I am a practitioner. I like to apply my faith—live it out rather than talking it to death. My relationship with Jesus is practical and hands on. I’m about loving and relating to people. I like to use practical things to pray with, like seeing a car and using it as a reminder to pray for a friend who drives the same model or helping out a single-parent family.
As a teenager, I wasn’t one to question or need proof for my belief. I’d experienced God and his presence, and that was enough for me. I know that many people need more. They want the proofs and the facts to back up all they believe. But sometimes too much head knowledge can be rough on the practicality and the faith part of faith.
Too much of anything tends to be detrimental. When a person becomes extreme—either overly intellectual or extremely anti-intellectual—evangelical faith and evangelical witness suffer. We cannot share the love of Jesus if we are constantly battling over who is right and who is wrong or who is in and who is out. If our faith comes down to a list, then we’ve really missed the relational factor of the Savior.
If we overanalyze and overthink faith, we can come to believe that we can figure out life on our own. God becomes a nice idea rather than a unique Creator who longs to be in a relationship with his creation. And I’ve definitely met those who feel they have out-thought God and no longer need him, especially some teenagers of late. On the other hand, God has given us great minds to use and great intellects to achieve brilliant things. And we need scholars and teachers and those willing to dig deep in words and in the lab to discover new things.
Evangelicals have always been the practical ones. Until recently, evangelicals were the ones making sure the kingdom was about the people who aren’t here yet; helping people find Jesus and get to know him in a personal way. But lately the extreme side of evangelicals seem to have lost their minds. They’ve allowed fear to control their actions; like wanting to burn Qur'ans or allowing a television personality to become a spokesmodel for God.
The true threat to evangelicalism is fear. And instead of being about what we are for, many people are now focused on what they are afraid of. My Bible says, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-discipline.” Doesn’t yours? This fear of others has meant that we’ve lost a lot of compassion for the “least of these.” And doing unto others seems to have gotten lost too. And we are afraid of anyone or anything that is different from what we’ve experienced.
Fear makes us do stupid things. We overreact; we shut down; we choose to believe the worst rather than the best about a person or situation. We close ourselves off from people who are different and choose hate over love. Fear can also cause us to lose relationship both with others and with God.
Also, our love of TV and technology has increased fear. 24/7 media allows us to be overly aware of all that is going on all over the world all the time. And rather than using this knowledge as an inspiration to pray, the 24/7 nature of the news causes too many of us to panic. Hearing things over and over again causes confusion and anxiety. And entertainment media can also blow information out of proportion. Some people begin to believe that the world is out of control and that they have to do whatever it takes to defend themselves, their family, their faith. Many have become defenders, fighters, rather than peacemakers. And here may be where brains get checked at the door; thus, we forget that God is in control no matter what the news or the newspapers say. And we forget that God isn’t scared and really doesn’t need to be defended.
An additional negative about media is its ability to define people and things. Many of us have acquiesced to the media’s definition of who/what an evangelical is. Sadly, the word evangelical now is a label that isn’t positive. An evangelical is seen as someone who has the tendency to be “ultra-conservative, right-wing, tea party, afraid, and anti-everything.” Evangelicals too often are known for what they are against and who they are attacking, not for loving people or loving each other, or serving others or even serving one another. Why have we allowed the media to define and label, and why have we allowed the extremists to get all the press? Hum…
I’d rather see us embrace the evangelicalism that Menno Simons professed almost 500 years ago. He said, "True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant. It clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry, it comforts the sorrowful, it shelters the destitute, it serves those that harm it, it binds up that which is wounded, it has become all things to all people."
What would happen if I really live this out? Live out the Sermon on the Mount. Live out Simons’s quote. Not just love the Bible, not just believe the gospel, not just know and understand doctrine but actually love one another, actually love my enemies. And actually serve the least of these. And as I/we do, I/we will have less and less time to complain, less and less time to be fearful, and less time to attack others who believe differently. And the media will have a very different label for evangelicals.
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Those of us who teach in seminaries often hear the old joke in which someone says, “How are things going at the cemetery?” I’m sure most of the time it is good-natured ribbing, but I also think it is often an indication of what people really think about seminaries (and about critical thinking in general). As one person put it to me when he learned I was a seminary professor, “Seminary is the place pastors go to lose their faith.”
