Herb Thomas’ Review of Ch.1 and Ch.2
My review of the first two chapters of “Love Your God with all your Mind” is as follows:
- Who is the enemy? J.P. Moreland asserts a current crisis in the church of anti-intellectualism but does not define who is specifically guilty of anti-intellectualism. Is it every local church, the universal church, the modern conservative Christian Church, Pentecostals, charismatics, Church of Christ, Lutherans, Methodists, Catholics, who? We do not know who the enemy is that is promoting this current crisis of “devaluing reason and intellectual development for individual discipleship” who needs to become “a studying learning community that values the life of the mind”?
- What Crisis? J.P. Moreland asserts a current crisis of anti-intellectualism in the church but does not quantify the scope of the crisis. How broad is this problem among Christians? His argument that such a crisis is widespread among Christians is not convincing or supported by facts. His use of exaggeration to prove his point does not work.
- Compelling Argument. J.P. Moreland makes a compelling argument that in order to love God with all your heart soul and mind, you cannot neglect the soulful development of a Christian mind so that we can properly understand passages of the Bible, answer questions to assure doctrine, and better defend the faith. This should be a call to arms for every Christian to make him or herself approved unto God by knowing him through his Word, prayer, teaching, instruction, and worship. This is true whether or not an actual crisis exists in some or many local churches of body of Christ.
- “Mind” Must be Balanced with “Heart” and “Soul”. J.P. Moreland admitted that loving God with your mind only is not acceptable but must be balanced with loving God with your heart and soul as well. “God is worthy of being loved with every facet of human personality, not simply with one or two aspects of our nature”. It appears J.P. Moreland is warning Christians against knowing God only through his emotions or heart to the neglect of knowing God through the mind as well. It can be equally detrimental to the spiritual maturity of a Christian if he knows God only through the mind to the neglect of knowing God through his heart and soul.
- Is J.P. Moreland a “Christian Intellectual” Elitist? J.P. Moreland makes statements later in his book that would raise the thought that he is promoting “Christian intellectuals” as a separate class or category of Christians. These statements sound prideful, arrogant and elitist in which knowledge itself is worshipped as an idol. He is probably very humble and did not intend this impression to be given. I am sure he has a deep love for the Lord and only wants the best for God’s people – that they would grow in love and admonition of the Lord and wanted to present a dramatic crisis that warrants action of some kind. I think he overstated his case in certain spots. Statements later in the book that I refer to: [underlines added] “if the local church is to overcome its anti-intellectualism, it must find ways to raise conscious awareness of the value of the intellectual life among its members. How many of us know our Christian intellectuals, celebrate their accomplishments on our behalf, pray regularly for the intellectual war they wage and hold them forth as heroes and vocational role models among teenagers? If we do this for missionaries, why don’t we do it for Christian intellectuals? The local church needs to be more intentional about fostering the intellectual life and mobilizing a new generation of Christian intellectuals.” Some of his suggestions: 1. “We should regularly incorporate vocational or apologetic testimonies and book reports on timely tropics in our services” 2. “We ought to identify intellectual leaders who are associated with the evangelical community or historic Christianity more broadly conceived and find ways to hold forth their lifework 3. “ We need to prepare teenagers for the intellectual world they will face in college” 4. “we should be more proactive in supporting and enfolding members of the body who go to graduate school” 5. “we need to increase our individual and congregational giving to support Christian scholarship”
- My Charge to You. Do not mindlessly accept through “emotion” what I am serving up to you. Read the first 2 chapters of the book using your Christian mind and reason and express your opinion as to what you think J. P. Moreland is saying.
10 responses so far
After reading Mr. Thomas’ post, I do have some “Hot Christian Intellectual Opinions” regarding the subject. However, as I have not read the first two chapters and I know that Mr. Thomas is a wise man, I will take his suggestion mentioned in #6 and read the first two chapters before expressing my opinions.
Enjoying the blog posts! Keep it up ShelfLife team.
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Herb thank you for your thoughtful approach to understanding the message of this author. I appreciated reading through your process of thinking. Your challenge of investigating for ourselves is a good one in that we should line up whatever we read, by any author, against what God’s word says is true.
