By Stephen James, Op-ed contributor
Take mindfulness from Buddhism, virtue from Stoicism, meaning from Christianity, identity from psychology, morality from personal experience and whatever science establishes in the lab. Don’t let any single tradition dominate — real wisdom, on this account, comes from assembling the best pieces from everywhere.
You’ve probably absorbed some version of this, even if nobody ever stated it quite so plainly. It sounds open-minded. It sounds humble. And it isn’t obviously wrong — we really do encounter true observations in disciplines that have nothing to do with Christian faith.
But when insights from competing religious and philosophical systems get combined into a new framework for determining truth, something more than open-mindedness is taking place. Christianity has historically called this problem syncretism: blending incompatible beliefs into a new religious synthesis. The method that gets us there — selecting a piece here, a piece there, from whatever tradition seems to have gotten something right — is eclecticism. The method feels harmless enough on its own. It’s what it quietly produces, once Christ is one input blended among several, that Christians have long recognized as a real danger.
That apparently humble approach conceals a massive assumption: that no single divine revelation possesses authority over the whole, so ultimate truth must be assembled from fragments scattered across competing systems. Once that premise is granted, the method is already decided — we’re locked into a permanent scavenger hunt for pieces.
What if the fullness was never actually scattered in the first place?
Another problem hides inside the method, though, and it’s worth exposing before we even get to that question. Even if truth really were scattered among competing traditions, someone would still have to decide which pieces belong in the final picture.
Who’s really deciding?
Here’s the question the “take a piece from everywhere” approach never answers: Who chooses the pieces? Nobody’s tradition is supposed to dominate — that’s the whole appeal. But someone still decides which Buddhist insight survives, which psychological theory gets kept, which Christian doctrine makes the cut and which quietly doesn’t.
Not the traditions. The individual assembling them.
The problem isn’t that the individual exercises judgment — we cannot think without doing that. The problem is that no authority is permitted to stand above that judgment and correct it.
The very model built to avoid privileging any single authority ends up crowning one anyway: the autonomous self — the individual functioning as his own final authority — sitting in judgment over every source of wisdom it consults, Christ included. What looks like humility toward all traditions turns out to be total authority for one judge, and that judge is whoever is doing the choosing.
Colossians answers this two ways — not just by telling us truth isn’t scattered, but by telling us who has the standing to judge it in the first place.
Not a fragment, but the fullness
The church at Colossae faced teachings that promised something beyond simple sufficiency in Christ — human tradition, dietary regulations, ascetic practices and a fascination with angels and mystical visions (2:8, 16, 18, 20–23). The ingredients have changed since then, but the temptation is recognizable: Christ treated as though He must be supplemented by something outside Himself. Paul’s response is striking. Rather than dismantling each competing claim one by one, he begins with who Christ is.
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible … All things were created through Him and for Him … and in Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:15–17).
Paul doesn’t frame Christ as a profound teacher offering one piece to a larger puzzle. Christ is the creator, the sustainer and the end for which reality exists — standing in a categorically different relationship to truth than any worldly system could claim. That means Christ cannot coherently be treated as one authority inside a reality that He Himself created and sustains. The systems by which we evaluate Him operate within His creation, not outside it.
Paul makes this explicit a few verses later: “It pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell” (1:19). Not a partial fullness, balanced by insights gathered elsewhere. “All the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (2:9).
If that’s who Christ is, no other system can function as a coordinate authority supplying some ultimate truth necessary to complete what God has disclosed and accomplished in Him.
The warning underneath the wisdom
Paul turns this high view of Christ into an urgent warning: “Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ” (2:8).
That’s not a call to stop thinking. Scripture never asks believers to switch their minds off. Notice how carefully Paul qualifies the danger: philosophy marked by empty deceit, rooted in human tradition and “the basic principles of the world,” and — this is the real test — “not according to Christ.” The problem was never that other ideas exist. The problem arises when they function as independent authorities against which Christ must be checked, rather than claims that must themselves answer to Him.
Look at how tightly Paul builds toward that warning. He prays that believers would know Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (2:2–3) — the treasure. Then: “Lest anyone should deceive you with persuasive words” (2:4) — the threat. Then the standard: measured “according to Christ” (2:8). Christ isn’t one ingredient weighed by some outside measure. He’s the standard everything else gets weighed by — the answer to the question this article opened with. The authority isn’t the self, curating pieces by its own judgment. It’s Christ, and everything else — self included — is accountable to Him.
What this doesn’t mean
None of this asks Christians to deny true observations made in science, philosophy, psychology or any discipline. We’re free to learn from careful thinkers who don’t share our convictions.
What it asks is that whatever’s genuinely true doesn’t get treated as completing an incomplete Christ. It remains accountable to Him — evaluated “according to Christ” (2:8), not the other way around.
Complete, not still assembling
Paul returns to the foundation of his argument: “In Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him” (2:9–10). Not partially equipped, waiting on other traditions to round out the picture. Complete.
That’s not a license for arrogance. Earlier in the same argument, Paul instructs believers to keep walking in Christ, “rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith” (2:6–7) — an ongoing posture, not a finished task. But it does mean the search for truth was never a scavenger hunt for what Christ lacks. The fullness of deity was never scattered among competing systems. It dwells, bodily, in Him.
So, the real question isn’t whether we can learn something from people who see the world differently. Of course we can. Eclecticism, as a method of selecting insights, isn’t the deepest problem — syncretism, the blending of Christ into a synthesis where He answers to something outside Himself, is. Neither escapes the same authority question: Who decides which pieces are true? Are we bringing what we learn before Christ — or quietly placing Christ before ourselves, keeping what we approve of and discarding the rest?
An “open-minded” worldview still needs someone to choose the pieces. Colossians asks whether that authority belongs to us — or to the one through whom and for whom all things were made.
Stephen Phillip James is Senior Pastor of Seven Springs Baptist Church in Seven Springs, North Carolina, and a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Apologetics at Liberty University’s Rawlings School of Divinity. He earned his Master of Divinity in Christian Apologetics from Liberty University in 2023. His writing focuses on biblical apologetics, Christian worldview, hermeneutics, and the relationship between divine revelation and contemporary challenges to Christian faith. As both a pastor and student of apologetics, he seeks to make substantive biblical and theological arguments accessible to Christians engaging the questions and competing truth claims of contemporary culture.