The Mother of All Heresies
How pastoral shipwreck starts long before the scandal goes public
This essay is primarily for pastors, but these concepts are beneficial and needed for all believers.
Years ago, when I first became a pastor, I went to a church planting bootcamp sponsored by Acts 29 (a church planting network I was part of at the time). One of my favorite sessions was about eldership. The man who led the session discussed what the elder’s calling is, how to identify and raise up new elders, and how to examine their character. It was an excellent and helpful presentation.
Shortly after the conference, however, I found out something about the man who taught that session.
He was an adulterer.
He abandoned his wife and children and ran off with another woman, leaving his church devastated and scrambling to find a new pastor. As far as I know, he’s now abandoned the faith entirely.
I wish I could say that his story was unusual, but it’s not. It feels like every few months somebody I respected and looked up to—someone who’s books I read and ministry I followed—has some kind of moral failure. Of course, nobody who goes into pastoral ministry expects that to happen to them. And most of us tell ourselves it won’t, because we’re not the kind of man that that happens to.
But brothers, you are exactly the kind of man that could happen to.
Why? Because you’re human. And because you’ve got a target on your back. That doesn’t mean the devil sneaks into your heart and forces you to act against your will. No, it happens through small compromises and micro-concessions that push you down a dark path. And it typically happens very slowly.
The Scriptures identify a key factor that both sustains a fruitful ministry and prevents pastoral shipwreck. It’s the same factor in both cases. Paul calls it a “good conscience.”
The Aim of Our Charge
In 1 Timothy 1:5, Paul gives Timothy what amounts to a thesis statement for the entire letter: “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.”
Notice that there are three qualifiers that define the kind of love Paul is talking about:
A “sincere faith” means you are a legitimate believer. You are converted, regenerate, filled with the Holy Spirit.
A “pure heart” means you are in ministry for the right reasons. You love God, you love his people, and you want to shepherd souls and build them up
A “good conscience” means your inner life is clear. You are not burdened by unconfessed sin or driven by nagging guilt you’re trying to manage.
All three of these things are important, but from my experience, the conscience is the most neglected of the three. At a recent Founder’s Ministry conference where I gave the talk this essay is based on, several men approached me afterward to tell me, “I’d never heard a discussion about the conscience like this before.” And yet, it’s so important that Paul included in the “aim of [his] charge.”
Actually, Paul has a lot to say about the conscience. It shows up repeatedly throughout the book of 1 Timothy. Every time it appears, it is connected to either the health or the destruction of a man’s ministry. In Acts 24:16, Paul said, “I always take pains to have a clear conscience toward both God and man.” When Paul listed qualifications for deacons in 1 Timothy 3:9, he required that they “must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience.”
In other words, a good conscience isn’t a luxury, it is a precondition for effective ministry. So what is the conscience?
What is the Conscience?
The conscience is the faculty of the mind and soul that tells you whether what you are doing is right or wrong. It an inner sense that tells you the moral quality of a given action. Put another way, it’s your moral compass.
This is important because we don’t go through life pulling up Bible verses for every decision we make. You know the Word of God, and as you simmer in it, it informs your moral compass so that in a given situation you can make a moral decision quickly. For example, when your conscience is working properly, you won’t tell a lie even when you’re tempted to do so because you intuitively know it’s wrong. You don’t need to look it up, you just know it.
A conscience can be called “good” when it meets two basic criteria:
First, your inner moral compass is properly calibrated by the Word of God. In other words, your sense of right and wrong is not calibrated by your feelings, or culture, or your wife, or by Instagram. The things you believe to be good actually correspond with what Scripture says is good.
Second, your outer behavior aligns with what your conscience tells you. In other words, you know what is right, and then you do it (cf James 4:17).
When both conditions are met, you’re better equipped for ministry. You can love people well, preach with authority, correct sin with integrity, and shepherd souls without the constant drag of hypocrisy nagging you from the inside.
How a Conscience Goes Bad
The conscience can also become bad, and when it does, it can kill your ministry and shipwreck your faith.
