I’m becoming more and more uncomfortable with the idea of “false teaching.”
It’s just a mostly meaningless term that we slap on anything we disagree with, or haven’t been studious enough to actually look into for ourselves. When we use it, we defile, in both our own eyes, and those who respect our opinion, ideas and thoughts that may be true, but that we were either too lazy, complacent, or fearful to actually look into. The thing is, though, if you take the time to familiarize yourself with an idea, even if you continue to disagree with it, you at least come away with a respect for it when you understand how it works, where it came from, and how it emerged. Like a person whose story you take the time to learn, ideas can be respected, even while being fully rejected. Of course, this does not work across the board, and sometimes the history of an idea only adds to our disdain for it, but most things Christians carelessly slap the label “false teaching” on, do not fall into that category.
When you place a label like that on an idea that is central to a person’s identity, you not only defile the idea itself, but the person, in your mind, and open the door for you finding justification for mistreating and disrespecting that person. And that is never ok.
Jeff Turner