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I
will have to confess that I stand guilty when it comes to the area of
anti-intellectualism. It’s not that I am
anti-intellectual, if that were the case I would not be pursuing my Masters
degree. What I am saying is that I have
not made a conscience effort to be anti-intellectual, but I have not actively
pursued it as well. I believe that some
of what we have been taught in our religious upbringing has been wrong. We have been taught that all we need to do is
be saved, baptized, attend church, remember some scripture, tithe, and serve
every now and then and everything is going to be fine.

I have learned that God wants you to
love Him with all of your heart, all of your soul, and all of your mind. We are good with the heart and soul part, but
not with the mind part. Why? Because we have not been taught how to love
God intellectually with our minds. Is
this a contemporary issue facing the church? It has been a contemporary issue facing the church for the past century,
if not longer and today it is worsening. I want my mind to be challenged with God’s Word and the wisdom of
God. When Jesus said in Matthew 5:3, “Blessed
are the poor in spirit”, he wasn’t saying that spiritual retardation is a good
thing, but it is good to want to know more about Him. There has to be a desire to want to know Him
and his ways.

In J.P. Moreland’s book, “Love God
With All Your Mind”, he outlines anti-intellectualism’s
impact on the church. These impacts
include a misunderstanding of faith’s relationship to reason. He says, “First, while few would actually put
it in these terms, faith is now understood as a blind act of will, a decision
to believe something that is either dependent of reason or that is a simple
choice to believe while ignoring the paltry evidence for what is believed. By contrast with this modern
misunderstanding, biblically, faith is a power or skill to act in accordance
with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true.” I have always been taught that the definition
of faith is how Moreland initially defines faith, to “walk by faith and not by
sight.” I have taught and taken Henry
Blackaby’s Experiencing God, which in essence he defines faith very similarly
to Moreland. I was introduced to this
concept of seeing where God is at work and then joining Him in that work
through Blackaby’s book. I hate to admit
it, but we have been taught in the churches regarding certain doctrines and
theology that are not correct. My belief
has been strengthened that we need to unlearn some of the things we have been taught
and begin to look at God and our theology in a different intellectual context.

 

The anti-intellectual state has had
a mushrooming effect on the church today. This attitude has affected the church in it’s evangelism strategy, it’s
discipling strategy, and it’s worship. This lack of using one’s mind in the spiritual realm, I believe has in
part happened because society has not emphasized the using of one’s mind. Of course the secular and spiritual world are
two totally different arenas, but we have allowed the thought processes and the
mind of the world to mingle in with the church. We are raising a society of mindless “zombies” who can surf the television
and the Internet and really don’t know how to use their minds. This lifestyle has infiltrated their spiritual lives and the church as
well. This has just not happened in the
past five or ten years, but has been building over the past thirty to forty years. It is critical that pastors and leaders of
churches begin the process of teaching or maybe I should say re-teaching our
congregations regarding the spiritual depths of God and His word.  It is sad to say, but many pastors need to be
re-taught or at least introduced to the idea of deeper probing into God’s word.