Intellectual Christianity in trouble???

This was nothing new to me. During the last decade of the 2000s, I have stated blogs  like this one and others that there is a creeping anti-intellectualism in American Evangelical Protestant Christianity.  Despite those who would wish for me to keep quiet and cover things up for the sake of the “unity of the church”, I have decided to speak up and criticize this trend.  This current decade of the 2010’s, I intend to continue to speak out. I am glad that I am not alone. This link called The Decline and Fall of Intellectual Christianity (Progressive Adventist sponsored) agrees. Here’s some excerpts of what they have to say,

Intellectual Christianity takes work and as time passed it became easier to merely follow religious institutions. Man by his nature is often lazy and seeks the path of least resistance. Not all men of course, for the Christian church could never have been founded by lazy men and women. As orthodox Christianity grew and spread so did the power of the church. With time intellectual Christianity diminished. The Protestant Reformation gave renewed hope to Christianity as the intellectual Christians began to question what tradition had done to the orthodox Christian religion. The Bible as the accepted standard, again took center stage and intellectual Christians championed new ways of understanding the messages that God had inspired. The mind, perhaps God’s greatest handiwork was used by God through the agency of intellectual Christians to rehabilitate the Christian church from the damage done by tradition. When emotion and experience based upon tradition were opposed by the God enabled intellectuals, the church changed.

 

Protestants today are in need of intellectual Christianity as much as any other time in history. The intellectual activity of our predecessors does not automatically flow to us. Their wisdom and their folly are there to be seen and learned from by those willing to process the information. Protestant heritage includes great minds; men and women of great accomplishments. But to use our intellectual faculties we have to make decisions that likely will lead us away from traditions which were not well founded. Not all emotion, experience or tradition is contrary to intellectual process. But it is the intellectual process that evaluates emotion, experience and tradition deciding what to keep and what to discard.

For those who want to read more this splendid article in it’s entirety, the link is here.