Shadows of the Heart: The Theological Anatomy of Self-Deception

J. Neil Daniels

Introduction

To speak of self-deception is to wander into a paradox. How can one deceive oneself while knowing, at some level, what is true? It is an old puzzle. Socrates already thought self-deception to be the most dangerous of errors, worse even than being deceived by another. Benjamin Franklin put it with his usual sting: “Who has deceived thee so often as thyself?”¹ It is a theme that has tugged at the edges of philosophy and theology for millennia, but in recent decades it has been curiously neglected in theological scholarship. Yet, as Joseph Pak has argued in a thoughtful essay, it belongs to the heart of Christian reflection on sin, salvation, and the human condition.²

The following essay explores the theological anatomy of self-deception. Drawing on Augustine, Pascal, Jonathan Edwards, and other witnesses, we will consider its connection with sin, its role in producing false assurance of salvation, its root in disordered love, and the remedies—sometimes severe—that God employs to awaken his people from its grip. Along the way, I will weave in anecdotes, historical side-notes, and textual oddities that illuminate the theme in unexpected ways.

Self-Deception and Sin

Self-deception, in the ordinary philosophical register, is often described as irrational belief against the evidence. But theology presses deeper: it is a willful refusal of truth because of sin. Augustine famously described the will as divided, pulled between love of God and love of self, such that sin clouds perception and corrupts judgment.³ The sinner lies to himself not merely out of ignorance but from a desperate desire to maintain the fiction that he is good, righteous, or at least “not so bad.”

Pascal sharpened this point with unusual clarity. In the Pensées, he remarks that human beings care about truth just enough to pretend to love it, even as they continually turn from it.⁴ This duplicity means that sin and self-deception are isomorphic realities: as sin turns from God, so self-deception turns from truth. In fact, William Wood argues that by fabricating a false self and projecting it into the world, the self-deceiver parodies God’s own creative act, an almost blasphemous mimicry.⁵

Scripture speaks in similar terms. Jeremiah 17:9 declares the heart “deceitful above all things, and desperately sick.” John warns believers that if they claim to be without sin, “we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). Paul bluntly confesses that sin “deceived me, and through it killed me” (Rom 7:11). The self-deceived sinner not only fails to see rightly but positively resists truth, deliberately constructing a false narrative of his moral state. The image is less of an innocent mistake and more of a compulsive liar who happens also to be his own victim.

There is a curious irony here. Even philosophers outside Christian tradition saw self-deception as avoidance of self-awareness. Sartre called it mauvaise foi—bad faith—by which a person flees from the burden of freedom.⁶ Christian theology agrees but insists that the flight is not merely from oneself but from God.

False Assurance and the Danger of Religion

If sin and self-deception are intertwined, their union produces a particularly lethal offspring: false assurance of salvation. Jesus warned of those who would say, “Lord, Lord,” and yet hear the terrible words, “I never knew you” (Matt 7:21–23). Hypocrisy in Matthew’s Gospel is not simply pretending for the sake of others but being deceived about one’s own standing before God. The Pharisees were not merely actors; they were blind men convinced they could see.

Jonathan Edwards, during the awakenings of the eighteenth century, grew deeply anxious about such hypocrisy. His Religious Affections is, in many ways, an extended treatise on how to distinguish true grace from its counterfeits. He worried that many were content with a vivid experience in the past, mistaking emotional intensity for regeneration. “Hypocrites,” he warned, “have false assurance because they rely on religious experience in the past as their conversion moment and they stop seeking God.”⁷ In short, they convince themselves that a fleeting enthusiasm proves eternal salvation.

Calvin had already observed that “we are all naturally prone to hypocrisy,” satisfied with “any empty semblance of righteousness” rather than righteousness itself.⁸ This tendency makes religion, paradoxically, one of the most effective masks for unbelief. A man who has never prayed may yet know he is an unbeliever; but the man who prays daily while deceiving himself may be unreachable, insulated by his own false confidence.

The Epistle of James is especially relentless on this point. “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (Jas 1:22). A religion that does not bridle the tongue, care for the poor, or produce works of mercy is worthless. The danger is not unbelief per se, but belief without obedience, a hollow faith more dangerous because it looks, from the outside, so pious.

The Root: Disordered Love

What causes self-deception at its deepest level? Augustine would say pride; Pascal would say disordered love. In truth, these two names describe one reality.

Pascal believed that our selves are formed in loving interaction with the world, but because our capacity to love is corrupted, the very self we construct is false.⁹ We are storytellers of our own identities, but our stories are stitched together from fragments of vanity and desire. In this sense, the “self” is already a fiction, an imaginary construct that we reinforce through the imagined judgments of others. Self-deception, then, is not an occasional lapse but the very air we breathe.

