This morning a friend e-mailed me the following comment from Dennis Prager, the Jewish talk show host and author of numerous books. I have long considered Prager one of the sharpest thinkers "out there."
"One thing I noticed about Evangelicals is that they do not read. They do not read the Bible, they do not read the great Christian thinkers, they have never heard of Aquinas. If they're Presbyterian, they've never read the founders of Presbyterianism. I do not understand that. As a Jew, that's confusing to me. The commandment of study is so deep in Judaism that we immerse ourselves in study. God gave us a brain, aren't we to use it in His service? When I walk into an Evangelical Christian's home and see a total of 30 books, most of them best-sellers, I do not understand. I have bookcases of Christian books, and I'm a Jew. Why do I have more Christian books than 98 percent of the Christians in America? That is so bizarre to me." - The Wittenburg Door magazine.
That indictment made me sad, almost ill. I am well familiar with it, but Prager put it in a particularly stark way. I went on the internet to see if I could locate the original interview. Though the interview itself is not available on the internet, it apparently can be found in a 1990 Door interview, issue #114 - "A Civilization that believes in nothing."
It was four years later, in 1994, that two notable books were published. The slimmer book, written by Dr. Os Guinness, was titled Fit Bodies Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don't Think And What to Do About It. A heftier and more-discussed volume was written by Dr. Mark Noll (then Professor of History at Wheaton College), The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Ten years later, Noll wrote a follow-up piece for First Things magazine titled "The Evangelical Mind Today."
In this later article, Noll wrote:
Ten years after the publication of "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind," I remain largely unrepentant about the book’s historical arguments, its assessment of evangelical strengths and weaknesses, and its indictment of evangelical intellectual efforts, though I have changed my mind on a few matters. Some readers have rightly pointed out that what I described as a singularly evangelical problem is certainly related to the general intellectual difficulties of an advertisement-driven, image-preoccupied, television-saturated, frenetically hustling consumer society, and that the reason evangelicals suffer from intellectual weakness is that American culture as a whole suffers from intellectual weakness. Another helpful criticism is that the book lumps together fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and holiness advocates as culprits in the stagnation of evangelical thinking and that it ignores certain mitigating circumstances and worthy exceptions that one could cite from each of these sub-traditions.
Yet on the whole, "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" still seems to me correct in its descriptions and evaluations. What is true throughout the Christian world is true for American Christians: we who are in pietistic, generically evangelical, Baptist, fundamentalist, Restorationist, holiness, "Bible church," megachurch, or Pentecostal traditions face special difficulties when putting the mind to use. Taken together, American evangelicals display many virtues and do many things well, but built-in barriers to careful and constructive thinking remain substantial.
There are, fortunately, major exceptions to the anti-intellectual indictment against evangelicals and maybe I will write about some of them in more detail at another time. For now, though, I find it interesting that some ways of addressing the problem are taking place outside traditional academia. I note Chuck Colson's Centurions Program as an example.
One of a number of good books arguing the case for intellectual engagement would be J.P. Moreland's Love Your God With All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul.