The Need for Intellectual RevivalRoy Hershberger Rediscovering the Art of Christ Centered Thought and Reason Historically, the group that leads a society in intellectual pursuits will have the most profound effect on that society. Popular culture will eventually be shaped and molded by those who do the thinking. By the apparent overwhelming disfunctionality of our present culture it is not difficult to realize that what has been traditionally known as “Christianity”, at least in its true life changing scriptural form, is having very little influence on the reasoning of the modern mind. The problem is not only to win souls but to save minds If you win the whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover you have not won the world. Indeed it may turn out that you have actually lost the world. Noll himself states: If evangelicals do not take seriously the larger world of the intellect, we say, in effect, that we want our minds to be shaped by the conventions of our modern universities and the assumptions of Madison Avenue, instead of by God and the servants of God. The unfortunate fact is that evangelicalism, as well as other modern forms of Christianity have been neglecting the mind for the past several generations, and this has lead to a weak, anemic faith. Where Christian faith is securely rooted, where it penetrates deeply into a culture to change individual lives and redirect institutions, where it continues for more than a generation as a living testimony to the grace of God - in these situations, we almost invariably find Christians ardently cultivating the intellect for the glory of God. With these facts firmly established no one should be able to effectively argue that intellectual pursuits are not important in the Christian life. However, many still do. An anti-intellectualism has so profoundly embedded itself into the Christian psyche that it may take many generations of paradigm shifts before there is a significant turn around.
The Results of Anti-intellectualismThe negative results of modern Christianity's “embedded anti-intellectualism” can not be overemphasized. I will use this article to take a brief look at four such results. Humanistic pragmatism, the separation of science and theology, the rise of (end times, this world is not my home) dispensationalism, and the confusion of Scriptural inspiration with a “simple”, “literal” interpretation of biblical text.
PragmatismOne of the most profound effects is the modern churches pragmatic approach to “doing church.” Again Noll effectively articulates the historical context: American evangelicals never doubted that Christianity was the truth. They never doubted that Christian principles should illuminate every part of life. What they did do, however, in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, was to make most questions of truth into questions of practicality. What message would be most effective? What do people want to hear? What can we say that will both convert the people and draw them to our particular church? The heavy pressure for results meant that very little time or energy was available to think about God and the shape of the human mind. Today we are still reaping the results of such thinking with most church groups developing business like techniques for running and organizing themsleves. Gone is the understanding that Christianity is about “being” and not about “doing”. If our actions spring forth from who we are, who we “Think” we are, then an emphasis on “doing” is misplaced. We are not a dead, cold institution called the “church” and thus we should not be about the business of “doing church”. We are the living breathing body of Christ and we should be about the Fathers business. But if we organize ourselves like an institution how do we expect to avoid becoming like one? We organize ourselves institutionally because we have failed to develop the mind of Christ, having more confidence in limited human reasoning and humanistic forms of government.
The Separation of Science and TheologyThe modern mind can not began to perceive the synthesis of modern science with theology. Yet the enlightened theology of the Reformation era was the very thing that gave birth to modern science. Unfortunately, a split emerged with the rise of naturalistic paradigms. Christians could have easily defeated the rise of such an obvious wedding of philosophy and science if they had been properly equipped intellectually. But alas, the church had no strategy to uphold the theological foundations of modern science. In order to preserve itself in a growing atmosphere of naturalism, theology, was forced to find it's own academic course and the strong and true Christian backbone of the great universities like Harvard and Princeton was replaced with the twisted deformity of secular humanism. By their all-or-nothing attitude, creationists [young earthers] make it harder, rather than easier, to isolate the critical issues at the intersection of religion and science. The roar of battle between “Creationists” and their “scientific” opponents drowns out more patient, more careful voices. Both those who want actually to look at nature as a way of understanding nature and those who want actually to look at themselves as a way of understanding how cosmological explanations are formed get shouted down. One great tragedy of modern creationism is that its noisy alarums have made it much more difficult to hear careful Christian thinkers - like many in the American Scientific Affiliation or like Phillip E. Johnson in his attacks on the