What is humanity’s oldest lie? And how is it freshly emerging to steal the hearts and minds of a new generation? Our guest today, Biola professor Thaddeus Williams, has a new book out called . Join Scott and Thaddeus as we dissect his “ten commandments” and talk about how to be a cultural heretic today.


Thaddeus Williams is Associate Professor of Theology at 91 and the author of several books and numerous articles. He is the author of Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth and REFLECT: Becoming Yourself by Mirroring the Greatest Person In History.



Episode Transcript

Scott: What is humanity's oldest lie, and how is it freshly emerging to steal the hearts and minds of a new generation? Our guest today, Biola professor Thad Williams, has a fascinating new book with a very provocative title called “Don't Follow Your Heart,” subtitled “Boldly Breaking the Ten Commandments of Self-Worship.” We're going to dissect his Ten Commandments and talk about how to be what he calls a cultural heretic today. I'm your host, Scott Rae, and this is ThinkBiblically, a podcast from Talbot School of Theology at 91. Thad, welcome. Great to have you with us. Congrats on your new book. It's a home run. But I suspect the first question our listeners have is, what on earth do you mean, don't follow your heart? Why not, and what's wrong with that?

Thad: Sure. I wish I could take credit for it, but it's actually the wisdom of a nine-year-old. So in the Williams household, we play a little game of spot the lie, a game we picked up from the great Christian thinker, culture commentator, Os Guinness. And the idea is, your kids are watching something instead of just passively consuming information, teach your kids some discernment so they don't just become chameleons taking on the colors of whatever's around them. So this was a few years ago, my now 13-year-old, which is scary to say, but when she was nine—Dutchie, we call her, Holland's her name—and she comes jumping down the stairs, daddy, you owe me another dollar. Well, what'd you find this time, darling? And she had been watching a commercial for some pixie princess rainbow unicorn, whatever. And she said, Daddy, the commercial told me I should follow my heart. I said, okay, what's the problem? And this is her exact response, permanently filed away in the proud daddy moments in my memory bank there. She said, daddy, I don't want to follow my heart. My heart's fallen. I'd way rather follow God's heart. And I just like teared up, wrapped my arms around her. She got five bucks for that one, well-earned $5. But I realized just how countercultural that statement is, where they are bombarded, the up-and-coming generations with this false gospel of be true to yourself, the answers are within. You know, 84% of Americans think the chief end of man is to enjoy yourself. 86% think that to enjoy yourself, do what you desire most. 91% say the answers are within. So yeah, the book really is a call to be heretics against that cult of self-worship.

Scott: All right, so you say we're boldly breaking the 10 commandments of self-worship. I take it there's something about self-worship that constitutes humanity's oldest lie. What is it specifically?

Thad: Yeah, well, let's hop in a time machine together, whisk back to Genesis 3, a famous scene, serpents with our first parents in the garden. And the promise in Genesis 3, verse 5 is that you will be, the language is: like God, knowing good and evil. And for years that baffled me like, okay, does that mean Adam and Eve just had a theoretical knowledge of good and evil? And by sinning, they had an experiential knowledge. It just—every interpretation I read didn't seem to jive until a few years ago, I was reading Abraham Kuyper, his tome, his 900-pager on common grace. He does a little exposition of the passage and he says the Hebrew term for knowing doesn't really have a solid English equivalent. He says it's something like a maker's knowledge. God knows it because he made it that way, a designer's knowledge. And it reminds me of back when I graduated Biola, you know, back in the early 60s, [laughs] not really.

Scott: You're not that old. You may feel it, but you're not that old.

