The Consensus Of Theologians

The history of the church is filled with a litany of fallacies, exegetical errors, and assumptions.  Ask conservative or liberal Christians alike if this is the case--many of them might agree that the church has succumbed to certain errors from time to time.  What they will often not acknowledge, though, is that some ideas held up as Biblical for millennia are often contrary to the whole of Scripture.  They generally have no problem with denouncing the consensus of secular people, but they forget that a consensus within the church is just as worthless.  Cognitive dissonance is an intellectual disease that festers in the minds of many Christians.

Christian theologians throughout history have generally reached asinine conclusions about many issues, some particular subjects they have distorted being rationalism, the Trinity, hell, egalitarianism, theonomy, and sexuality.  And yet many people will resist a logically or Biblically verifiable idea simply because the majority of Christians have not and do not embrace it!  Indeed, the thought that the majority of Christians can be wrong terrifies or puzzles them, as if mass delusion is an impossible thing!

In elevating the consensus of past theologians to a level of perceived importance, people merely reveal how incompetent their grasp of reason is.  One of the most basic objections that some people raise against certain Biblical truths (like annihilationism or egalitarianism) involves the fact that historical Christians often denied them.  There is a very simple refutation to these objections: the truth of a doctrine has absolutely nothing to do with what theologians claim.  No rational theologian will look to an alleged authority figure instead of consulting logic and Scripture.

Contra-Biblical ideas like eternal conscious torment for all unsaved beings, complementarianism, sexual prudery, and anti-rationalism have been, and still are, claimed by the majority of those within the church.  The church at large has never been a bastion of intelligence and accuracy.  Instead, it falls to individual Christians to wield reason as they dispel the illusory power of myths and traditions.  The consensus of theologians is worthless because a consensus means nothing except that there is agreement.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.