philosophical pretensions of grand-scale Darwinistic theories - whose work could carry evangelicals beyond the sterile impasse of earlier decades. Charles Hodges, a professor at Princeton Seminary in the 1860s reflected a much more reasonable stance on the blending of science and theology. He states in his article The Bible in Science: Nature is as truly a revelation of God as the Bible; and we only interpret the Word of God by the Word of God when we interpret the Bible by science. As this principle is undeniably true, it is admitted and acted on by those who, through inattention to the meaning of terms, in words deny it. When the Bible speaks of the foundations, or the pillars of the earth, or of the solid heavens, or of the motion of the sun, do not you and every other sane man, interpret this language by the facts of science? For five thousand years the Church [and obviously pre-church theists] understood the Bible to teach that the earth stood still in space, and that the sun and stars revolved around it. Science has demonstrated that this is not true. Shall we go on to interpret the Bible so as to make it teach the falsehood that the sun moves around the earth, or shall we interpret it by science, and make the two harmonize? Of course, this rule works both ways. If the Bible cannot contradict science, neither can science contradict the Bible... There is a two-fold evil on this subject against which it would be well for Christians to guard. There are some good men who are much too ready to adopt the opinions and theories of scientific men, and to adopt forced and unnatural interpretations of the Bible, to bring it to accord with those opinions. There are others, who not only refuse to admit the opinions of men, but science itself, to have any voice in the interpretation of Scripture. Both of these errors should be avoided. In order to find such a balance modern Christianity must lift itself above it's current apathetic attitude toward the development of the mind. And such a balance is absolutely necessary if we hope to have a lasting and powerful impact on modern culture.
DispensationalismDispensationalism is a rather broad idea that can not be easily defined. I am not here to say that the theology that has developed from this line of thinking is necessarily all bad. However, there is one particular part of dispensationalism that I believe has had overall bad effects on the development of the Christian mind, and that is what I call the “end times, this world is not my home” mentality. Or, as I like to say for added effect: “This world is not my home so I let it go to hell.” The evangelical predilection, when faced with a world crises, to use the Bible as crystal ball instead of as a guide for sorting out the complex tangles of international morality was nowhere more evident than in responses to the Gulf War in early 1991. Neither through the publishing of books nor through focused consideration in periodicals did evangelicals engage in significant discussions on the morality of the war, the use of the United Nations in the wake of the collapse of Communism, the significance of oil for job creation or formation throughout the world, the history of Western efforts at intervention in the Middle East, or other topics fairly crying out for serious Christian analysis. Instead, evangelicals gobbled up more than half a million copies each of several self-assured, populist explanations of how the Gulf crises was fulfilling the details of obscure biblical prophecies. The systems of biblical interpretation promoted in those best-sellers were all variations on dispensational theology.
Biblical LiteralismThere are some “Christian” sects who believe that the King James version of the Bible is the most enlightened and inspired translation, and should be held on a higher plain than even the original Hebrew and Greek. Few evangelicals have gone to such extremes, but sadly many are not that far away. It is most pious to say and most prudent to take for granted that Holy Scripture can never lie, as long as its true meaning has been grasped; but I do no think one can deny that this is frequently recondite and very different form what appears to be the literal meaning of the words... I think that in disputes about natural phenomena one must begin not with the authority of scriptural passages but with sensory experience and necessary demonstrations. For the Holy Scripture and nature derive from the godhead, the former as the dictation of the Holy Spirit and the latter as the most obedient executrix of God's orders... God reveals Himself to us no less excellently in the effects of nature than in the sacred words of Scripture. [As quoted inThe Scandal of the Evangelical Mind p. 205] In Genesis Unbound John Sailhamer points out the naive evangelical perspective of Genesis 1 ...we shouldn't assume that current conservative or evangelical views of Genesis 1 automatically represent the “traditional” view. More often than not, current assumptions about this chapter are a far cry from traditional views. [Dr. John Sailhammer,Genesis Unbound, (Mulnomah Books a part of the Questar publishing family, 1996), p. 22.] We have strayed from the more traditional view because we have been looking at Genesis through our own preconceptions rather than trying to understand it through the eyes of the ancient Hebrew. Modern Evangelicals have made a habit of this in all of their attempts to interpret the Bible and have consequently confused and blurred the distinction between literalism and Godly inspiration. All content on gel |
