I find, even when I have plenty of free time, I am much better at starting articles than finishing them. There’s probably some profound insight I can gain into myself from this, but I don’t really care to think that deeply about it.
Since I’m too distracted (or lazy) to finish any of my own articles, I’m going to post a few quotes and links.
From The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark A. Noll
[It] is evident that in almost every case where theology has provided guidance for broader intellectual work, that theology has featured insights, not from dispensationalism or other twentieth-century evangelical innovations, but from classical traditions like Anglicanism, Calvinism, Roman Catholicism, Anabaptism, Lutheranism, or even Eastern Orthodoxy.
Quoting Os Guinness:
Evangelicals have been deeply sinful in being anti-intellectual ever since the 1820s and 1830s. For the longest time we didn’t pay the cultural price for that because we had the numbers, the social zeal, and the spiritual passion for the gospel. But today we are beginning to pay the cultural price. And you can see that most evangelicals simply don’t think. For example, there has been no serious evangelical public philosophy in this century…. It has always been a sin not to love the Lord our God with our minds as well as our hearts and souls…. We have excused this with a degree of pietism and pretend that this is something other than what it is – that is, sin…. Evangelicals need to repent of their refusal to think Christianly and to develop the mind of Christ.
Quoting Charles Malik:
The greatest danger besetting American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind as to its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough…. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is abdicated and vacated to the enemy. Who among the evangelicals can stand up to the great secular or naturalistic or atheistic scholars on their own terms of scholarship and research? Who among the evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics?
[Editor aside: only two Evangelicals come to mind: philosopher Alvin Plantinga and scientist Kurt Wise]
From Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis:
I said not long before that work and weakness are comforters. But sweat is the kindest creature of the three – far better than philosophy, as a cure for ill thoughts.
It burned me from within. It quickened; I was with book, as a women is with child.
