Monday, September 14, 2026
The Sin I Did Not Know I Was Committing
Part I: Before Curiosity Became a Sin
Know Thyself
Long before Christianity warned against the dangers of curiosity, the Greeks carved a different command into the intellectual imagination of the West: gnÅthi seauton—know thyself.
The words were associated with the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, where pilgrims came seeking answers from the oracle. Yet the command itself is less an answer than a warning. To know oneself in the ancient world was not simply to discover preferences, talents, or some hidden authentic identity. It was to recognize one's place. You are human. You are mortal. You are limited. You are not a god.
The ancient command to know oneself was never an invitation to unlimited intellectual conquest. It contained humility within it. Self-knowledge meant recognizing the boundaries of the self.
I find that tension increasingly compelling because the same command can lead in two very different directions. One response to human limitation is restraint: there are things beyond us, and wisdom requires leaving them alone. Another response is inquiry: because our understanding is limited, we should keep examining what we think we know.
Socrates chose the second path.
The Socrates who survives in Plato's dialogues is rarely presented as the man with the answers. He is the man with another question. Someone offers a definition of courage, justice, virtue, friendship, or piety, and Socrates begins pulling gently at its loose threads. What do you mean by that? Does your definition apply here? What about this exception? If that is true, does this follow? The conversation proceeds until something that initially appeared obvious becomes much less certain.
That method can be maddening.
It can also be liberating.
Socrates' peculiar wisdom rests partly in his recognition that confidence and knowledge are not the same thing. He repeatedly encounters people who believe they understand matters they have never seriously examined. Their ignorance is not the problem. Everyone is ignorant of something. Their problem is that they do not know that they are ignorant.
There is an enormous difference between saying, “I do not know,” and believing that there is nothing left to ask.
I spent many years thinking education worked in the opposite direction. The point of learning, I assumed, was gradually to replace uncertainty with certainty. You begin not knowing. You study. You acquire information. Eventually you know.
That is certainly true in limited ways. I once did not know how photosynthesis worked, how to calculate a particular equation, how a bill moved through a legislature, or how a research methodology differed from another. Those things can be learned. Questions can be answered.
But education has increasingly taught me something more unsettling: every answer reveals the boundary of another question.
The more history I learned, the more complicated history became.
The more theology I studied, the less singular Christianity appeared.
The more science I encountered, the larger the natural world became.
The more I learned about education, the more cautious I became about simple explanations for why students behave, learn, succeed, or struggle as they do.
Knowledge did not eliminate mystery. It enlarged it.
That realization brings me back to Socrates.
Near the end of Plato's Apology, after defending a lifetime spent questioning the assumptions of his fellow Athenians, Socrates offers one of the most famous claims in Western philosophy: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
It is an astonishing statement.
Socrates does not say the comfortable life is not worth living. He does not say the unsuccessful life, the unbelieving life, or even the immoral life. He says the unexamined life.
Examination becomes a moral activity.
To ask questions about oneself, one's society, one's assumptions, and one's inherited beliefs is not merely an intellectual hobby. It is part of what it means to live responsibly.
That conviction resonates with me more deeply now than it would have when I first encountered the quotation in a textbook.
“Know thyself” has become less a destination than a practice.
Who am I?
Why do I think the way I do?
Where did these assumptions come from?
Which parts of myself have I chosen, and which were inherited before I knew I was inheriting anything?
What do I believe because I have examined it?
What do I believe because someone I trusted told me it was true?
What am I afraid to reconsider?
Those questions became particularly important as my relationship with religion changed. I was raised within a tradition that placed enormous emphasis on knowing: knowing scripture, knowing doctrine, knowing whether one was saved, knowing what God wanted, knowing where history was headed, knowing which beliefs were true and which were false.
There was remarkably little uncertainty in the vocabulary.
“I don't know” was often a temporary condition awaiting the correct biblical answer.
The strange thing is that I genuinely loved learning within that world. I read the Bible because I wanted to understand it. I listened closely in Sunday school. I read apologetics because I wanted Christianity to withstand scrutiny. I asked questions not because I hoped to destroy belief but because I assumed truth should survive examination.
For a time, I believed those impulses were entirely compatible.
Then the questions began producing answers I had not been taught to expect.
That is when I discovered that some communities value questions primarily when the questions return acceptable answers.
This distinction is easy to miss.
A tradition may encourage study enthusiastically. Read the Bible. Memorize it. Attend classes. Learn doctrine. Study church history. Read commentaries. Ask your pastor questions.
All of that can look intellectually open.
But the real test comes when inquiry begins moving somewhere unexpected.
What happens when geology complicates Genesis?
What happens when history complicates doctrine?
What happens when textual criticism complicates scripture?
What happens when another Christian tradition offers an interpretation that fits the evidence better than one's own?
What happens when a question does not return safely home?
Socrates understood the social danger of that kind of questioning.
Athens did not execute him because he lacked answers. It condemned him because his questions destabilized confidence. He made people uncomfortable by revealing that things they considered settled were not nearly as settled as they imagined.
There is something profoundly threatening about the person who asks one more question.
Not because every question is wise.
Not because every inherited belief is false.
But because a genuine question contains a possibility that the answer may change us.
That is what separates inquiry from performance.
A question whose answer has already been prescribed is not entirely a question. It may be an exercise, a catechism, or a test of whether the student has learned the approved response. Genuine inquiry is riskier. It allows the possibility that the person asking will emerge different from the person who began.