Thad: You were my professor in, let's say—

Scott: Now we're dating ourselves. [laughs]

Thad: We'll keep the dates ambiguous here. But when I was in graduate school, when I was at Talbot, one of my roommates, an old high school friend, played bass for a band called Lincoln Park and they were working on their sophomore release. We'd come home from work about the same time and I would listen to the tracks they laid down for the day and I would grill him. I would ask Dave questions, you know, what effect are you using there? Whose idea was the key change? And I never stumped him because Dave had a maker's knowledge of the songs. It wasn't that he studied them or listened to them on repeat or memorized the sheet music. He knew they were the way they were because he made them that way. That's analogous to the kind of knowledge God has of his cosmos—a designer's knowledge. And the original temptation then makes more sense that the serpent is offering Adam and Eve: you can be God-like, you can be the sovereign meaning makers-over, you can be the definers of. And then it's followed in Hebrew by good and evil, which is an ancient Jewish idiom; you would use opposites to describe everything in between. So good and evil, I don't take it to be moral categories in this context so much as if you and I are ancient Jews and we say black and white, we would understand each other. We're referring to every color. If we say the Beatles and Nickelback, we would understand we're describing every band the best and, sorry Nickelback fans, the worst. And something like that is happening in Genesis 3:5. You will be like God knowing the sovereign definers over everything, good and evil, and everything in between. And so in that light, a lot of what's being, a lot of what's trending now is this cutting edge and this innovative and be true to yourself and hashtag authenticity—it really is outdated. It really is as uber traditionalist as it can possibly get harkening back to a serpent's deception in Genesis 3.

Scott: So in this regard, there really is nothing new under the sun.

Thad: Oh, exactly. Yeah, it's the oldest lie in the book, literally.

Scott: So that's a really helpful take on Genesis 3. And I think that figure of speech is very common in the Old Testament where you have two extremes, but what's meant is the whole in between. And so I think most people take that as moral categories, but I think seeing it in that way as more all encompassing is really helpful. And I think it sort of goes to the heart of what the temptation actually was.

Thad: Exactly. And it makes sense of the contemporary. It gives us a cultural hermeneutic. So now when we hear cartoon characters telling kids to follow their heart, if you pay close enough attention, you can not only hear, you know, the Jean Paul Sartre saying, you just exist, you create your own essence. You not only hear sort of the echoes of Fred Nietzsche saying, you know, because God is dead, we live beyond good and evil, the Uberman who creates their own values. If you listen close enough, you can hear, hey kids, follow your hearts with an emphasis on the S there. You can hear the old serpent's propaganda.

Scott: But is there something positive and beneficial that we ought to take from the notion of following our heart or do you see that as entirely a product of the first temptation?

Thad: Yeah, good question. I think, you know, just yesterday after I wrapped up things here on campus, I headed back down the freeway and I'm coaching my little boy Henry's T-ball team and we have quite a few.

Scott: It's a sanctifying experience, I'm sure.

Thad: It is for sure. Yeah, Luther said the home was, you know, is more the monastery than the monastery. The T-ball team can be a very sanctifying experience. So anyway, there's quite a few little dudes on the team who it's pretty clear they've never swung a bat in their lives. They get up there and their little hands are quivering and their bats are shaking. They don't know which way to shape, which way to face. I was putting the ball on the T for one kid and his dad came up to me and said, hey, are you trying to teach him to hit lefty? You know he's right handed. Like the kid didn't know. And so if I have a kid who's flipping out about the terror of hitting a baseball or catching a baseball, it might be good advice to say, believe in yourself. Might be good advice to say, you know, dig down deep and find something there and follow your heart. I think there's context where it's innocuous. This book isn't about that. It's about what a lot of the culture commentators are describing expressive individualism. Where it's an all encompassing worldview.

Scott: Which means?

Thad: So it's this all encompassing worldview where I have a duty, not like in the traditional sense to moral responsibilities outside of myself. Where I need to be a good father and a good husband and a good churchman and a good neighbor or a good professor or anything like that. Dor the expressive individualist, it's really about making my three best friends—me, myself and I—happy. And one of the marks of that ideology is that my feelings slash my heart, they occupy the role that scripture takes in a historic Christian worldview. My feelings are unassailable. My feelings are infallible. My feelings are unquestionable. And so now my moral duty is not to anything beyond myself. I have a duty to be true to myself. And the only real sin in expressive indi