However, we need to come to grips with the idea that being a critical thinker and being spiritually healthy are not polar opposites. In fact, as Dallas Willard reminds us, “We need to understand that Jesus is a thinker, that this is not a dirty word but an essential work, and that his other attributes do not preclude thought, but only ensure that he is certainly the greatest thinker of the human race: ‘the most intelligent person who ever lived on earth.’ He constantly uses the power of logical insight to enable people to come to the truth about themselves and about God from the inside of their own heart and mind” (quoted in James Sire, Habits of the Mind, p. 181).
Willard is building on the idea of St. Anselm in the 11th century: fides quaerens intellectum. "Faith seeking understanding." Anselm was not saying, "I understand, therefore I believe" nor yet, "I believe, therefore I don't need to understand." Rather, what he wanted to convey is that “Because I believe, I hunger to understand.” Learning feeds faith, and faith drives for fuller knowledge.
The problem, of course, is that being a critical thinker means we will sometimes (often?) have to consider ideas that seem to call into question previously held beliefs. Things we were taught in Sunday school, learned from our parents, or even heard from the pulpit are suddenly brought into sharp contrast with new information we’ve received. The reality is that this can be an extremely painful experience. No one likes to be told that what they have always held to be true may in fact not be. However, know that it is nothing strange, unusual, different, or unique. We who teach see it all the time. It is not your heart drying up. It is God trying to wean you off milk and onto more solid food. It's God trying to get you away from Snickers and Diet Coke and onto vegetables, fruit, and fiber.
This is a moral and spiritual process that many people—especially students of theology—pass through and which Paul Ricouer has described in three stages: first naïvete; critical awareness; and second naïvete.
Stage one is naivete. We have a simple, direct faith. We tend to see world in black-and-white categories. How do you know what to believe? What is right? The "authorities" tell us. Knowledge is absolute and unchanging—it is possessed by the authorities. Anyone who disagrees with the authority must be wrong. No compromise or negotiation. People raised in such environments often grow up to be stage-1 thinkers—authoritarian, dogmatic. However, when authorities disagree with each other (no matter what the area), it is deeply unsettling. How do you know which one to believe/follow? As soon as we have to explain why we believe one over the other, we have moved from stage-1 thinking. Just as Adam and Eve couldn't return to the garden, back to blind and uncritical acceptance of authority once they had tasted the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so it is nearly impossible to return to stage 1 after realizing its oversimplifying inadequacies.
Stage two is critical awareness. That's when we start learning stuff. Greek, Hebrew, doctrine, philosophy, church history. We start realizing that not all devoted believers say things the way we do or think the way we do. We learn that much in the Bible isn't what we thought, that some important passages have major unresolved issues, many passages have two or three genuinely possible and mutually exclusive interpretations. The result is a pain like no other. We feel stripped of our faith, our certainty. And since that stripping happened through the acquisition of new knowledge, we blame all new knowledge. At this point, we feel we have lost our first love. In Christian education, we call this the liminal phase.
We can retreat back to the first naïvete and resist any further learning, focusing on techniques and skills of ministry (except, of course, the skills of exegesis and theological analysis). We can try to unscramble the egg and get it back into the shell. People responding this way deny that their response is one of fear.
We can become cynics, masters of Christian learning and language but detached from all of it; we see it all as metaphors, images, nothing as certain or normative. A lot of scholars end up here and assume you can't have a profound and certain faith if you “really know the score." Unlike the retreaters, people in this reaction talk about their disillusionment and disappointment. They make no bones about their cynicism and even come to enjoy shaking people up. But there is a third option.
Stage three is a movement forward. We learn enough to become, once again, humble and small in our own sight. We laugh both at our early, naïve egotism (Satan, the prince of darkness and father of lies, is personally after me, so I must be important!) and at our critical cynicism (I actually thought I was smart enough to overturn a consensus of Christian truth, teaching, and experience). We realize that both naïvete and cynicism are immature.
This stage is often called second naïvete. We recover our simplicity, our directness in faith, but we realize that our outlook, however true, is at best provisional, certainly partial, and that God has a life beyond us. We are fearless in learning but also fearless in our believing. Oddly enough, people who are authentically in the second naïvete typically decline to say so. They merely see themselves as pilgrims, knowing what they know, wanting to learn more, and wanting to please God; but they leave the ultimate issue in God's hands, confident that he is good on his word, even if we ourselves are not always sure of the best way to interpret his word. We don't shrink from faith, but we know that "we know in part.“
Charles Wesley, the great Methodist hymn writer and theologian, is famously said to have stated, “Unite the two so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety.” Wesley understood that to be a biblical Christian meant that one had to find ways to synthesize our critical thinking with our spirituality. As we learn to submit our intellect and our heart to God, only then we will discover what Jesus meant when he stated, “The truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
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Mark Noll, the story goes, was irritated with the direction of American evangelicalism’s premier institution, Wheaton College, and opined publicly in a book-length rant, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. It was a good read because there is an undeniable anti-intellectualism among many evangelicals.