Joseph Butler, the eighteenth-century Anglican bishop, put it more soberly: self-deception arises from “partiality to ourselves.”¹⁰ We judge our own actions with a leniency we would never extend to others. If we achieve success, we credit our virtue; if we fail, we blame circumstance. This is the moral blindness of self-love.

It is striking that Paul, when addressing the Galatians, links self-deception explicitly to pride: “If anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself” (Gal 6:3). Pride and self-deception are symbiotic. Pride demands a flattering self-image; self-deception obliges by manufacturing one. The result is a distorted vision of reality that justifies sin, rationalizes cruelty, and silences conscience.

Remedies: Trials, Truth, and Pain

If the disease is deep, the cure must be radical. Scripture and the great theologians point to several remedies—though all are costly.

First, there must be the acknowledgment that self-deception is universal. Socrates’ “examined life” remains necessary, though theology insists the examination must be carried out before the face of God. The Word of God serves as the mirror that exposes our distorted self-images (Jas 1:23–25). Without such exposure, the false self thrives.

Second, there must be willingness to avow what was once disavowed. Herbert Fingarette argued that the essence of self-deception is refusal to own responsibility; the way out is precisely to confess it.¹¹ Augustine and Edwards would agree: confession is the gateway to truth, not merely psychological honesty but a laying bare before God.

Yet God rarely leaves this process to our initiative. Often, he employs trials—sometimes bitter, always disruptive—to shatter our illusions. Edwards called temptations and trials the “experiment of the sincerity of professors,” a sort of divine testing that either confirms or exposes faith.¹² C. S. Lewis went further, famously describing pain as God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”¹³

Pascal, ever the diagnostician of the human heart, noted that people seek diversion—whether in gambling, hunting, or in our own age, endless scrolling on glowing screens—to avoid confronting their mortality and sin.¹⁴ But trials cut through such diversion. They compel attention to what we would rather evade. They leave us with the stark choice between love of God and love of self.

History offers sobering illustrations. The complicity of many Christians in the face of Nazi atrocities did not begin with overt hatred but with the quieter self-deception that faith could be maintained without sacrifice. As David Burrell and Stanley Hauerwas observed, Auschwitz was, in part, the harvest of Christian self-deception—the belief that one could bear the symbols of faith while denying its cost.¹⁵

Conclusion

Self-deception, then, is no mere quirk of psychology. It is, in the words of Pascal, the most dangerous enemy of the moral life—not ignorance, not weakness, but the inward lie by which we persuade ourselves that evil is good, or at least that it is not so bad. It is the refusal to see as God sees, rooted in disordered love and pride.

But God, in mercy, does not leave his children to their illusions. Through Scripture, through conscience, through suffering and trials, he dismantles our false selves and recalls us to truth. Augustine was right: moral virtue is necessary for intellectual clarity, and sin clouds both. Edwards was right: only a persevering life of obedience, tested by trial, can provide true assurance. And Pascal was right: diversion is our perennial temptation, but only love of God can order our loves aright and set us free.

The examined life, then, is not a luxury but a necessity. To neglect it is to risk perishing in our illusions. To embrace it, however painful, is to walk in the light of truth... the light that exposes, yes, but also heals. And perhaps that is the final paradox: that in admitting our self-deception, we finally come to know ourselves truly, because we know ourselves in the presence of God.

Endnotes

Benjamin Franklin, quoted in Greg Bahnsen, “The Crucial Concept of Self-Deception in Presuppositional Apologetics,” WTJ 57 (1995): 10.
Joseph Pak, “Self-Deception in Theology,” Themelios 43.3 (2018): 405–16.
Augustine, Confessions, VIII.5.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (Christian Classics Ethereal Library), §210.
William D. Wood, Blaise Pascal on Duplicity, Sin and the Fall: The Secret Instinct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 293.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943), esp. Part I, ch. 2.
Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections (Carlisle: Banner of Truth, 1997), 306.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.i.2, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 38.
William Wood, Searching for the Secret Instinct: Blaise Pascal and the Philosophical Analysis of Self-Deception (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007), 254–55.
Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (Cambridge: Hilliard and Brown, 1827), Sermon X.
Herbert Fingarette, Self-Deception (London: Routledge, 1969), 146.
Edwards, Religious Affections, 352.
C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 91.
Pascal, Pensées, §§136–139.
David Burrell and Stanley Hauerwas, “Self-Deception and Autobiography: Theological and Ethical Reflections on Speer’s Inside the Third Reich,” JRE 2 (1974): 100.