Sermon Illustrations on Intellect

Intellect, Pleasures of the

Intellectual pleasures are nobler and more enduring than sensory pleasures.

Intellectual pleasure is as much more noble than that of sense, as an immortal spirit is more noble than a clod of earth. The pleasure of sense is drossy, feculent; the pleasure of the mind, refined and pure: that is faint and languid; this lively and vigorous: that scant and limited; this ample and enlarged: that temporary and fading; this durable and permanent; that flashy, superficial; this solid and intense: that raving and distracted; this calm and composed.

— John Howe

Total Truth -- A Bold Manifesto For the Christian Worldview

Books come and go, with hundreds of new titles released each week. Most of these books will quickly go out of print, make their way to remainder tables, and eventually be forgotten. On the other hand, sometimes a book comes along that demands immediate attention and will earn long-term influence. That is certainly the case with TOTAL TRUTH by Nancy Pearcey, which may well be one of the most important Christian books of our times. TOTAL TRUTH, subtitled “Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity,” is a manifesto for Christian worldview thinking in the 21st century. The book is a masterpiece of cultural analysis and intellectual engagement, tracing the odyssey of its author even as she provides virtually an entire education in Christian worldview understanding in a single volume. This is no small achievement.

Nancy Pearcey is a gifted writer, and one of the brightest minds serving evangelical Christianity. Raised in a Scandinavian Lutheran home, she grew to know about Christianity as a child without coming to faith in Christ. She eventually became an adult convert to Christianity, but only after an intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage that took her from one side of the Atlantic to the other -- including time at Francis Schaeffer's L'Abri, a study center for young people asking big questions. [...]

TOTAL TRUTH serves as a basic introduction to Christian worldview thinking, but its depth and clarity of thought sets it far above the usual fare. Throughout the volume, the influence of Francis Schaeffer is apparent. One of the twentieth century's most significant apologists, Schaeffer was an eccentric and magnetic figure who helped an entire generation of struggling young evangelicals find their way into biblical Christianity. Schaeffer served as a prophet of cultural engagement during an age of rebellion among America's youth, and he shaped the thinking of an entire generation of theologically-minded Christian young people.

Nancy Pearcey's conversion came when she recognized that “God had won the argument,” and that her response must be to “give my life to the Lord of Truth.” In other words, she came to believe that the gospel is true, and that its truth demanded obedience. “Once we discover that the Christian worldview is really true, then living it out means offering up to God all our powers -- practical, intellectual, emotional, artistic -- to live for Him in every area of life. The only expression such faith can take is one that captures our entire being and redirects our every thought. The notion of a secular/sacred split becomes unthinkable. Biblical truth takes hold of our inner being, and we recognize that it is not only a message of salvation but also the truth about all reality. God's word becomes a light to all our paths, providing the foundational principles for bringing every part of our lives under the Lordship of Christ, to glorify Him and cultivate His creation.”

One of Francis Schaeffer's key insights was the split in the modern mind that separated “religious” truth from all other truth. This “two-story” division of truth into secular and sacred spheres ultimately undermines the Christian truth claim and leaves believers with nothing more than a claim to “spirituality” and “meaningful experiences” rather than objective truth and biblical authority.

Nancy Pearcey conducts a thorough autopsy on these deficient patterns of thought, demonstrating throughout her book that all too many Christians fall prey to this kind of thinking. She tells a story of a theology teacher in a Christian high school who drew a heart on one side of his blackboard and a brain on the other. He told his class that the heart is what we use for religion, while the brain is what we employ for science. What this teacher was insinuating is that Christianity is a matter of feeling and emotion, while science is a matter of fact and objective truth. As Pearcey laments, “Training young people to develop a Christian mind is no longer an option; it is part of their necessary survival equipment.”

Too many believers, Pearcey insists, “have absorbed the fact/value, public/private dichotomy, restricting their faith to the religious sphere while adopting whatever views are current in their professional or social circles.” She continues: “We probably all know of Christian teachers who uncritically accept the latest secular theories of education; Christian businessmen who run their operations by accepted secular management theories; Christian ministries that mirror the commercial world's marketing techniques; Christian families where the teenagers watch the same movies and listen to the same music as their nonbelieving friends. While sincere in their faith, they have absorbed their views on just about everything else by osmosis from the surrounding culture.”

