his savior loves him regardless of his accomplishments means that his defeat will not shake him or destroy him in the way that the unbelieving world's system of judging a person's worth by his merits and accomplishments would destroy or drag down the unbeliever. Simply put, Christianity makes the Christian far stronger than he would be if he were an unbeliever. It is therefore false to say that Christianity makes a person weaker.
In summary, when an unbeliever becomes a Christian, he comes to acknowledge and confess a spiritual and moral weakness that he already had. He does not become weaker than he was before; he becomes stronger, both for his greatest love being shifted to the creator of the universe who died for the believer's sins and for his having the Spirit of God living in the believer to will and to act according to his good pleasure (Phil. 2:13). This is true of the believer generally as a person. He becomes more resilient, more persevering, more courageous and bold, more patient and kind and compassionate, and on and on.
The unbeliever's assessment of the Christian and of himself would therefore be almost entirely backwards. The unbeliever is the one enslaved to sin and to his flesh, lacking the power or freedom to break free from his bondage. The believer is the one empowered to do what is right and successfully fight the battle against sin and temptation, and who actually does engage in the war for holiness. The unbeliever considers himself strong, but only the believer has the courage and the boldness to risk his life to help others in the confidence that his savior holds forth the eternal life and riches of heaven that death can't take away. Losing his life takes away all that the unbeliever holds dear in this life, and so the threat of death produces fear and cowardice. In contrast, death for the believer ushers him into eternal life, into the arms of his sweet savior, and into a world of unsoiled riches and beauty that this world has never known after the fall of mankind into sin. He thus becomes bold, courageous, and daring.
So, the unbeliever's criticism that Christianity is a crutch for the weak almost completely misunderstands the true nature of the situation. Its Dunning-Kruger spirituality deems the unbeliever to have a strength that he does not in fact have, while it grossly underestimates the strength of the believer.
The Christian Strength that seems like weakness
That the unbeliever's system of evaluation gets things almost totally backwards is seen in yet one other area, and that is its undwillingness to turn the other cheek. Jesus himself taught his followers to do just that (Mt. 5:42), but the conviction underlying that teaching runs through the very heart of the Christian message. Jesus was Lord of Lords, the creator of the universe, sustaining all things in existence by his powerful word (Hebrews 1:3). Yet when his creatures sinned and turned to wickedness, he withheld his eternal judgment for a time, and he first became a man and willingly suffered and died when he could have called on twelve legions of angels to save himself (Mt. 26:52-54; 2 Pet. 3:3-9). He who had all power refused to exercise that power so that he could take on himself the punishment of those who would hate him and want to kill him.
This is the opposite of the unbeliever's view of power. In the letter of 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul said that 'God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.' (1 Cor. 4:7). So it was in the life of Jesus. Although he will come again to earth and strike down his enemies with the sword of his mouth, he first turned the other cheek, suffered and died at the hands of sinners for the eternal salvation of sinners, and thus won the greatest battle through weakness.
Still, as with the ironic turning of the tables for the Dunning-Kruger spirituality of the non-Christian, the weakness of Jesus was actually a show of strength. On being attacked, it is very easy to draw a sword or pull out a gun and fight back. It takes far more strength and courage to leave the sword in its scabbard, the gun in its holster, and willingly suffer and die at someone else's hands. That is even more true if one has the power to stop the pain and vanquish one's opponent at a moment's notice, as was true in the case of Jesus.
The unbeliever thinks that the power of force is something to be used to bend others to his will and subdue them. That is what strength is to the unbeliever, but it is not the strength that God values in his children. Although God greatly values his omnipotence and uses it wisely, and although I would put the case of war and law enforcement in its own category, the strength he esteems in his creatures is generally the opposite of the physical force the unbeliever cherishes. God desires that his children would be like him, giving their lives for the salvation of others as he did. That requires true strength that only God gives. The believer has that strength. The unbeliever does not. And yet in his own little world of misguided Dunning-Kruger Spirituality, it is the unbeliever who thinks himself strong.
Endnotes:
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