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.
so yeah.. um.. I don’t think it’s only Evangelicals who have a thinking problem today (although they should be the last ones to have that). It’s really a broader problem in a society that wishes to be fed everything in non-thinking bites. Nearly all of america is subsiting on intellectual baby food, and if they run accross a mental steak, they refuse to accept it, and turn back to a video game. It’s too complicates, it’s too much trouble to actually consider the meaning of something and measure its truthfullness.
Comment by Mordecai — May 16, 2006 @ 7:45 am |
Good quotes. I don’t agree that dispensationalism should be abandonced because some people have abused it, but nevertheless Noll really hit the nail on the head.
I’m glad you like Alvin Plantinga. I’m not a reformed epistemologist, but nevertheless he is a brilliant philosopher and definitely my favorite of the past century. Just got done writing an article of my own on his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, in fact.
I’m looking forward to reading some of your articles.
Comment by razzendahcuben — May 16, 2006 @ 8:16 pm |
By the way, Mordecai: you’re wrong. You’re always wrong. ALWAYS.
Just kidding.
I think you are correct about America, nevertheless we can’t resort to a “well, everyone else is doing it” mentaility, because 1. we are called to love God with our minds and be salt and light, and 2. secular academia is respected whereas evangelical academia is not. I’m sure you agree with that—I write this simply as an addendum to what you wrote.
Comment by razzendahcuben — May 16, 2006 @ 8:19 pm |
A good post indeed. Mordecai is certainly correct that it’s a problem with American culture in general. However, “fundamentalist” evangelicals seem to be leading the charge into ignorance and lack of “book-larnin’”.
Plantinga, although he’s wrong on a lot of points (e.g. libertarian free-will) is a God-send. It’s pretty incredible to see a Christian philosopher, even one who doesn’t believe in evolution, to be considered the leading modal logician alive even by secular philosophers. We need more Christians to pursue excellence in their fields and to value intellectual progress and hard work. We need more Christians to understand that the mind is a gift, not a curse, and that it can be used to accomplish great things when used properly (i.e. in submission to God’s Word).
Thankfully, and praise be to God, there has been a resurgence or renaissance of sorts in philosophy from a Christian perspective in the last forty years. In a recent article (http://www.philoonline.org/library/smith_4_2.htm) atheist Quentin Smith whines about how “today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians”, and bemoans the fact that philosophy has “allowed itself to lose the secularization it once had.” Praise The Lord! I pray that Christians can now do what Smith is so afraid of and push even further in philosophy, and additionally bring the same resurgence to other fiends, particularly the sciences.
Comment by Travis White — May 17, 2006 @ 3:08 pm |