Stories about expertise cut both ways. Real expertise is a gift: years of practice that let a person see and do what others cannot. But the reputation of expertise can also be a trap, for the experts who start believing their own authority and for the rest of us who stop thinking whenever someone sounds impressive. "The simple believe anything, but the prudent give thought to their steps" (Proverbs 14:15).
Below are three sermon illustrations about expertise, each retold in full in our own words: a four-year-old who refused a toy violin because he wanted the real thing, a forger who fooled the greatest art expert of his day, and an actor who convinced a room of professionals that nonsense was brilliant. Each one ends with a takeaway for preaching or reflection.
Stories in this post:
- "I Want Nothing to Do With It": Menuhin's Toy Violin
- The Forger Who Fooled the Experts
- The Dr Fox Hypothesis: When Nonsense Sounds Expert
"I Want Nothing to Do With It": Menuhin's Toy Violin
Yehudi Menuhin was one of the great violinists and conductors of the twentieth century, a musician who held audiences spellbound all over the world. Like many great musicians, his gift showed itself early. Born in New York in 1916 and raised in San Francisco, he made his formal debut in the San Francisco Bay Area at the age of seven (Wikipedia), and at eleven he played Beethoven's Violin Concerto at Carnegie Hall in New York to a sensational reception. In his memoir Unfinished Journey (1977), Menuhin tells how his lifelong love affair with the violin began.
From the time he was about three years old, his parents often took him to concerts of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, where the concertmaster and leading violinist was Louis Persinger. Whenever Persinger played a solo passage, little Yehudi, sitting with his parents up in the gallery, was enchanted. "During one such performance," Menuhin wrote, "I asked my parents if I might have a violin for my fourth birthday and Louis Persinger to teach me to play it."
His wish seemed to be granted. A family friend gave the little boy a violin. But it was a toy, made of metal, with metal strings.
Yehudi was only four. He could hardly have had the arms or fingers to do justice to a full-sized instrument. But he was furious. "I burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing to do with it." Looking back many years later, Menuhin said he understood why. He wanted nothing less than the real thing, because he knew instinctively "that to play was to be."
Within a short time he did get a real violin, and lessons. Persinger himself later became his teacher, and the rest is musical history.
Takeaway: Long before he had the skill, Menuhin had the hunger, and the hunger refused to settle for an imitation. Expertise usually starts there: with a love so real that toys and shortcuts feel like an insult. "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord" (Colossians 3:23). Where in your life are you settling for a toy version of something God made you to do for real? If you want to know how real mastery is built, Sopranu's review of Peak is a good next read.
Source: Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, quoting Yehudi Menuhin, Unfinished Journey.
The Forger Who Fooled the Experts
It may be the greatest hoax in art history, and at its centre is a question about experts. Han van Meegeren was a Dutch painter working before the Second World War. The critics of his day savaged his exhibitions. One famously described him as a gifted technician who had made "a sort of composite facsimile of the Renaissance school," a man with "every virtue except originality."
Stung by their verdict, van Meegeren set out to beat the experts at their own game. He painted a large religious picture in the style of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, titled it The Supper at Emmaus, and arranged for it to reach Abraham Bredius, the most respected Vermeer authority of his generation.
Bredius was completely taken in. In 1937 he announced his discovery in The Burlington Magazine: "It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master." He called it "the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft" (Wikipedia). With the great expert's blessing, the painting was bought for a fortune and given to the Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam, where it hung in pride of place in a celebrated exhibition of four centuries of European masterpieces.
Van Meegeren had meant to unmask the hoax at that moment and humiliate the critics. Instead, greed took over. He kept quiet and produced more fake Vermeers, earning millions. During the Nazi occupation he even sold one of them, Christ with the Adulteress, to Hermann Göring.
After the war, Allied investigators tracing art acquired by the Nazis followed the trail back to van Meegeren. They wanted to know where he had obtained a Vermeer to sell to the enemy. In May 1945 he was arrested and accused of collaboration, a charge that could carry the death penalty for selling a national treasure to the Nazis.
In prison, van Meegeren confessed that he had painted the "Vermeers" himself. Now came the strangest twist of all. Nobody believed him. The experts who had authenticated the paintings insisted they were genuine. Their reputations depended on it. The only way van Meegeren could prove his innocence was to forge again, in front of witnesses. Over the following months he painted a new "Vermeer," Jesus Among the Doctors, under supervision. He was, quite literally, painting for his life.
In the end the collaboration charge was dropped, and the man who had made a fool of Göring became something of a national hero. In November 1947 he was convicted only of forgery and fraud and sentenced to a year in prison, but he died of a heart attack on 30 December 1947 before serving it.
Takeaway: Bredius was a genuine expert, yet his expertise made him see what he longed to see: a lost Vermeer that would crown his career. Later, other experts defended the fakes because admitting the truth would cost them. Expertise is a gift, but it is never a substitute for humility. "Do not be wise in your own eyes" (Proverbs 3:7). Where might your own knowledge be keeping you from seeing something you would rather not see?
Source: "The forger who fooled the world," The Telegraph, 5 August 2006, with details from the record of van Meegeren's 1947 trial.
The Dr Fox Hypothesis: When Nonsense Sounds Expert
In 1970 three researchers at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, Donald Naftulin, John Ware and Frank Donnelly, ran a now-famous experiment (Wikipedia). They hired a professional actor, Michael Fox, gave him the impressive name "Dr Myron L. Fox," and introduced him to an audience of psychiatrists, psychologists and other educated professionals as an authority on the application of mathematics to human behaviour.
His lecture was titled "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education." In fact the talk had been deliberately built to mean nothing. The actor had been coached to deliver what the researchers called double talk: material patched together from a popular science article on game theory, full of made-up words, non sequiturs and contradictory statements, mixed with jokes and pointless references to unrelated subjects. He delivered it all with warmth, energy and great confidence.
Afterwards the audience filled in an anonymous questionnaire. The professionals rated the lecture highly. They found it clear and stimulating, and nobody spotted that it was nonsense. The study was published in the Journal of Medical Education in 1973 under the telling title "The Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational Seduction."
Some years later J. Scott Armstrong, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, took the idea further. In a series of tests with both written and spoken communication, he found that people tend to be impressed by "experts" from their own field even when what those experts say is unintelligible. He named this the "Dr Fox hypothesis," and in a 1980 paper he even found that academic researchers were rated as more competent when their writing was harder to understand.
Takeaway: A confident voice, a good title and a few big words were enough to fool a room of trained professionals. Churches are not immune: it is possible to admire a preacher's delivery while learning nothing true at all. The Bereans were praised because they "examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true" (Acts 17:11). When did you last check what an impressive speaker actually said, rather than how well they said it?
Source: Leadership magazine, Spring 1983; Armstrong's research originally appeared in Interfaces, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1980), and was reported in Psychology Today. Study details from Naftulin, Ware and Donnelly, Journal of Medical Education (1973).
Final thoughts
A child who wanted the real violin, an expert who saw a masterpiece where there was only a fake, and an actor who made nonsense sound brilliant. These stories about expertise show real skill and false authority side by side. True expertise grows out of love and long practice. False expertise grows out of pride, and it thrives wherever the rest of us stop asking questions.
God gives people real gifts, and it is right to honour those who have spent years developing them. But no expert, in any field, is beyond the need for humility, and no listener is excused from thinking for themselves. Which of these three stories challenges you most?
More stories you may like:
- Stories About Wisdom, Foolishness and Growth
- Stories About Pride, Humility and Judging Others
- Stories About Vocation, Calling and Integrity
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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