Dummies in church

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Posted: May 10, 2002 1:00 a.m. Eastern

 © 2002 WorldNetDaily.com

Speaking earlier this week, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Rev. Peter Jensen, noted, “one of the most notable features of the churches is our almost total lack of intellectual significance.”

As a result, “No-one in their wildest imaginings would say that . there is a persuasive Christian world view being promoted, even as an alternative.” Indeed, how often do media or decision-makers turn to ministers, theologians or expressly Christian intellectuals and professionals for comment or input about the events and controversies of the day?

Only, it seems, when some of those ministers are molesting children or shooting abortion doctors.

Jensen argues that what’s missing in the faith “is a comprehensive and profound and recognizable theology able . to intersect with, challenge and illumine the thinking of the world.”

The Christian faith is a total faith. It speaks to every area of life: government, economics, sexuality, spirituality, health, science, marriage, childrearing, business ethics, substance abuse, the arts, entertainment, even geography.

The problem is Christians are woefully ignorant of their own faith. Because of the influence of late 19th- and early 20th-century fundamentalism, we have truncated the faith so greatly that Christianity only speaks to matters of the afterlife and personal piety in the here-and-now.

Evangelist Billy Sunday actually used to brag that he didn’t “know any more about theology than a jack-rabbit knew about ping-pong.”

That kind of anti-intellectual approach to the faith – one that boils it all down to a personal relationship with Jesus to the exclusion of the vast body of knowledge to be found in the Scriptures – is precisely what has reduced Christians to begging for a place at the discussion table and, if we get our desired slot on the bench, leads us to fear citing the source of our opinions and convictions.

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Rather than fight the intellectual battles of a hundred years ago, we retreated. Rather than moving with and shaping the debate, we backed out and cloistered ourselves in our cultural ghettoes, waiting for the Second Coming while trying to win as many to Christ with a scandalously simplified gospel – e.g., fire-insurance faith, jack-rabbit theology and a bit of good-times spiritual feeling thrown in for kicks.

“Learning, indeed, is not esteemed in the evangelical denominations,” said H.L. Mencken in 1925, noting that fundamentalism was the cause of “evangelical sects [to] plunge into an abyss of malignant imbecility.”

Instead of the Christian universities of the past – Harvard, Princeton – evangelical ministers are trained in colleges run by “half-idiot pedagogues and broken-down preachers,” said Mencken. The graduate’s “body of knowledge is that of a bus-driver or a vaudeville actor. But he has learned the clich ©s of his craft.”

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The really bad fruit of fundamentalism, while liberals would like to say it is intolerance, is actually anti-intellectualism and cultural irrelevance. Fundamentalism set the stage and provided the impulse for the withdrawal from the general culture. “Backward, Christian Soldiers” became the marching hymn. And, while things have improved in the last many years, we’re not yet done with brain-rot. If we were, Jensen would have spoken about something else.

“Some of our ministries and organizations that operate at the highest levels of national life are still deeply, explicitly and persistently anti-intellectual,” writes evangelical author Os Guinness. “We are still attracted to movements that replace thinking and theology by other emphases – relational, therapeutic, charismatic and managerial (as in church growth).”

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by Joel Miller

from http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27569