There’s a feeling you get when you win a theological argument. A warm rush of certainty. The sense that the universe has been put back in order, that you’re standing on the right side of the line.
It’s addictive. And I think it’s dangerous.
The dopamine of being right
Neuroscience tells us that the experience of being proved right triggers the same reward pathways as other addictive behaviours. Our brains don’t distinguish between “I correctly identified the nature of the hypostatic union” and “I found food.” Both feel like survival.
This matters because it means our theological convictions aren’t purely rational. They’re neurochemical. The strength of our feeling about a doctrine is not proportional to the strength of the evidence for it.
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9, ESV)
What we protect when we argue
When someone challenges our theology, what exactly is being threatened? Rarely is it God himself. More often it’s:
- Our identity within a community
- Years of intellectual investment
- The comfort of a settled worldview
- Our sense of being one of the good ones
This isn’t to say convictions don’t matter. They do. But if we can’t tell the difference between defending truth and defending our ego, we have a problem.
The Hebrew concept of emet
The Hebrew word for truth — emet (אמת) — carries a richer meaning than our English word. It’s bound up with faithfulness, reliability, and steadfastness. Truth in the Hebrew Bible is not primarily a proposition to be defended; it’s a relationship to be lived.
When we reduce truth to “the correct position in a debate,” we’ve already lost something essential about what emet means.
A different posture
What if we approached theology less like barristers and more like archaeologists? Not trying to win a case, but carefully, humbly uncovering something that was always there — something bigger than our ability to articulate it?
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12, ESV)
Paul — the apostle, not me — wasn’t embarrassed to admit the limits of his own understanding. He considered partial knowledge a feature of faith, not a bug.
The test
Here’s a practical test: When was the last time you changed your mind about something theological?
If the answer is “never” or “I can’t remember,” it’s worth asking whether you’ve been seeking truth or defending a position. Those are not the same thing.
Being right is not the goal of the Christian life. Being faithful is. And faithfulness requires the kind of humility that can say, “I might be wrong about this.”
That’s not weakness. That’s emet.