I once had a pastor who used to employ this phrase (or something close to it) during his sermons on a regular basis: “You don’t need to have any special knowledge to share the gospel. All you need to do is to say ‘here’s what my life was like before Jesus; here’s what it’s like now.’” In other words, all anyone needs to share gospel hope with a broken world is a (tidy) personal anecdote.
I can appreciate what this pastor was attempting to accomplish. This was an evangelical church after all, built around an emphasis on the Great Commission with a vision to send its people out into the world as witnesses to the risen Christ. It’s a vision I fully support. With so many of us struggling to find ways to share our faith that feel natural and accessible, I can also understand the effort to democratize the process of evangelism.
But what if this type of thinking is a microcosm of a problematic approach to Christian living? What if it can actually harm our efforts toward pursuing the fulfillment of Christ’s kingdom on earth? Trite, oversimplified thinking of this sort is one the ways both big and small that our evangelical culture both contributes to and creates a kind of pseudo folksy, populism-as-virtue mindset that undermines the pursuit of intellectualism. And the cost is that we are hindered from loving God with our minds. In this worldview, there’s a sense that the “life of the mind” (to borrow a phrase from Mark Noll) is secondary at best, or at worst totally irrelevant to Christianity. Listening to those sermons, I remember almost feeling as if I was being discouraged from serious study and intellectual engagement. As if Paul’s resolve to “know nothing…except Christ and Him crucified,” was an exhortation to glory in ignorance.
Bubbling just under the surface of certain segments of Christianity there is a barely suppressed belief that “the Bible is sufficient” actually means the Bible is comprehensive. In this paradigm, it’s difficult to make room for new concepts or higher forms of knowledge, because we lack categories. The default then is to accept our cultural norms as biblical, and to see unfamiliar ideas as suspect. In its most fundamentalist iterations, knowledge found outside the Bible is in danger of being seen as suspicious, irrelevant or just plain wrong. The reductive and overused phrase “just preach the gospel,” emerges from this movement, implying a kind of contextless existence to the hearers. It’s as if participants live in a void where the past is expunged and the present must be kept in a state of hyper-purity that finds no meaning in or intersection with the outside world.
The irony is that no one can really live this way, even if they pretend to. We can’t exist in the world without relying on certain forms of extra-biblical knowledge. Yet harboring these beliefs, even subconsciously, tends to lead to a rejection of specialized learning and higher education. This type of rigorous, formal study can become delegitimized as unbliblical and stigmatized as “elitist.” A quote attributed to John MacArthur highlights some of the dangers in this type of thinking. “You don’t become a theological liberal by reading the Bible. You have to go to school for that.” This short statement promotes a philosophy that alienates serious academic study from serious Christian discipleship, and assumes they cannot coexist.
All of this creates a natural pathway for Christians to find themselves feeling marginalized (often through our own doing), in the realms of science, history, anthropology, and more. Perhaps this explains in part the unhealthy alliance we’re witnessing between the church and purveyors of misinformation. When Christians identify themselves as outsiders, it’s easy for us to see those with fringe views as natural associates and co-sufferers. When poorly reasoned arguments are presented by discredited scientists or untrained historians, not only do Christians then not have the tools to critically evaluate, but we empathize with those who are “silenced” by institutions because we imagine ourselves to be mistreated in similar fashion.
But what of scripture and the revelation that God uses the foolish things of this world to shame the wise? Ought we then seek to be naive or ignorant for the sake of Christ? Should we suppress our intellect for the sake of the gospel? No. What seems expedient and worthwhile in the world’s eyes – power, status, wealth, beauty – is overturned by the Servant King. The gospel doesn’t subvert truth but our expectations. It demonstrates the foolishness of our attempts to save ourselves. What it doesn’t do is destroy truth in any form. All truth is God’s truth, and common grace ensures that it exists outside as well as within the walls of the Church.
To love God with our minds is to integrate our intellect with our faith. To see the natural and supernatural not as warring opposites but as two halves of a whole, ripped at the seams by sin, but destined for perfect reunification. The natural world with its laws, principles and experiences is not an enemy of faith but the theater for it. History, science and the like ought not be ignored or demonized, but mined for evidence of God’s involvement, purposes and glory.
Rather than engaging with a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” to borrow a phrase from Andrew Bertodatti and Rasool Berry, we are obligated to avail ourselves of the fullest capacity of our own reasoning and faculties. We shouldn’t fear or avoid the revelations of science, nature, or anthropology, nor should we esteem them disproportionately. Instead we should engage with them as windows into the character of the God of grace and invitations to move into more purposeful commitments of love for God and neighbor.