Paul writes in 1 Timothy 1:6, “Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.” People who ruin their ministries begin by swerving from the things Paul just mentioned the verse before: a pure heart, a good conscience, a sincere faith. Kind of like a moral car accident—first you swerve, then you crash.
A bad conscience refers to a damaged moral compass. When this happens, your perception of right and wrong is broken. Isaiah 5:20 warns about this, saying, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” A man with a bad conscience may end up doing bad things and not feel guilty about it because his inner sense of right and wrong has been damaged.
When your conscience is healthy, the guilt triggered by the conscience functions as a gift of God. It’s like a warning light on your spiritual dashboard. When you feel guilty, you are prompted to examine yourself. Perhaps you realize you’d done something wrong and can correct it. Perhaps you were harsh with someone or dishonest about something and you bring it to the Lord in repentance. When that happens, that’s the system working as God designed it.
But if you ignore those warning lights, they eventually grow dim. The feelings of guilt start to fade, and eventually, you can’t hear the voice of the Spirit at all. Nevertheless, you’re still preaching, still running staff meetings, still counseling and doing weddings and funerals, all the while your internal monitoring system has gone dark.
That’s the scary part. Your soul is malfunctioning in some way but you can’t tell because the warning light on your spiritual dashboard isn’t working. If a man has damaged his conscience through pornography, he may fail to recognize that he’s also gotten too friendly and flirty with a woman on his staff. If a man has damaged his conscience by telling little “white lies” here and there (there’s no such thing as a “white” lie, by the way), he may not feel any guilt when he starts telling bigger lies to cover his tracks.
He builds a little castle around his soul and keeps a handful of secret sins locked up in the lower dungeon, free from visibility and accountability.
Calibrating the Conscience
Throughout our lives, every Christian is constantly calibrating our consciences in one of two directions, either for better or worse.
We can improve our consciences in two simple ways.
First, we inform the conscience through the study of Scripture, which is further sharpened in fellowship with other believers. That’s like a spiritual firmware upgrade. Your moral reasoning improves with biblical wisdom and experience.
Second, we strengthen the conscience by obeying it. This means we live according to what we believe is right, which reinforces the truth.
I grew up in Appalachia where my grandfather and great grandfather were both independent baptist preachers. They were also teetotalers. At the time, my conscience was calibrated to believe drinking alcohol was a sin.
While I was in college, a family from church asked me to house-sit for them while they went on vacation. He said, “make yourself at home, let the dogs out, help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge.” So that’s what I did. But when I opened the fridge, what I found there scandalized me. He had a case of beer in there, left out in the open, like some kind of evil, drunken sociopath.
I thought he was a Christian! How could he dare drink this poison devil juice? (A young woman I knew made a practice of going to Kroger and praying over the beer cases that it would make people sick.)
But over time, I began to realize my conscience on this issue was mis-calibrated. How can alcohol be a sin when Jesus turned water into wine? Through further study of scripture I learned to distinguish the sin of drunkenness from the moderate use and enjoyment of alcohol. It took a while for my emotions to catch up, because it still felt like a sin even though I realized it wasn’t. But at least I understood that my feelings aren’t in charge. My conscience was being recalibrated by the word of God.
Your conscience can be damaged when you sin against it, even if the issue in question isn’t actually a sin. If I had popped open a beer in that man’s house, it would have been sin for me to do so, not because drinking a beer is a sin, but because I would be sinning against what I believed to be right. It is bad for your soul to do what you think is evil even if you’re wrong about the fact that it’s evil (cf Rom 14-15:7, esp 14:14).
So, when we sin against conscience, we create a moral contradiction within our souls that must be resolved. If you do not repent, you will soothe your conscience by telling yourself it wasn’t wrong after all. You’ll make excuses to justify it. This is what Paul calls a “seared conscience.”
A seared conscience signals to your soul that the behavior in question is really not a big deal. Every time you indulge this pattern, your conscience adjusts to it and feels a little less guilty about it. The next time you face the same situation, it gets even easier to do it. You feel less and less guilty until the guilt no longer registers at all.
These micro-adjustments add up to a trajectory, which is a slow drift towards greater and greater moral compromises.
