“Woe Unto You Experts”

Matthew 22:34 And when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they themselves gathered together. 35One of them, an expert in the law, tested Him with a question:

Luke 11:52 Woe to you experts in the law! For you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.

These are but two examples among many examples in the Gospel that could be elucidated where we find the experts in the law explicitly or implicitly condemned. Obviously, Jesus didn’t have much use for the “experts” in the law. Only the experts could have gotten everything as wrong as they obviously did and Jesus wasn’t slow to point that out and for that habit He earned their enmity. Jesus mocked them, condemned them, and expressed incredulity at their slowness in understanding. Jesus was having nothing to do with their so called “expert” status and demonstrated that expert status — a status today typically gained by all kinds of degrees — was often bogus.

I’m going to pursue a thread here where it should be said to our modern “experts” both within and outside the Church, “Woe to you, experts…” As a result some are bound to accuse me of “anti-intellectualism.” This was the cat-call brought against the Fundamentalists by the Modernists during the Modernist vs. Fundamentalist controversy in the early part of the 20th century. The Fundamentalist had rightly sniffed out some of the ridiculous claims of the Higher Critical Modernists who fancied themselves as “experts.” The problem then was the Fundamentalists were often just as ridiculous as the expert Modernists and so the Modernist cat-call of “anti-intellectual” stuck.

However, just as Jesus was not being anti-intellectual when He called out the “experts in the law,” so I am not being anti-intellectual here. Jesus was anti-expert because the experts he was dealing with were idiots and the culture of experts that we are living in today are all too often likewise idiots.

Take as the most recent example the experts in the last four months who screamed “The sky is falling. The sky is falling. You must cancel life and hibernate because the Wuhan is coming to get you, oh my.” Clearly these experts should be pivoted upon and shouted at, “Woe unto you, you experts in Medicine.” Take as an example how the experts claimed that the birth control pill was perfectly safe for women only to be found out decades later that there is a connection between women taking birth control pills and breast cancer. “Woe unto you, you experts in Medicine.” Take as an example in the Church how the experts are telling us right now that Jesus Christ doesn’t have direct, express and explicit Sovereignty (R2K) over the public square. “Woe unto you, experts in Christianity.” Take as an example in Psychology of electric shock therapy which for decades the experts told us was a legitimate way to treat patients. “Woe unto you, experts in Psychology.” How many more examples do I need where the self-annoited experts were just idiotic in what they were pushing? Take as an example the Governmental experts declamation during the run up to WW II that the Feds could build needed landing craft better than the private sector. You guessed it … the experts were wrong again. “Woe unto you, experts in the Federal Government.” Take as an example the experts in the Church right now who are telling us by repeated books and conferences that celibate sodomites in the ministry is perfectly acceptable per God’s Word. “Woe unto you, experts in the Clergy.” Take as an example the experts in the Law who have arranged for us to redefine the meaning of marriage so as to include the marital union of sodomites. “Woe unto you, expert lawyers and judges.” Really I could go on for paragraph after paragraph on the reality that the idea of a culture of experts, where we the hoi polloi, are supposed to passively listen to the experts and follow their guidance is pure skubala.

This kind of reciting example after example is necessary because now the experts are threatening us with their expertise which is on the cusp of demanding, that given their expertise we need to, by way of force of law, require our children to get vaccines. This kind of reciting example after example is necessary because now the experts are threatening us with their expertise which is on the cusp of demanding, that given their expertise we need a Universal Basic Income so that we can be taken care by the experts in the Federal Government. This kind of reciting example after example is necessary because now the experts are threatening us with their expertise which is on the cusp of demanding, that given their expertise we need to coalesce into a New World Order Government. “Woe unto you experts in nearly any field.”

So what is with our putative “experts.” What was with the “experts in the law” during Jesus time? In both case their expertise existed as in a pagan world and life view. In both cases, experts then and now, are earning and basing their expertise on assumptions that are anti-Christ in their nature and are contrary to revelation. For example, much of vaccine theory is based on Darwinian evolutionary thinking. For example, much of psychology is based on reality that the God of the Bible does not exist. For example, much of law today is not based on God’s revelation but on Postivistic law, which presupposes man’s autonomy from God. For example, much of sociology is based not on principles drawn from God’s Word but rather is anchored in an anthropology that man is basically good and on the inevitability of humanist progress. The Lion’s share of our experts have been gained their expertise in Universities that are anti-Christ. As such most of our experts — from Clergy to Lawyers to Psychologists to Educators to Sociologists to Medical Doctors to Judges to Politicians is just so much skubala that is at its core anti-intellectual. Our need is to turn upon them and proclaim “Woe unto you experts.”

