hough I always feel somewhat uncomfortable when introduced as a speaker, this introduction (at a camp meeting years ago) should be emblazoned in bronze.

“Now, we have Clifford Goldstein here,” the host emoted into the mike, “and he’s a 100 percent full-blooded Jew!” Though he meant well, I felt like a cow at an auction (“We have a 100 percent full-blooded Holstein here”). Perhaps, after reaching the podium, I should have let them inspect my teeth.

Nevertheless, he was right: I’m a 100 percent full-blooded Jew. At least in genetic descent and religious roots. However, in my head I’m Greek. I love the Greek philosophers’ attempt to discover truth through reason, empiricism, and logical speculation. Never mind that they got much of it wrong; it was the way that they tried to pry truth from the stars, from the rocks, and from raw, unencumbered logic that I find fascinating.

However, a recent head-on collision with a thought has radically realigned my epistemological prejudices. Think about it: Of all the truths that we can ever know, what’s the most important? Of course, that Jesus Christ at the cross bore the penalty of all our sins so that we never have to bear them ourselves, and that through faith in Him we can stand perfect before God in judgment because we are clothed in His righteousness (not our own), the only means of attaining eternal life. In contrast to this truth, questions about whether philosophers should be kings, or whether Achilles can catch up to the tortoise, or whether you can step in the same river twice become banal and trite.

Yet (and here’s the punch line) how did I learn this most important truth about Christ and the cross? Through science? Logic? Empirical analysis? Mathematics? No way! I know it only because I have been told it, spoon-fed it through revelatory drips and dribbles from God’s Word.

Science, logic, and math might lead to profound truths about everything from the Excluded Middle to the elusive nature of light, but none of these disciplines—no matter how exhaustively pursued—terminates at the cross. At God, or gods? Perhaps. At a Creator, or even an intelligent Designer? Maybe. But to Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, who sacrificed Himself for the sins of the world? Never. You might as well use a Geiger counter to interpret dreams.

Now, if science, empiricism, reason, in and of themselves, can never teach me the most important thing that I need to know, salvation in Jesus Christ, why should I allow things such as science, logic, and empiricism to define my understanding of that salvation? Because these disciplines, even at their best, could never lead me to Jesus, it makes no sense to set them up as the final judge and arbiter of what I believe about Him (Why use pigeon feathers to judge stealth bomber wings?). If none of these disciplines could ever get us to the cross, what makes them the supreme arbiter of what we believe once we’re there?

No one is denying the utility of these disciplines; it’s the role that they’ve assumed in the area of faith that I question. For too many people, even professed Christians, the Word of God—rather than being the standard by which they judge and critique the conclusions of science, or reason, or empiricism—is, instead, judged and critiqued by these disciplines. What jives with science, logic, empiricism (or at least whatever the latest versions happen to be), that’s what we keep; what clashes, that’s what we dismiss.

“In vain do they worship me,” said Jesus, “teaching as doctrines the precepts of men. You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men” (Mark 7:7, RSV). Science, logic, and empiricism are nothing but modern renditions of the precepts and traditions of humanity, now garbed in the robes of modernity. And though precepts and traditions can be fine—even true—they’re not the Word of God, and they certainly don’t provide the supreme standard for judging it.

No question, truth has come out of Athens. But Truth itself came from Jerusalem, Truth too important to be left for us to try to figure out on our own. That’s why it had to be told us. Do we listen, or do we filter it through the very tools that have proved inadequate to teach us that Truth in the first place?

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Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.