In TOTAL TRUTH, Nancy Pearcey offers a solid theological engagement with the critical intellectual issues of our times. While she presents a devastating critique of secular philosophies ranging from scientific materialism and Darwinism to rationalism, she also gives a constructive and biblical theological framework for establishing the structure of the Christian worldview. She lays this out in terms of three great themes: Creation, Fall, and Redemption. Every worldview, she explains, must provide a theory of how the world came to be, explain what has gone wrong with humanity, and point to some hope of redemption. By using such a theological grid, Pearcey suggests that “we can identify nonbiblical worldviews and then analyze where they go wrong.” Furthermore, Pearcey explains, the first great affirmation of her worldview grid underlines the importance of asserting the truth of Christianity at the very point of creation. “If the grid of Creation, Fall, and Redemption provides a simple and effective tool for comparing and contrasting worldviews, it also explains why the biblical teaching of Creation is under such a relentless attack today. In any worldview, the concept of Creation is foundational: As the first principle, it shapes everything that follows. Critics of Christianity know that it stands or falls with its teaching on ultimate origins.”

In other words, we cannot create a synthesis of biblical truth and evolutionary theory. This is absolutely correct and urgently important -- for to surrender the Bible's truth claims on the origin of the universe is eventually to abdicate the totality of the Christian truth claim. After all, Christian truth does not come as isolated claims linked together by an underlying spirituality. To the contrary, Christian truth is a comprehensive and unitive whole that produces transformed lives precisely because the Gospel is true.

If believers allow Christian truth claims to be pushed into an “upper story” of mere opinion, while suggesting that science and other forms of knowledge deal with “facts,” we surrender the integrity of faith itself and are reduced to offering Christianity as a form of spiritual therapy rather than as a message of transforming truth.

As Pearcey explains, “To be loyal to the great claims of our faith, we can no longer acquiesce in letting Christianity be shunted aside to the value sphere. We must throw off metaphysical timidity, be convinced that we have a winning case, and take the offensive. Armed with prayer and spiritual power, we need to ask God to show us where the battle is being fought today, and enlist under the Lordship and leadership of Christ.”

So, why are evangelicals so vulnerable to intellectual timidity? Nancy Pearcey has a quick answer. While theological liberals were busy denying cardinal doctrines of the faith, evangelicals were simply retreating into an upper story faith where Christianity was reduced to an experience. Furthermore, many evangelicals bought into various philosophical movements that undermined clear-headed thinking. Others are simply blinded to their own intellectual, moral, and spiritual compromises by the pervasive seduction of contemporary culture.

TOTAL TRUTH is one of the most promising books to emerge in evangelical publishing in many years. It belongs in every Christian home, and should quickly be put into the hands of every Christian young person. This important book should be part of the equipment for college or university study, and churches should use it as a textbook for Christian worldview development.

Why does all of this matter? As Nancy Pearcey remarks, “These are not merely abstract intellectual matters fit for philosophers and historians to debate in the rarefied atmosphere of academia. Ideas and cultural developments affect real people, shaping the way they think and live out their lives. That's why it is crucial for us to develop a Christian worldview -- not just as a set of coherent ideas but also as a blueprint for living. Believers need a roadmap for a full and consistent Christian life.”

Serious Christians ought to be developing an entire library of books intended to apply the Christian worldview to every area of life, thought, study, and culture. TOTAL TRUTH will be an important part of that library, and may also be the catalyst for other good books that will follow. In the meantime, quickly get a copy for yourself and send another to a young college student. In so doing, you just might be sending an intellectual life preserver to someone about to drown in a sea of secularism. Never underestimate the power of the right book put in the right hands at the right time.

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This article originally appeared on September 8, 2004.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5583]

All They Will Ever Have!

John 15:2

”As scientists look back at all the discoveries made in the 1990’s, the so-called Decade of the Brain, one finding stands out as the most startling and, for many scientists, the most difficult to accept: people are not necessarily born with all the brain cells they will ever have.” These words are a quote from Sandra Blakeslee, from a 1/4/00 preview article of a The New York Times piece entitled “Discovery Yields Shock About the Brain.” [Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company]

Commentary:

Well, shut my mouth! Neither are they born with all of many things they will ever have. Take sin, for example. And we have no idea the precise change that takes place when a sinner is born again. If scientists have difficulty accepting an unexplained increase in brain cells, no wonder so few of them seem to be believers.

