In response to the inauguration of the Center for Christian Thought at conservative evangelical Biola University, one article argues that the recent renaissance of evangelical scholarship is dogged by the “intellectual habits” of fundamentalism.  Many of these habits are rooted in the familiar fundamentalist appeal to “what the Bible plainly teaches.”  It is critical to notice the assumptions underlying this mantra:

1. The Bible’s purpose is to deliver content.

2. This content is obvious to any honest reader.

When we add to these the doctrine of inerrancy — that this obvious content is perfect and without error — then the stage is set for the strident, unyielding use of Scripture that we associate with the conservative Christian.

Rick Santorum exemplifies this with his Manichean dichotomies between the “law of God” and the “law of man,” between a theology  “based on the Bible” and Obama’s “phony theology.”

For if God clearly delivers the true theology to us in the Bible, then any other theology is a phony work of man.

The narrower and more selective one’s use of this “obvious” content, of course, the more absurd and hypocritical it all becomes.  Many in the blogosphere have rightly criticized Rick Santorum, pointing out that the Bible is full of texts about helping the poor, refraining from judgment of others, the dangers of money, and so on.  How little all this has to do with Santorum’s conservative agenda!

These assumptions about the Bible also help generate Santorum’s infamous anti-intellectualism.  If the Bible delivers a clear and inerrant content, the ideal knower is a passive recipient (a consumer!) whose task is to accept what is offered, like the poor sinner accepting God’s forgiveness at the altar.

If knowing is passive reception, then intellectual activity — questioning, reasoning, testing, all of which requires one to risk a change of mind — can only be the passive reception of a different, non-Christian content, another “worldview” accepted for subjective reasons.  Science and religion both require “faith.”  When a conservative loses her faith at college, it is not because the activity of thinking produces knowledge and conviction.  Rather, Santorum and his ilk assert, academia is at war with Christian faith. Questions are attacks on the Christian faith or weaselly rationalizations for one’s immorality.  The fact that some liberals, some academics, and some scientists probably are dogmatically anti-religious only confirms Santorum and his ilk in their anti-intellectual posture.

The same model of knowledge as passive reception generates the conservative suspicion of the mind outside academia, in the life of the ordinary Christian.  But even moderate and intellectually open evangelicalism remains entangled with the intellectual habits of fundamentalism.  I was in New York this Sunday, and I attended an evangelical church that is (as far as I can tell from one visit) the sort of evangelical community I’m rooting for.  Instead of culture war rhetoric, they were raising money for a group fighting human trafficking in New York city.  Their website makes a point of welcoming people “regardless of your past, background, religion, race, gender, sexual orientation.” (I know this does not necessarily entail fully affirming every religion, gender, or sexual orientation.)

The sermon affirmed the loving graciousness of God, but saw the human response to this in the lived obedience to Jesus’ commandment in Luke 14:13-14: “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.  And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” I can’t remember the last time I heard that passage from an evangelical pulpit.

This community has obviously rethought and reformed much of the old evangelicalism. Nevertheless, the assumption that the Bible delivers obvious content to a passive receiver remains unquestioned.  One can see this on their website.  Like many more-conservative churches, after each paragraph statement of their doctrine (relabeled as “values” and “narrative theology”), they append a handful of Scriptural references.  The implication is that their website adequately restates the self-evident content of those verses.

More striking was the sermon, which displayed an astonishingly wide vocabulary for calling the congregation to respond to its message, a message the pastor equated without examination or labor with the content of the Bible.  The congregation was exhorted to act as faithful disciples, but the content of faith and the shape of the community’s actions were given in advance.

So the pastor spoke of “equipping” and “encouraging” the congregation to respond to Jesus’ commands.  He wanted them to “care about what Jesus cares about,” no longer to be “indifferent,” to change their “hearts, attitudes, and actions.” Each of these words elicits a subjective response to a message whose content is taken for granted.  Even where the pastor addressed the mind, he called the congregation to subjectively appropriate a content that was not itself questionable: he wanted to “remind” them, so that they would “rediscover” it and “be amazed.”

There was no implication that discerning the content of Christian faith itself requires intellectual labor and activity, and so there was no exegesis, no argumentation, no formation of the congregational mind.  He used Scripture without attending to it.

I certainly would not want the intellectual life to replace emotions or actions.  The mind is only a part of the whole person, so we must “do the one without neglecting the other” (Matthew 23:23).  Indeed, the idea that developing habits of thinking would be opposed to spiritual discipline, profound feeling, or right action is itself a product of the assumption that the content of the Bible is obvious!

One reason I am hopeful about evangelical churches like this one is that their very existence testifies to the many significant changes evangelicals have been making to the content of faith they received from their fathers and mothers.  These changes are surely the product of thinking.  Attention to this fact should goad evangelicals into reconsidering the intellectual habits they have inherited from fundamentalism.

All of this is a kind of teaser and introduction to my next few blog posts.  I believe that the Bible itself disrupts the idea that readers could receive its content passively; but through this very disruption it begins instilling distinctive Scriptural habits of mind and modes of thinking. In short, the Bible teaches wisdom, and “the words of the wise are like goads” (Ecc. 12:11).  I hope that communities trained in Scriptural wisdom will not only be better equipped to navigate internal disputes about the meaning of the Christian faith but will also be able to contribute thoughtfully to a public discourse whose habits of mind (as the primaries continually remind us) are themselves in dire need of healing.

Image from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Bible_paper.jpg