Four degrees south of the city of Destruction lies the town of Stupidity. It is a worse place than even that city of Destruction. It is turned more obliquely from the sun, making it darker and colder than most places. Sur­prising it was, then, to learn that Old Honest was from this town. He had been a mountain of ice, but the Sun of Righteousness had thawed his frozen heart. Mr. Fearing, too, was from this town. These two, while citi­zens in that town, were slow on the uptake in matters of religion. “O fools! and slow of heart to believe!” This had to be said of them. Here in our city, known as The-Place of-the-Boiling-Pot, you may meet men and women with the best university education, but who, in everything pertaining to true religion, are as stupid as they can get. These intellectuals react quickly to correct the inefficiency of the occupant of a university chair, but they understand nothing of a pulpit bearing the mark of the true church. They may be church members themselves, but know neither the creed, the doctrine of their church, nor the fact that their church is fast totally apostatizing from that doctrine. In this city, we have experts in science and re­search, scholars in every field of learning, leaders in political and municipal life, yet stupid in the things of the Protestant and Re­formed faith and life.

Is stupidity a sin? That’s a humbling ques­tion, for we had better be careful, lest we come up with a stupid answer. According to the modern behaviorist philosophy, which greatly colors and conditions the thinking of university education, stupidity is a personal defect, an intelligence inferiority, and if not due to physical or organic causes, is brought on by poor adjustive habits and forms of be­havior acquired by trial and error. (Trial and error is the testing out of one error to exchange it for another.) This means that stupidity is not an innate, but an acquisitive condition resulting from unstructured habit patterns. The individual develops stupidity. He becomes a stupid person. Stupidity is the result of learned behavior under the slavery of a wrong-habit process. The stupid fellow got into the habit of being stupid. Instead of learning to be smart, he learned to be stupid. He did learn something: he learned how to learn nothing. Oddly enough, that is exactly what some of the courses at the university are all about — how to learn nothing. Accord­ing to behaviorist thinking, man is just an animal, which, in the evolutionary advance, is but a shade above his dumb animal ances­tor, and, where he turns out to be a stupid ass, there is a reversive and retrogressive trend to the lower (dumb) animal level. Man, therefore, to begin with, is neither smart nor stupid. His nature is in equilibrium, neutral, capable of tipping the balance in either direction. If he turns out stupid, that con­dition being capable of objective scientific explanation and correction, is not sinful. In some circles it is socially unacceptable, and everywhere regrettable, but never sin­ful. But according to the Word of God and the Reformed Confessions, man was originally created righteous, holy and in perfect knowl­edge. Yet by his own willful sin, he fell, los­ing these excellent gifts, including the per­fect knowledge. He became unrighteous, actually wicked, and unholy, really ungodly, and ignorant. He became stupid. Looking at the matter in this proper perspective, then, stupidity is a sin, and a very deadly sin. For this is eternal life, to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent. But not to know Them is deadly stupidity. Such ignorance is bogged down in spiritual death. So, since it is true that “we have not (yet) perfect faith,” nor perfect knowledge, when we ask the Lord to forgive all our sins, we must also individually plead. Lord, forgive me my stupidity!

Man by his original sin fell helpless to an extreme degree of folly and stupidity. In plain words, man by nature is a stupid fool. It all began when he listened to that stupen­dous Fool, the Devil. Throughout the ages, in all nations and in all parts of the world, the entire world of mankind has been taken in by the blinding policy of Satan, to become sunken prone in terrible stupidity, except for one small, insignificant people, de­livered by divine grace.

The evidence for this stupidity is seen in men and nations everywhere in their for­saking the knowledge and worship of the true God for the most stupid idolatry. The whole human race, shortly after the flood, “be­cause they did not like to retain God in their knowledge,” had committed two evils: they had forsaken the Lord, the Fountain of living waters, and hewed out to themselves cis­terns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water (Rom. 1:28; Jer. 2:12f). The invisible things of God, even His eternal power and Godhead, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. The reason why knowing God they did not glorify Him as God was because they became vain in their imaginations, and because their foolish heart was darkened by their sin and idolatry of changing the glory of the incorruptible God into an image like to corruptible man. Certainly then, this is inexcusable stupidity. (Rom. 1:19-21).

When the nations came to their greatest height of intellectual, scientific and esthetic development, as in the ancient Greek civili­zation, they nevertheless, as to religion, plunged to the depths of stupidity. For that great civilization still clung to the absurd gods which first arose in Egypt, their deified dumb animals and deified stupid men.

Now, today, look at Africa and Asia. Have they appreciably advanced over the darkest idolatry of their notorious history of hea­thenism? Look at North and South America. Since the peoples of the British Isles and of Europe came here, have these areas triumphed in any degree over the grossest delusions of paganism? No, rather the total depravity of human nature is revealed in their most glaring idolatry and worse than brutish stupidity. For “the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times, and the turtle (dove), and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming; but My people know not the judgment of the Lord” (Jer. 8:7).

Stupidity is sinful. For stupid fools are sinning fools. Since “they have rejected the word of the Lord… what wisdom is in them?” (8:9). This same prophecy also says that the wise men of the heathen, because they are idolaters, are altogether stupid and foolish (10:7,8). Though they are ever so wise, yet they are (lit.) in one thing stupid, i.e., in their idolatry. Every man of them is stupid! How did they get that way? They are (lit.) stupid from science (v. 14), i.e., from their science, of making and using idols and images (physically, materially, mentally and spiritually). Their knowledge is a kind of ignorance, a form of stupidity, very much so, when they believe in such gods, practic­ing base idolatry and deep in image-worship. The use of images in worship reveals the grossest stupidity and lack of understanding.

Wise men stupid from their science (phi­losophy)! That’s exactly it! This was true of Kant. “Who can read without indignation of Kant,” remarks De Quincy, “that at his own table, in social sincerity and confidential talk, let him say what he would in his books, he exulted in the prospect of absolute and ultimate annihilation; that he planted his glory in the grave, and was ambitious of rotting forever! The King of Prussia, though a personal friend of Kant’s, found himself obliged to level his state thunders at some of his doctrines, and terrified him in his ad­vance; else I am persuaded that Kant would have formally delivered Atheism from the professor’s chair, and would have enthroned the horrid ghoulish creed, which privately he professed, in the University of Konigsberg. It required the artillery of a great king to make him pause. The fact is, that as the stomach has been known by means of its natural secretion, to attack not only whatso­ever alien body…introduced within it, but also…sometimes to attack itself and its own organic structure, so… with the same pre­ternatural extension of instinct, did Kant carry forward his destroying functions, until he turned them upon his own hopes, and the pledges of his own superiority to the dog, the ape, the worm.”– Geo. B. Cheever, in “Voices of Nature,” 1852. (Quoted in The Treasury of David, IV, 274).

But never mind the wise men of the heathen. What about the wise men of the church? Surely that means the pastors, doesn’t it? If they are not wise, then you have the blind leading the blind; or the stupid leading the stupid. When the pastors are become stupid, they ruin the religion of Jehovah. They do nothing to repair and reform it. They are stupid because they have not sought the Lord. They are all stupid people who do not seek the Lord. (Jer. 10:21). The pastors are be­come brutish, boorish, boarish. They do not feed the people with true knowledge and un­derstanding, for they themselves are stupid. When the pastors are stupid, the people are dead. Like Old Honest in the story, we must confess our humiliating origin, and just as honestly leave it forever behind. The Chris­tian walk, being antithetical to all moral and spiritual stupidity, is more an escape and flight from it!