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Have Christians Lost Their Minds? (Part 1)

A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

I had surgery on my right had a few months prior to writing this article. It put me out of commission (in terms of writing for TrueU) for a time. I missed chatting with you, but during that time I got a chance to do some fun stuff.

One weekend, my wife and I took in a theater production called Albert Speer. I had read the book about a Nazi war criminal just a month before and now I was seeing flesh put to the story. It was so hard to imagine that these barbaric characters were real people.

The play and the book were about Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and confidant. Speer was hired away from a lucrative private business to design Hitler's "New Berlin." In the process of designing a great new world capitol, he came to know Hitler very well. They became friends. After the war was over and Hitler had died, Speer and several others were arrested for war crimes. At the trial of Nuremburg, Speer was the only one to plead guilty. He spent 20 years in Spandau Prison and was released in the early 1970s.

The trial, the book and the play all dealt with the inevitable question for Speer: How could you not have known that Hitler was ordering the death of millions of Jews, homosexuals and handicapped? Speer's answer has stuck with me: "I could have known, I should have known, but I didn't." In his trial he stuck to that defense. In the book he repeated it to hundreds of friends and colleagues. In the play, in one very poignant scene with his wife, he breaks down in tears repeating that statement over and over.

In the early days of "Good Morning America," host David Hartman did an interview with Speer. Hartman asked the same question, and Speer paused a very long time, mulling his answer over and over. Finally, in slow, methodical words he repeated, "I could have known, I should have known, but I didn't."

This was his story, and as it turned out it would be his last public appearance, for he died just a few days later.

As I have thought about the Speer's mind, which had to come to grips with the truth of what actually happened during Hitler's reign, I see several parallels to the Christian mind. So often we are asked to defend what God has taught us and who He is to us, and we almost have a "Speer-like" response — "Well, I guess I could know, I should know, but I don't."

This article series is about lighting a spark under you. It's about you as an individual using your mind and the church corporately doing the same.

Love the Lord Your God

The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind ….¹

Mark Noll, former Wheaton College history professor began his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, with those words. They're a stark reminder that we have gotten lazy about glorifying God with our minds.

We have forgotten part of the "Greatest Commandment" (Matthew 22:37) … "Love the Lord your God with all your heart…" — we do that pretty well. "… and with all your soul…" — again we feel pretty confident in this one. But when we get to, "…and with all your mind," we don't seem to measure up.

Rather than attempting to figure out why we aren't loving God with all our minds, we try to play down the use of rationale and reasoning by claiming "faith," a supposedly non-rational pursuit, as the cornerstone of our beliefs. Faith is central but the greatest commandment doesn't stop there. It compels us to use the mind that God created in us.

Where Did That Mind Go? It was Here a Minute Ago …

During much of the 20th century there was a move away from Christians seeking an intellectual life. Of course, we need to talk about this in its historical context. I contend that there was an emergence of anti-intellectualism in the church — a knee jerk reaction to the modernistic attempts to explain away God via human reasoning. This anti-intellectualism made its way into individual lives, as well as the church as a whole. Today it comes in the form of people who fill the pews to get their ears tickled, feel good about their lives and move on to Sunday brunch.²

What happened to Christians who are critical thinkers? Where are the Christians who aren't afraid to ask tough questions of their own faith as well as the beliefs of others?

When I am around college students I like to ask them tough questions like, "Why do you believe in God?" or, "How do you know God exists?" or "Why should I believe the Bible is God's Word?" The question and answer period that follows shows a lot about the students and their use of the mind for their Lord.

For many of us, we're posed those questions and we back off. Or we give the "just because" kinds of answers that demonstrate little thought and even less faith. These are the types of questions each of us should be able to answer. The culture, as I tell these students, is asking them and it really wants an answer. The less compelling your answer, the less compelling God will seem to them. Am I saying that your reasoning power outweighs the Holy Spirit's power to change lives? Not at all. I am saying we can make it a team effort a whole lot more than we are. If we do not know why we believe what we believe then why should we expect others to believe it?

This rise in anti-intellectualism is a big reason our minds have gone soft.

Leaving the Academy

Another key reason is the noticeable withdrawal of strong evangelical Christians from the fore of academic disciplines — namely philosophy and biblical criticism. There are those evangelical Christians who are waging a great war in these disciplines, but the number of top evangelical scholars in these areas of study has dwindled a great deal in the last century.

The field of biblical criticism is in especially dire straights. This subject has been taken over by scholars who think the Bible is just another text to be analyzed and it isn't really the holy Word of God. When we begin to give up ground in these areas, we begin to give away the foundation for Christian thought. For example: The "experts" start writing, teaching and speaking about the Word of God as merely a text. Their ideas trickle down to their students — the very students who go on to fill our pulpits and become members of our congregations. Eventually their teachings become the dominant view.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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How can the church get out of its anti-intellectual rut?

Join the discussion!

Remember, the view I hold is one of orthodoxy — a high view of Scripture and high view of God. When those two things begin to diminish in our churches, the foundations of Christianity find themselves on sandy ground. Why did the wise man build his house upon the rock? And what made him wise? Was it following sanitized, secularized teachings of biblical interpretation and godly characteristics?

When the positions of academic and intellectual authority are filled with those who don't hold those views the battle becomes very one-sided. We'll talk about that more in my next article.