Engaging A Needy World

In the months before World War II, an Oxford don by the name of C. S. Lewis wrote, “Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason because bad philosophy needs to be answered.” Lewis’s students questioned the importance of studying the humanities and sciences with war on the horizon. But Lewis understood, as he wrote so beautifully in his classic book WEIGHT OF GLORY, that “To be ignorant and simple now ... would be to throw down our weapons and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen.”

Sadly, bad philosophy — like relativism, naturalism, and secular humanism — runs rampant in our legislatures, schools, movie theaters, and even our churches.

Our culture urgently needs more men and women who will rightly wield good philosophy to counter the bad philosophy of the postmodern era, men and women who can winsomely present the Christian worldview in their sphere of influence.

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[condensed by Rev. Holwick]

Remembering St. Augustine of Hippo

Acts 9:3

On August 28, 430, St. Augustine of Hippo died. Perhaps the most important father of the early Church, Augustine’s writings shaped Western theology and defined how Western European society understood itself for over a thousand years.

Augustine was born in Thagaste in modern Algeria in 534. His mother Monica was a Christian, but his father Patricius was a pagan who only became a Christian late in life. Although raised a Christian, Augustine found the Bible unsophisticated. To his mother’s dismay, he embraced Manichaeism, believing that this popular, dualistic religion resolved the problem of evil by positing two deities, one good, one evil. However, he eventually became disillusioned with Manichaeism and intrigued by skepticism, also popular during that time.

A highly trained rhetorician, Augustine was hired as a professor of rhetoric in the imperial city of Milan. Monica followed her son to Milan and continued to preach the Gospel to him, but it was when Augustine met Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, that he truly considered Christianity. Like Augustine, Ambrose was an expert orator. Using Neo-Platonic ideas, he showed Augustine a way of reading Scripture that opened new depths that he had not previously seen. This led the way to Augustine’s conversion in 386. He was baptized by Ambrose in 387.

Soon after, Augustine returned to Africa, sold his family property, and started a monastery. In 391, he was ordained a priest in Hippo Regius, a city also in modern Algeria. Determined to use his rhetorical skills to help the church, he quickly became famous as a preacher. Augustine preached between six and ten thousand sermons, most lasting an hour or more. Only about 500 have survived. In 395, he was named bishop of Hippo Regius, an office he held until his death in 430.

Augustine was involved in many key apologetic and theological controversies. His arguments against the Manichaeans were so effective that they disappeared from the Latin world. In particular, he argued that evil does not have an independent existence. Rather, it is non-existent. Like darkness is the absence of light, he argued, so evil is the absence of good.

Within the church, Augustine was the key figure responding to the Donatists, a Christian sect who argued that the worthiness of a priest determined the validity of the sacraments he performed. He was also the primary opponent of Pelagius, a theologian who argued that salvation must be earned. Augustine’s responses established the principle that sacraments were effective due to the worthiness of Christ, not a priest. He also articulated the doctrines of original sin and predestination, emphasizing divine initiative and grace in accomplishing our salvation.

Augustine’s best-known work is Confessions, a spiritual autobiography and the first work of its kind to provide a psychological examination of the author’s life. In this work, Augustine became the first person to use the word “I” as a self-conscious, self-reflective being, as we do today.

Augustine’s most important work is the magisterial The City of God. Written in response to pagan claims that the abandonment of the old Roman gods was the cause of the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410, Augustine gave a sweeping vision of world history. He argued that the world consisted of two cities, the City of Man and the City of God. The City of Man is ruled by pride and lust for power, which is enforced by violence. The City of God is ruled by humility and love, enforced by service and penitence. Though they exist in the same time and place, and at times work toward the same ends, they exist by different means and for different motives. The City of God provided the model for the Latin world’s vision of itself for the next thousand years or more, making it one of the most influential books in world history after the Bible and the Quran and rivaling the Analects of Confucius.

Augustine was a remarkable figure, a towering intellect with unmatched rhetorical skills. He exhibited an unprecedented capacity for self-reflection with a contemplative and even mystical streak. His impact continued throughout the Western church through the Protestant Reformation. He was a major influence on Reformers such as Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, and John Calvin. And his theological legacy continues today across denominations. Though he died on this day centuries ago, he continues to speak to all of us.