This post was actually designed to be a comment on Rick and Christy’s blog, but I kept rambling so I decided to post. It is in response to McLaren’s article in Christianity Today…
just read the article. a few comments. first, a qualifier: this is a good word for us to hear. obviously, nobody is going to disagree with McLaren’s premise. then comes the HOWEVER…he makes the statement: ‘that too many of our most “educated” Christians are some of the meanest’. here he gives a general sweep with no examples or reasons for prompting him to write this article. who exactly does he have in mind? and now people reading the article are drawing the inference that less education equals more godliness. i have met many people, and many christians (as i work customer service for a well-known christian book company) who are not educated at all and are extremely mean. just look at many fundamentalists who actually downplay education and can be some of the meanest people. and on the contrast, most all the smartest people around me are the nicest also. i was all but ousted from a church because i had “too much” education. i just guess that the 12 inch head/heart distance thing has become very cliche. i honestly think that we act on what we believe. i don’t think knowledge is the issue, so much as it is faith. i mean, come on, people are so afraid of “knowledge” that all you hear in churches is application. having gone through a seminary that has a “spiritual formation” class/program, requiring “spirituality”, i really think that McLaren’s statements about this are not helpful. our class was a royal waste of time. think about it, do we really think that the major problem in christendom is that people are “over-educated”? absolutely not! quite the opposite. to experience or learn Christ, you must learn about him. i know that i am automatically the bad guy as soon as I critique an article about being more godly. maybe i would have been better served by this article if he made it more narrative and described some of the negative experiences he has had with the “more” educated rather than just generalizing. as Piper said on Edwards:
“How many people in your churches do you know that are laboring to know God, who are striving earnestly in study and prayer to enlarge their vision of God. Precious few. Well then, what will become of our churches if we the pastors, who are charged with knowing and unfolding the whole counsel of God, shift into neutral, quit reading and studying and writing, and take on more hobbies and watch more television?”
“If the single-minded occupation with these things is left to a few academic theologians in the colleges and seminaries, while pastors all become technicians and managers and organizers, there may be superficial success for a while, as Americans get excited about one program or the other, but in the long run the gains will prove shallow and weak, especially in the day of trial.”
“You recall what Mark Noll said: ‘Edwards’s piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-entranced world-view. . .’ The sweet marriage of reason and affection, of thought and feeling, of head and heart, study and worship that took place in the life of Jonathan Edwards has been rare since his day and still is rare.”
“In other words, it is to no avail merely to believe that God is holy and merciful. For that belief to be of any saving value, we must ’sense’ God’s holiness and mercy. That is, we must have a true delight in it for what it is in itself. Otherwise the knowledge is no different than what the devils have. “
“Does this mean that all his study and thinking was in vain? No indeed. Why? Because he says, ‘The more you have of a rational knowledge of divine things, the more opportunity will there be, when the Spirit shall be breathed into your heart, to see the excellency of these things, and to taste the sweetness of them.’ (Works, II, 162, see p.16)”
“But the goal of all is this spiritual taste, not just knowing God but delighting in him, savoring him, relishing him. And so for all his intellectual might, Edwards was the farthest thing from a cool, detached, neutral, disinterested academician.”
I mean not to generalize here myself, I just think that we need an Edwards-like model to help us balance. Thoughts?