Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Living an intellectual life sometimes seems problematic for the Evangelical believer. Our own loyalty to the truth of Scripture can seem to be a stumbling block. In more than one place the Bible tells us that it pleased God to reveal Himself to the simple rather than the wise, at least the “worldly wise”. The common people flocked to Jesus while many of the learned men of Israel plotted His downfall. It is evident that none of the 12 was scholars.
Earlier, in the Old Testament, we are introduced to Solomon, the wisest man ever to walk the earth up until that time. Yet, with all his wisdom he still ends up so badly compromised by indulgence in the pagan religions of his foreign wives that we are left to wonder about his eternal destiny.
A notable exception to this lack of Godly thinkers is the Apostle Paul. The writer of the lion’s share of the New Testament was a Pharisee and the Pharisees were an intellectually sharp, if spiritually corrupt, group. It is safe to say that Paul’s encounter with the Greek philosophers on Mars Hill was a meeting of equals. Apparently Paul was comfortable dealing with the “intelligentsia” on their own level.
In the history of some conservative Christian movements in America we have seen, at times, an almost visceral dislike for any approach to the faith that seems to involve the upper reaches of the human intellect. Some have traced this phenomenon back to the Scopes “Monkey Trial” that took place early in the last century. The Fundamentalist defenders of Creationism were soundly thrashed from a rhetorical perspective during that trial, at least partially because they apparently could not argue on the same level with the more erudite defenders of Darwinism. In the aftermath the Fundamentalists had two paths to choose between. They could educate themselves in an effort to become as intellectually vigorous as their opponents, or they could reject the life of the mind altogether and paint intellectualism as a weapon of the proud and ungodly. They chose the latter and the retreat of Bible-believing Christians from the intellectual marketplace began, a retreat which still influences us today. One of its legacies is the idea in popular culture that biblical Christians “check their brains at the church door”.
The problem here is that God gave some of His children above average minds. Unless we are to believe that He somehow “cursed” them when He did that we must grapple with the fact that being a “Cerebral Christian” is not an oxymoron. We must consider the possibility that some insights into the nature of God can only be revealed to those who have minds God designed to receive those insights. This is not to say that Christians who are less endowed intellectually are somehow inferior. Such individuals are given their own insights, ones that perhaps elude their “smarter” brothers and sisters. Both the learned and the unlearned have their own unique contributions to bring to the Church as a whole.
In recent years some Evangelicals have promoted an effort to bring the academic standards of Christian colleges up to the level of secular institutions. There has been a conscious effort to, among other things, re-inject a respect for the mind into our churches. The hope is that Evangelical scholars can then be produced who will be able to defend orthodoxy with as much intellectual “firepower” as those in the liberal church and the secular world bring to bear against it. There have already been some formidable minds engaged in this battle, men like Ravi Zacharias, R.C. Sproul and the late Chuck Colson. In each case we have seen individuals who employ the intellectual gifts God gave them on the front line of battle in the intellectual world.
This ongoing effort signals the end of the Scopes-inspired rejection of the intellect that unfortunately continues in some Bible-believing churches. From Augustine to C.S. Lewis thinking Christians have contributed sublime insights into the truth and reality of God, helping countless believers to come into deeper fellowship with the Divine. For these men the mind’s contemplation of God was as vital to sanctification as that of the heart. There are many Evangelicals today who recognize this truth and are ready to use their minds to the full in glorifying the Lord. They know it is time for our tradition to add its own insights to the living history of Christian thought.