Reasons to Believe’s David H. Rogstad has just completed a series of blog posts under the title “Intellectual Repentance,” dealing with 1 Corinthians 2. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) I might fuss with his characterization of Paul’s attitude toward reason and argument after the Areopagus event, but I’m right with him about this much:
In order to receive God’s gift of life, [the Corinthians] needed to repent. This repentance is not only from their moral failures. They must lose confidence in their independent, self-sufficient ways of thinking and come to a kind of “intellectual repentance.” We are told in many places in Scripture that human wisdom causes us to be puffed up with pride. For Paul to prepare an argument that appeals solely to the mind may, in fact, convince a mind, but he wants to do much more than simply convince them intellectually. He wants their hearts. (Intellectual Repentance, Part 2)
Now, I’m a big life-of-the-mind guy. In general, I think the 21st-century church is not sufficiently characterized by careful, disciplined, God-honoring thought. A student of Douglas Groothuis has said, “Christians should humbly try to be the smartest people on the planet,” and I wholeheartedly agree.
But there’s a trap that is ever-present when Christians seek intellectual formulations of faith: it becomes sterile. I’ve been listening to a series of lectures given by Michael Ramsden at the European Leadership Forum; he often admonishes his listeners that apologetics died in Europe when it became a sterile, academic discipline. Instead, any banners for intellectual Christianity ought to fly far behind the standard of the Gospel message itself. Put simply, the Gospel, with its transforming power, must come first. Any defense or explanation thereof must come thereafter.
There are all kinds of debates about apologetic methods—presuppositional vs. evidentialist apologetics, and so forth—but I’m beginning to think that’s just the sort of sterilizing phenomenon Ramsden (and others) warn against. I’m reminded that Francis Schaeffer tired of such affairs; he simply left them to the academy and went off to actually minister to people.
Similarly, William Lane Craig cautioned in one of his podcasts,
We must never let apologetics distract us from our primary mission, which is sharing the Gospel. And I would only use apologetics when the unbeliever has questions or objections to the Gospel message that we present. We must never make apologetics our focus of attention or the goal in interacting with nonbelievers. …Always get the Gospel out first, and then deal with the arguments and evidence in favor of the Gospel.
Likewise, Ravi Zacharias warns against letting our intellectual pursuits desiccate our ministry:
For those of us in who are in the ministry, we are immersed in [our message]. We are immersed in it. We speak it, we study it, we read it, we proclaim it, we sit around tables and interact with it. And there’s a point at which something very, very dangerous can happen. It’s what I call that danger point that comes in theological training when the Bible becomes merely a textbook that removes itself from becoming a fire within your bones, which it was when you entered in order to study it. And the challenge of the young theological student is to recognize that as much as he or she is critiquing all avenues of sacred writ (because we are there to defend it) and while we are going through authorship and date and this theory and that theory and higher-critical theories, at the end of the day we had better remember it is not we who are reading the book as much as that the book is reading us. (A Fish Out of Water: Loving People)
O God, help us forget ourselves. Help us to forsake technique in favor of trust in Your sovereignty; help us to be doers of the Word and not just defenders of its truth. Teach us to fear You more than men. Fix our eyes on the Cross, fuel the fires in our bellies, sharpen our minds to glorify You with the truth, soften our hearts to love a lost world, and ready us in every way to make disciples of the nations… Amen.