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Herb – Great comments – here are some responses:
•Who is the enemy? / What crisis? – I thought this was a really interesting insight and was something that I didn’t catch during my first read through chapters. I must say, when I read his thoughts and realized they were true in my own life, I was guilty of assuming “everyone is like me”. I know that the three churches I’ve been a part of since I became a Christ follower about 13 years ago have been more “practical” focused and therefore have not placed a significant focus on building the “mind” of the believer in the ways Moreland discusses in this book. My suspicion is that he would believe the enemy (which I believe is a word that is a little too strong, but we’ll go with it for now) is the entire Protestant church in America.
I’d be interested to know if any of the other folks reading this book have been a part of or know of Protestant churches in the US who place a higher value on combating anti-intellectualism and strive to build the mind of the believer? I have only listened to his sermons, but Tim Keller appears to preach in a way that encompasses intellectual reasoning, doctrine, application and is above all, very Gospel-centric. Based on my limited experiences, his church in NYC appears to be doing something unique. Anyone else have examples?
•Compelling argument – I agree with your statements, that was good encouragement.
•“Mind” Must be Balanced with “Heart” and “Soul” – See my response to your comment on Monday’s post. As we will discuss a little more next week, I think we need to be sure to do all we can to worship God with every faculty of our soul.
•Is J.P. Moreland a “Christian Intellectual” Elitist? – In my first post on Monday, I asked the question: do you believe “asking and thinking” pose any threats to the church? To answer my own question, I think this is the one threat it poses: elitism. To be fair, any niche has the risk of leading to elitism, so “Christian Intellectualism” is no different than someone with the gift of evangelism, teaching, serving, etc. Anyone who excels at something can quickly cross the line and become elitist about their gift. We’re a sinful people and pride is always crouching and ready to leap into action in our life.
Any gift we have is not for us. It is for “Him and them;” them being The Body (see 1 Cor 12, specifically v7). If our knowledge grows to the point where we lose our ability to connect with the world (and don’t seem to care that we’ve lost this ability), or if our knowledge grows to the point where we think it is a requirement for the here and now life with God, then I think we’ve become elitist and missed the boat. At that point, we’re just “speaking into the air”.
Bumping up against pride is never fun, but for some reason, the times in my life when I have bumped up against the pride of “intellectual elitism” have been especially hurtful. The smug smile of the “learned man” is just so degrading.
To answer your question – is the author a Christian Intellectual elitist? I don’t think so, but I think you bring up a great “risk” that will be good for all of us to watch out for so we don’t fall into that trap. All of this is for “Him and them.”
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Adam,
Addressing your question on other churches:
Redeemer is indeed an excellent example. Staying local, I think that PCPC did this very well when it was pastored by Skip Ryan, and was greatly aided through the influence of Sinclair Ferguson. Though not Protestant, Church of the Incarnation is phenomenal and my personal parish for corporate worship and resource for relevant Christian thought. Anglicans, however, expect the highest academic excellence of their clergy and inherently foster more intellectual support…so this may not be fair to your question. It’s just where I find this done very well.
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Adam Tarnow Reply:
September 21st, 2009 at 8:09 pm
I’ve heard good things about both PCPC and Church of the Incarnation. Thanks for the reply.
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Thank you very much for your detailed review, Mr. Thomas. I am glad to find a group of Christians reading J.P. Moreland, as he is definitely a great example of Christian scholarship and discipleship of the mind.
I hope to join in more regularly on posts in the future, but I wanted to respond quickly to one of Mr. Thomas’s points, about whether Moreland is a Christian intellectual elitist. Adam, your comments were apt that every profession, as with the general human endeavor, is naturally susceptible to pride and therefore to “elitism”.
However, the passages cited above seem to me to refer less to an elitism of the mind than a profession of the mind. It is true, in my experience, that churches often do not know what to do with graduate students and other such “knowledge workers”. Businessmen find roles as organizers, administrators, fundraisers, and advisors on personal finances in the church (i.e. MoneyWise). Lawyers can be advocates for the poor or oppressed (IJM, WM’s work with Alarm). Everyone recognizes the importance of teachers in the lives of our children. But the church does not know quite what to do with grad students, professors, and other “intellectuals”.
