When the world considers the evangelical church they don’t conclude we’re overrun with intellectual rigor. They don’t consider us the sharpest knives in the drawer. God commands us to love Him with all of our minds. He gives us, His children, the blessing of studying not just the wonders of the cosmos, but the wonders of the One who spoke the cosmos into existence. He calls us to make diligent use of every gift He has given us that we might more clearly see and delight in the Giver of those gifts.
That said, one can find within the evangelical church, in the Reformed corner, a cadre of soldiers fighting the good fight for robust doctrine, careful thought, theological precision. For that I give thanks, and a warning.
When I was a younger man I struggled with my ambition. Jesus warned us that the first would be last, that we ought not to be jockeying for position. I brought my struggle to a wise man, my father, and he told me, “Son, it is not a bad thing to want to do great things for the kingdom.” As per usual, he was right. The danger, however, is that there is the thinnest and faintest of lines between wanting to do great things for the kingdom and wanting to be great in the kingdom. In like manner a rather thin line separates wanting to think great thoughts and wanting to be thought great.
There are multiple scandals of the evangelical mind. First, we are intellectually lazy. But second, we long to be thought intellectually respectable. The outside world considers us troglodytes. To mix a metaphor, knuckle dragging intellectual backwaters. Because of our pride, that stings. We then, rather than embracing the scandal of the cross, which is at the root of our reputation with the world, seek to cover the scandal, and recoup our reputations. We baptize our pride by reasoning that in order to have a hearing for the gospel we must first attain standing, establish our intellectual bona fides.
Fools populate the unbelieving world (Psalm 14:1). They have built a fantasy world on a fantasy foundation that begins with the denial of the world and its foundation. The world holds, as it holy creed, their most sacred truth that there is no truth. They may reign, but they are naked. And what fools we are when we think we will gain a hearing by taking off our own clothes. The cross is foolishness to the Greeks. Only a fool would think we can jettison our reputation for folly while holding on to the cross.
The gospel requires us to sacrifice our reputations, both moral and intellectual. We enter in confessing we were so wicked, and so foolish that we were dead. He made us alive. His Spirit gave us sight. We brought nothing to the table except our own cadavers. Having been made alive, we return to death when we boast of our attainments. The great scandal of the evangelical mind isn’t that we aren’t smart. The great scandal is that we think being thought smart matters a lick. We began in humility, not about His truth, but about ourselves. So let us continue.