That difference helps me understand my own education more clearly.
For many years, I thought I was collecting knowledge.
I now think I was being trained in examination.
Each new field gave me another way of asking questions. History taught me to ask when an idea emerged and who benefited from it. Literature taught me to inhabit perspectives other than my own. Science taught me to ask whether a claim could be tested. Research taught me to distinguish evidence from assertion. Philosophy taught me to examine the assumptions beneath the argument. Art taught me that meaning can exceed literal explanation.
None of these disciplines gave me a final account of reality.
Together, they made final accounts harder to accept.
That is not intellectual failure.
It may be intellectual maturity.
To know oneself, then, is partly to know the limits of one's own knowing. It is to recognize that one's perspective is situated, inherited, partial, and revisable. It is to admit that certainty is not necessarily evidence of truth and that doubt is not necessarily evidence of weakness.
This is where the Delphic command and the Socratic life finally meet for me.
Know thyself.
Know that you are limited.
Know that you can be wrong.
Know that some of the things you are most certain about were given to you before you were old enough to examine them.
Know that every intellectual tradition, including your own, has blind spots.
Know that education does not free you from error.
It merely gives you better tools for discovering it.
And then keep asking.
The irony is that this kind of humility can look remarkably like rebellion from inside a system built upon certainty. The person who says “I do not know” may appear less faithful than the person who confidently repeats an inherited answer. The person who asks for evidence may appear arrogant. The person who continues reading may be accused of overthinking.
Yet Socrates suggests another possibility.
Perhaps humility is not knowing one's place beneath an answer.
Perhaps humility is knowing one's place before the question.
I am human.
I am limited.
I do not know everything.
That is precisely why I want to know more.
Sunday, September 13, 2026
Saturday, September 12, 2026
They Went Out From Us
The First Baptist Family
On June 1, 1992, my pastor sent me a photograph.
In it, I am standing against a plain wall wearing a red shirt, looking directly at the camera with the expression of a child who has been told to stand still long enough for someone to take his picture. The photograph came with a typewritten letter.
“Dear David,” it begins.
The pastor explained that he was sending the picture “as a remembrance of the day you became a part of the First Baptist family.”
I have kept both.
At the time, there was nothing remarkable about the language. I understood what he meant. I belonged to the church. More importantly, I belonged to the faith the church represented.
The letter went on to express the hope that, as part of that family, I would join the church in reaching “those who are lost around us.”
There were two groups in that sentence.
There was the family.
And there were the lost.
I knew which one I belonged to.
I was a Christian.
That statement feels simple to me even now. It describes the world as I understood it then. I believed in God. I believed Jesus was the Son of God. I believed that human beings were separated from God by sin and that Jesus had died to save us. I believed the Bible told the truth about those things. I believed prayer mattered. I believed people could be saved, and I believed I was one of them.
As I grew older, those beliefs became more than something I had inherited from adults.
I participated.
I studied scripture.
I attended Sunday school.
I worshiped.
I evangelized.
I preached.
I worried about whether I was living as I should.
I tried to understand what God wanted from me.
Christianity was not an affiliation I checked on a form. It was one of the primary ways I understood who I was and what the world meant.
The people around me understood me that way too.
The letter matters to me now partly because it preserves that shared understanding.
Memory is unreliable. We revise our own histories. Details disappear. Later experiences change the emphasis we place on earlier ones. I know that the person remembering his childhood today is not the child who lived it.
But the letter is still there.
A pastor looked at that child and wrote that he had become part of the First Baptist family.
No one knew where his life would go.
No one knew what questions he would eventually ask.
No one knew that he would study religion closely enough to begin questioning some of the explanations he had been given for it.
No one knew that he would someday stop calling himself Christian.
The photograph contains none of that.
It is simply a picture of a boy who belonged.
That is what makes it important to me.
More than a decade later, in another Baptist church, I would stand in a small kitchenette between Sunday school and worship and have a very different conversation.
By then, I was in my early twenties. College had changed the kinds of questions I was asking. My beliefs had begun moving outside the boundaries of the congregation. Church leaders had discussed me. I had already lost roles that had once affirmed my place in the community.
During one of those conversations, an older deacon would tell me that I had never really been saved.
The statement did more than describe what he thought about the person standing in front of him.
It reached backward toward the boy in the photograph.
If I was not a Christian now, then perhaps I had never really been one.
If salvation could not be lost, then whatever had happened in 1992—and everything that came afterward—had to mean something other than what we had believed it meant at the time.
That tension has stayed with me.
A church once sent me a photograph to commemorate the day I became part of its family.
Years later, another church would help me understand that, according to the theology I had inherited, my eventual departure could be evidence that I had never truly belonged.
The ending could change the meaning of the beginning.
For a long time, I thought the important question was which interpretation was correct.
Was I really saved?
Was I never saved?
Did I lose something that theology said could not be lost?
Those questions once seemed enormous to me.
They do not anymore.
I have become more interested in a different question.
How do we construct the stories that allow our beliefs to survive?
We do it with scripture.
We do it with doctrine.
We do it with history.
And we do it with one another.
The photograph on my desk is a small reminder that, before anyone knew how the story would end, there was a time when the story meant something else.
And one of the things we believed then was very simple.
Once saved, always saved.
Antigonish (I met a man who wasn't there)
By Hughes Mearns
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away...
When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... (slam!)
Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away...
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