Evangelicalism

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Evangelicalism

By Rowland Croucher and others ⋅ February 21, 2005 ⋅ Post a comment

From Mark:
“Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals don’t think and what to do about it” ( Baker Books; Grand Rapids:1994) – Os Guiness

p. 9 -11
…a leading problem in American evangelicalism – anti-intellectualism. Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind. …evangelicals have toned up their bodies and dumbed down their minds. The result! Many suffer from a modern form of what the ancient stoics called “mental hedonism” – having fit bodies but fat minds. …At root, evangelical anti-intellectualism is both a scandal and a sin. It is a scandal in the sense of being an offense and a stumbling block that needlessly hinders seriopus people from considering the Christian faith and coming to Christ. it is a sin because it is a refusal, contraruy to the first of Jesus’ two great commandments, to love the Lord our God with all our minds.

p. 12
Bertrand Russell mocked, “Most Christians would rather die than think – in fact they do!”

p. 14
Critics of evangelical anti-intellectualism commonl;y quote four great facts of our shame. First, no general evangelical magazine of serious ideas exists. Second, no cogent case for the Christin faith has been written by a living evangelical that can confidently be given to a serious non-Christian reader. Third, there is no evangelical university worthy of the name that has a program of graduate studies on par with other major universities. Fourth, there has been no generally accepted, constructive formulation of an evangelical public philosophy for the last hundred years.
p. 15
Not surprisingly the disarray and frustration is deepest in evangelicals who think – whether they do so for a living, such as academics, or those who do so for the love of it, such as artists.

p. 16
Those more educated now tend to be sighnificantly less religious, those more religious tend to be significantly less educated.

p. 17 – 18
… evangelicals have relied upon populist strengths and rhetoric rather than addressing the gatekeepers of modern society … evangelicals have chosen to rely on a rhetoric of protest, pronouncement, and picketing rather than persuasion.
p. 25
… slow etreat from the Christin mind to the creation of a “ghost mind.” …. slow rise of a mass mind and the creation of an “idiot culture.”
p. 30
The false antagonisms of that sort of either / or thinking have become a standard feature of evangelicalism … In terms of a Christin mind, we evangelicals characteristically pit “heart” versus “head” and opt for the heart as the more spiritual choice.

p. 31
… “heart” in the Bible is more a matter of understanding than sentiment – so “heart” versus “head’ is a false choice.

p. 32
John Wesley , the founder of Methodism, had said, “It is a fundamental principal with us that to renounce reason is to renounce religion, that religion and reason go hand in hand, that irrational religion is false religion.”

p. 60
“Philistine” became a pejorative term. It described someone who was crucially uninformed in a special area of knowledge or openly disdainful of intellectual or artistic values.

p. 62
…evangelical artists – and poets, scriptwriters, sculptors, dancers and actors – as the least understood and most alienated single group of people in the evangelical churches.

p. 72
… the inability to read anything but the shallowest texts is equally widespread. … the body of Christ often gives the appearance of the uncontrolled movements of a paraplegic.

*** p. 93
The result is a form of the faith that is Christian Lite.
***(Griz made alt.christnet.christianlife into alt.christnet.christianlite through his cult)

p. 116
… Christian discourse is beginning to take on some of the characteristics of tabloid and talk-show truth. FGor a start, we have our own frenzied circulation of myths and “psycho-facts” – beliefs hat become true because we feel they are true even if they are not; or beliefs that are not supported by hard evidence but are taken as real because their constant repetition changes the way we view life.

p. 132
Let My people think.

p. 139
…. Dante pronounced, in words that illuminate the cross of Jesus, the wisest person in the city is “He whom the fools hate worst.”

p. 140
… “All truth is God’s truth,” so we can welcome truth wherever it is to be found, even among pagans. But equally, “all that is not of God is not of truth” and therefore not for us, even if it is we who believe it devoutly.
p. 143
A fourth misconception concerns the idea tht thinking Christianly is a form of uniformity – in other words, that if we all think Christianly we will all think the same way. Whe this happens, the goal of thinking Christinly collapses into a frantic search for the one particular correct way of thinking or acting. The result is he fallacy of “particularism”, the uniformity of a particular “Christianly Correct” way of thinking. …[particularism] denies two requirements of thinking Christianly that oppose all uniformity: the importance of diversity and the fact of human fallibility.

p. 143 – 144
For another thing, applying the idea of uniformity is disastrous because it leads inevitably to legalsim and judgementalism. There is only a short and easy step from “This is the Christian way” to “There is only one Christian way” to “Anything different from this Christian way is not Christian” to “All those who differ fom my way are not Christians”.

p. 151
One of the greatest sadnesses oif a thinking evangelical is knowing the thousands who have left, and are still leaving, evangelicalism because evangelicals do not think.

p. 152
Dorothy L Sayers … “The cultivation of religious emotion without philosophic basis,” she explained, “is thoroughly pernicious.” …One of the great legacies for those of us who knew the late Francis Schaeffer was that the truth mattered to him. He took God seriously, he took people seriously and he took truth seriously. Friederich Nietsche’s aphorism could be applied to him, “All truths are bloody truths to me.”
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