I see it in an utterly baffling observation like this: “What’s all this about the Trinity? I don’t see the word Trinity in my Bible.” Or I see it in American Christians who, in what can only be called a cocksure manner, utter strong words on behalf of the Tea Party or Republicans or Democrats but, when asked about the simplest of explanations of an economic theory, have absolutely no idea how the economy works. For some it’s as simple as an ATM: put in numbers, out comes money. An economic theory is at work and is perhaps the single most ignored factor in political discourse.
But my ire is most provoked when I hear such banalities from the lips of pastors and preachers who, though they are seeking to appeal to the populist audiences to which they minister, are propagating the sort of superficiality that erodes our faith and deprives the intelligent parishioners—and there are more than most care to recognize—of growth and exploration and, sometimes, of a faith substantive enough to survive the withering impact of intellectual questions.
But we need to be honest: The intellectual life is not for all; not all care about how Trinity and atonement connect; not all care to think theoretically about the design of the state in ancient Israel and how it was impacted by the New Testament expansion into a global movement and then to consider how that might be best lived out in our world. Nor do all care to explore the subtle and brilliantly attractive connections of faith and science. And not all that many want to explore Charles Taylor’s theories of modernity and secularism. Let’s admit that perhaps the majority don’t care about such things. There’s no more reason to make everyone into intellectuals than to make all of us baristas.
But some people are intellectuals, and it is the calling of the Jesus Creed to love God “with all our minds.” This means the church—every church so far as it is able—must muster resources and make possible the exploration of the mind of God, the mind of Christ, and the mind of the church when it comes to intellectual questions.
Here are a few intellectual questions of our day, and a church that doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of the questions and the integrity required to tackle them seriously is irresponsible and in need of repentance.
I think of the massive shift occurring among our young adults about how to think Christianly while embracing some form of evolution. Most of my students don’t even question evolution but have profound questions about how to think through theological topics and what the Bible says in light of their embrace of evolution.
I think of the serious thinking being done today on the relationship of the state and the church. There is an instinct for many simply to align with a political party, and often enough the instinct is barely informed. But there are many today who want to ponder how to think Christianly about state, about economy, and about the kingdom of God in our world—and how the kingdom impacts the former. James Davison Hunter’s recent book, How to Change the World, is one sophisticated probing, and many crave conversation about these topics—and often from the angle of a particular expertise: economists have things to say, business folks have perspective… I could go on.
And I think of historians who want to know what Jesus was like in his Jewish world and won’t stand for banal analogies; they want to know who wrote Isaiah and are unconvinced it is a simple one-guy-did-it-all approach, and they want to work that into their doctrine of Scripture.
And I think of many who are deeply aware of how context and history and heritage shape what we believe, and they are aware that the Reformation’s questions and answers, while profound and valuable, are not ours—and they have new questions that transcend those questions and those answers, and pastors who want to regurgitate Reformation theology and pretend that is enough simply don’t get the job done for them.
And I think those who are studying contemporary culture recognize it is post-Christian and know that old methods don’t connect well. They want to explore a missiology for a new day.
So what can we do? Let me make three suggestions:
First, pastors need to recognize, legitimate, and support the value of the intellectual life. This means, at times, exploring some intellectual themes in sermons and classes. Some in churches like to hear a reference to Aristophanes and Shakespeare and even Richard Rorty.
Second, churches need to provide a safe place for intellectuals in a church community to gather with others, think about serious topics, and ponder away at issues that may not find resolution or that may—and here’s the reality—lead to answers that aren’t as safe as many pastors might prefer. Truth will win, so let’s work at it and not be afraid.
Third, intellectuals in churches need to demand that their pastor respect the intellectual life and that their churches provide a forum for intellectual endeavors. There is no reason why churches can’t invite Francis Collins to speak or ask a professional archaeologist to speak about recent discoveries. Again, the fields are ripe for harvest. Who will see the fields?
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