All of that leaves us having to become our own experts as much as possible, and that because we desire to be intellectual about our expertise. We must become experts in law, medicine, sociology, psychology, economics, politics, Christianity, ethics, and art. Of course we should employ the division of labor as much as possible but it simply is the case that the cynical attitude towards the “experts” we have developed over the last few decades needs to be set in stone. The experts, exceptions notwithstanding, are our enemies and the enemies of all men. They should no more be automatically be trusted than the traveling snake-oil salesman was trusted once upon a time. In all disciplines we must be like the Bereans who studied to see if the things they were being told were true.

There will be times we get it wrong, but in the times we get it wrong we must remind ourselves of the multitude of times the experts got it wrong. File this under, “If I am going to mess up then I’d rather mess up according to my lights and research as opposed to an ‘expert’ who has a track record of messing up.”

Of course there will still be times we will have to entrust ourselves to the “experts.” If I’m arguing before SCOTUS I want an expert. If I’m going under the knife for a kidney replacement I want an expert. However, even then I’d like to find a Christian whose expertise looks different than his colleagues pagan expertise.

Of course this kind of talk drives the experts rabid. How dare we question their bailiwick? How dare the peasants take up their pitchforks against the citadel of tower Expert? Don’t they know their place? It’s the same kind of protest the Rome raised against the Reformers. It’s the same kind of protest that Charles I raised against the Puritan Round-heads. It is the same kind of protest that British General Cornwallis raised as he surrendered to Washington at Yorktown. Cornwallis was so miffed that his expert Generalship was trounced that he even had his troops march out of town to the tune of “The World Turned Upside Down.” It is the same kind of protest we have seen the last 4 years in Washington DC with the arrival of the non-expert Trump. Experts do not like being challenged by the peasant class as Jesus found out when he challenged them in the first century.

As Dan Brannan argues in his column that inspired this one,

http://tribaltheocrat.com/2020/06/kneel-before-the-the-experts-the-philosopher-kings-of-pbs-demand-your-obedience/?fbclid=IwAR2hP_wPVAI9KaGFDBO5livZDYafkCaeT4gINvjaSFCG4JiOQYK54WsnDgY

the instinct to vest interests in experts is a largely feminine and effeminate one. I won’t repeat Dan’s argument again here but it is an argument that is worth your time and consideration.

There is another implication that needs to be drawn out here and that is that as Christians we have to absolutely give up on the University (especially “Christian” Universities) to become experts. The University system as been co-opted and is owned root, stem, and branch by the Marxists and so should be absolutely verboten for Christians. Any “expertise” gained at the University will be gained at the cost of our children’s souls. We only have to point at experts in the Church today to demonstrate that in spades. Whether it is the expert Rosario Butterfield, or the expertise of Sean Michael Lucas, or the expertise of Al Mohler, or the expertise of Tim Keller, or the expertise of R. Scott Clark it is clear that the experts in the Church now, having their worldview shaped by their University education leaves the Church vacuous. This causes us to conclude that if you value your own soul as well as your children’s souls that not only will you flee the university system, you will flee the contemporary conservative Reformed Churches which are anthills of expertise. Remember … “Woe unto you experts.”

I recommend if you want to make your children scholars and experts you set them about a routine diet of pocketcollege.com. I suggest that you have them feast on Dabney’s “Secular Discussions.” I suggest that you have them read Blamire’s “Disappearance of the Christian Mind,” or Esolen’s “Out of the Ashes,” or Machen’s “Christianity and Liberalism.” Have them read Ironink.org daily. Have them listen to Dr. Glen Martin’s lecture series. If we want to be experts again we have to gain our expertise as existing in our own Weltanschauung while telling the pseudo-experts to bounder off.

The only other option we have is to commit the chief sin of Medieval Roman Catholics which we have been committing in spades and with increasing intensity over the last decades and that is the putting of our minds in park and letting the Magisterium do our thinking for us in one field after another. We could call that “Expert-olatry.” Consider where our expert-olatry has led us. Because of our expert-olatry the Conservative Reformed Church is on the cusp of accepting celibate sodomites in seat of Elder. Because of our expert-olatry in the Medical field we are on the cusp of injecting our children with vaccines which contain the type of assorted garbage, chemicals, and fetal DNA which would make a hardened Marine quail. Because of our expert-olatry we are on the cusp of actually letting the Federal Government become our outright explicit owners (that’s called slavery). We must rid ourselves of the idea of an expert Magisterium and start thinking God’s thoughts after him again.

So, while acknowledging exceptions, I say, “piss on the experts. ” Those people are getting us killed and if I am going to die I’d rather die at my own hand then the hand of the Christless “experts.” They may be well intention-ed in some cases but their good intentions won’t make you any less dead by listening to them.

Let our theme in these matters become, “Woe unto you experts.”