Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God by John Piper & Mark A. Noll

Author:John Piper & Mark A. Noll
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion
ISBN: 9781433520716
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2010-09-14T22:00:00+00:00

9What I mean by rationalistic is suggested by the way G. K. Chesterton warns us: “The madman is

not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his

reason.” “The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” In other words, the poet is “rational” the way I am using the term—he is humble enough to freely delight in what heaven really has to reveal.

Orthodoxy (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1959), 17–19.

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Facing the

Challenge of

Anti-intellectualism

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I do not undervalue education, but really I have seen

so many of these educated preachers who forcibly

reminded me of lettuce growing under the shade of a

peach tree, or like a gosling that had got the straddles

by wading in the dew, that I turn away sick and faint. . . .

Peter Cartwright

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9

Unhelpful Anti-intellectual

Impulses in Our History

Evangelist Billy Sunday, who died in 1935, spoke for many Christians

when he said, “If I had a million dollars I’d give $999,999 to the

church and $1 to education.”1 This might not be a bad idea if the

church took responsibility for education. But that’s not what he

meant. This is the voice of thousands who are deeply suspicious of

any emphasis on thinking in the pursuit of God—like the emphasis

of this book.

American Partners: Pragmatism and Subjectivism

The America that produced Billy Sunday was an America on its way

to the triumph of pragmatism and subjectivism. Not that Sunday

was unprincipled, but his hostility to the life of the mind diminished

the ability of the church to stand against destructive uses of the

mind—like pragmatism and subjectivism.

These two views have triumphed for many people in our cul-

ture—and in our churches.2 Subjectivism says that thinking is useful

1Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1962), 122.

2One of the best books documenting this is David Wells, No Place for Truth, Or: Whatever Happened

to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993). “Many of those whose task it is to broker

the truth of God to the people of God in the churches have now redefined the pastoral task such that theology has become an embarrassing encumbrance or a matter of which they have little knowl-Think.20716.i03.indd 119

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120 Facing the Challenge of Anti-intellectualism

as a means of justifying subjective desires. Pragmatism says that

thinking is useful as a means of making things work. To be sure,

these forces can produce striking achievements in science and busi-

ness and industry. But missing from both views is the conviction

that thinking is a gift of God, whose chief role is to pursue and love

and live by ultimate truth.

Pragmatism and subjectivism obscure the reality of truth. They

engage the mind, but they make it the servant of our desires and

our work. But they can’t answer which desires I should pursue and

which work is worthwhile. On this point Nicholas Wolterstorff,

who taught philosophy at Calvin College for thirty years and at Yale

University for fifteen years, wrote in

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