All your heroes are trash
never meet your heroes
You know the old saying, "never meet your heroes". At a distance, it's easy to idolise, to put people on a pedestal. But up close, you see their flaws. They disappoint. And the temptation is "oh, I got sucked in, suckered by them. But 'Other Person', they are different, they are great, they would never let us down."
They will, they always will.
Who are the two greatest American theologians? Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield (Okay, Whitefield isn't technically American, but he was the leading figure of the Great Awakening there). Edwards was a slave holder and saw no problem with it. Whitefield caught a vision for an orphanage as a way of engaging in social benevolence in a Christian way, and yet his need to fun it through slave labour led in turn to the state of Georgia legalising and legislating slavery, which it had previously banned.
John Howard Yoder. Brilliant Christian ethicist. Involved in decades of sexual abuse.
Karl Barth. Lauded as one of the most profound theologians of the 20th century. Had a 40year affair with his live-in mistress.
The ancient church? Almost universally silent and blind on the issue of slavery. Deeply conflicted and troubled on the place of women. No unblemished heroes there.
I will spare you running through the list of contemporary leaders and pastors and their sins. They are easily found, and I don’t want to get caught up in naming names.
The point is, all these people turn out to be deeply flawed. Not just, "oh, we all sin, we're all flawed", but some of these things are deep, tragic, persistent patterns of sin that we ought never to excuse. Forgive, yes; excuse, no. Many of these things ought to be permanent disqualifications from leadership or ministry.
What do we do with this?
I think the first answer is obvious: Jesus. There is one hero who doesn't disappoint precisely because he is without sin. Whoever else you idolise or look up to or consider a great leader is going to disappoint.
And yet, the question lingers: what to do with all the rest?
The response of the age is to throw them all in the bin, never to be read again. I have sympathy with that view. We ought to be deeply disturbed at the sins of these people. We ought to recoil. And yet, if we in fact did this we would soon find ourselves with nothing to read, no-one to listen to, no partners to dialogue with. I think that's the theological learning equivalent of "going out of the world", 1 Cor 5.10. If you are determined to never learn from a sinner, you'll have to give up learning from anyone, living or dead. Every leader, theologian, author you encounter is a sinner, to a greater or lesser extent, and while we should not disconnect their thinking from their lived-life, neither should we collapse the two.
One of the things I am grateful for in my education is the general consistent tone of "pursue truth, wherever it is found, and whoever is saying it". I was not encouraged to only ever learn from "the right authors". Part of that means being willing to do the difficult work of engaging authors you disagree with, and seeing what is true in what they say. I suggest that this is true not just at the intellectual level, but it also needs to be true at the ethical level.
Which means a careful and critical and appreciative engagement with our heroes, theological and otherwise. It means setting aside adulation and admiration. It means admiring what is admirable, but doing so with sober judgment. With caveats. With awareness. With acknowledgement. Without excuses. And with humility of our own inevitable falling short, in myriad ways, each peculiar to ourselves and yet oh so common.
All our heroes are trash, but they point us to a better hero. We can learn from their best, and take heed and warning from their tragic failures. We ought to be honest about their sins, while being thankful for whatever good (great or even small though it be) is to be found in them. We should, too, be reminded that we ourselves are deeply flawed, and yet our sin is not the last word about us.