When Your Conscience Finds a New Law
There’s one more wrinkle I want to point out about when a conscience goes bad. A bad conscience doesn’t shut off entirely. We are moral creatures, after all, and our conscience will still send moral signals to our souls even if it’s wrong. When your conscience is damaged in one area, it often adjusts by finding a new law to obey. Very often, these are manmade laws that make us feel righteous because we can actually keep them.
In other words, a bad conscience may substitute God’s law with a homemade standard conditioned by your own preferences and personality.
I’ve noticed that some pastors who disqualify themselves for ministry have a reputation for being quite scrupulous about trivial matters. Their glaring character flaws are paired with strange convictions about relatively minor issues that have become hobby horses.
There’s a reason for this. He soothes his wounded conscience by hyper-focusing on an area of his life where he feels he’s doing well. For example, a man who is hiding sexual sin may become very conscientious about eating healthy foods. His fixation on a secondary matter distracts his conscience from the sexual sin he’s keeping unconfessed and buried.
This is what Paul says in 1 Tim 4:1-3 when he describes those who “depart from the faith.” He describes them as false teachers whose “consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving.” In other words, in Paul’s example, the man with a seared conscience suddenly develops bizarre scruples about singleness (“forbidding marriage”) and food (“abstinence from foods”).
That’s worth paying attention to, because some Christians have a bad habit of majoring on the minors. This is especially common online. Men who do this have “wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions” (1 Tim 1:6-7).
It is not uncommon for a young man to suddenly get interested in postmillennialism and start pontificating about Christianity and politics while his own life is riddled with sin and falling apart. It’s easier to have convictions about politicians should do in Washington, DC than to fight and kill sin in your own heart. A bad conscience will do that to a man.
Thus, a bad conscience doesn’t mean you abandon all sense of morality. It often means you substitute God’s law for your own and impose that one on others ruthlessly. It’s why modern social justice warriors are as self-righteous as any Pharisee in Jesus’ day. Their conscience isn’t dead, it’s been recalibrated to a different standard, and they enforce that standard on everybody.
This is why John Calvin once said, “a bad conscience is the mother of all heresies.” He was not being sensational.
He meant that theological errors don’t usually begin as intellectual mistakes, they often begin as moral compromises that are later justified by doctrinal adjustments.
Quite often, heresy is simply a belief system one develops to justify his own sins. It’s no accident that this teaching features prominently in the pastoral epistles, because pastors, teachers, and ministry leaders are the ones in the best position to commit this error.
What I’ve described so far is how a conscience goes bad. What I haven’t described yet is what it looks like along the way. There are four identifiable and catching them early is the difference between repentance and shipwreck. I’ll address those in a follow up essay.
“Loser Theology” Updates
Pre-orders for my latest book, “Loser Theology: Why the Weak Will Not Inherit the Earth,” are off to the races. I’ve heard from a number of people who seem genuinely excited to read it and engage with the argument of the book.
Some people take offense at the title, which was to be expected. I address this directly in chapter one of the book. It reads:
I use the term because it’s a theology that advocates for losing as the way to be faithful to God. Loser Theology can refer to theological perspectives and movements that emphasize passivity, retreat, and defeat, often conflating suffering and loss with humility. In other words, the Loser Theology label is not about petty name calling, but about calling Christians to break free from the prison of Loser Theology that’s holding them captive.
The first chapter of the book is available to read now for free at losertheology.com.
I was recently interviewed by Jon Harris about Loser Theology on his Conversations that Matter podcast. Jon is a man for whom I have much respect.
I was also interviewed by John and Stacy Whited on the Flyover Conservatives podcast. I had a great time getting to know them. Great conversation! (I look really angry in the thumbnail photo haha)
https://rumble.com/v7cderc-the-flyover-conservatives-show.html
Finally, I’ll share a few more endorsements from Canon Press’s marketing email.
A profound failure in orthopraxy (right practice) if not repented of, usually leads to departure from orthodoxy. For example, if a Christian is persistently pushes evil political views, such as open borders or alphabet stuff, sooner or later, that Christian will depart from the Faith. I've seen it time and again.