Let me offer a moderate example. One church I attended elsewhere had two professors of world-class quality among its members – one in organic chemistry and nanotechnology, the other in sociology – but found no use for them beyond leading a Bible study. Outside their church the one was a leader in the fight against the assumption of evolution in the sciences and the other a leader in sociology of religion, cities, and race, but neither, to my knowledge was ever asked to lead a seminar on their respective subjects, or ever consulted by the pastor, or even prayed for publicly. I sometimes wonder whether the pastor ignored them because he just did not understand enough about what they did to understand the opportunities there.
Watermark, on the otherhand, provides a great counterexample. Nathan Wagnon, DTS graduate and passionate student of Biblical textual criticism, regularly led (before he joined the army) a Training Day class on church history and the textual reliability of scripture that was excellent, both because of his passion and because of his deep learning.
These are both mild examples, but more robust examples exist, both of the church’s intellectual apathy and antagonism (there is a reason that evangelicals are as a group less educated than the general population of the US by a sizeable proportion) and also intellectually robust engagement with the centers of power (see as cited above, Redeemer Presbyterian, also All Soul’s Church in London, Marsden in history, Moreland in Philosophy, Emerson in Sociology).
Since Moreland is a Christian professor and philosopher, I suspect that when he talks about honoring the Christian intellectual, he is not talking about the self-styled “intellectual” person who reads the New York Times and has opinions about everything, but the Christian intellectual as someone who earns his living by idea work, by publishing articles and books and teaching students. These are the people that the church too frequently either ignores or unjustly looks down upon, and whom Moreland argues should be regarded as heroes for the way that they defend the faith in the halls of knowledge, from UT to Harvard.
When he talks about “us” and “them” he is merely identifying a reality, which is that a good businessman, to be good at his work, will not have the time to read the journals and the new books, to learn the languages, to attend the conferences, and to reflect on the assumptions and arguments of all the right scholars, all work that is rightfully necessary to attain the mastery of a subject and be acknowledged as a “scholar” by other “scholars”. The church should not expect the businessman to do that. That is the role of the scholar.
I think that’s what Moreland means when he discusses the Christian “intellectual”.
A quick introduction to myself:
1. I would not say that I have been “typical” in this sense, through a combination of family and personal choices, but I have had many friends who were “typical” and have had to think through some of the issues in depth through that route.
2. My father, who studied Classical Greek in college, went to law school and is now a corporate attorney, but who maintains his Greek so that he can read scripture. Also, George Marsden, Mark Noll, Luke Harlow, and Rusty Hawkins in history, Michael Emerson, Michael Lindsay, and Rodney Stark in Sociology, Saint Augustine of Hippo, J.I. Packer, John Stott, Francis Bacon, Leslie Newbigin and others that don’t come to mind right now. Marsden and Augustine are two of my favorite examples, though.
3. I worship God in the purist way through theology. I love to read something profound about God and be filled with awe about how much greater God is than I had ever known. Packer is excellent for this purpose.
4. Asking and thinking do not pose any threat to the church as long as we maintain humility about our own ability to know. I think it was Anselm who described his work as “faith seeking understanding.”
I appreciate this opportunity. My apologies for my length. I did not have time to write a short post.
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Matthew Reply:
September 20th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Excellently said.
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Aaron Reply:
September 21st, 2009 at 7:43 am
loved reading your post.
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David M Reply:
September 21st, 2009 at 10:26 am
Great response and assessment of our intellectual heritage. I would also say that since faith and reason are not contrary but complimentary of each other then the true intellectual could also love God in the most profound and intelligent way. I think the book of 1 John embodies this idea.
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Adam Tarnow Reply:
September 21st, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Hey Stephen – excellent thoughts. I especially liked your comment: “he is not talking about the self-styled ‘intellectual’ person who reads the New York Times and has opinions about everything, but the Christian intellectual as someone who earns his living by idea work, by publishing articles and books and teaching students.” That is a very good distinction and has been very helpful to me.
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