ARE WE ANTI-INTELLECTUAL?
By DAVID REAGAN

As a college professor, I am deeply committed to the search for truth. It is this search which motivates and inspires all my intellectual endeavors.

As a Christian, I am deeply committed to the Truth, Jesus Christ the Son of God. It is this commitment, this faith, which sustains my life and gives it meaning and beauty.

I see no conflict between these two commitments.

I believe that God endowed me with an intellect and that He intended for me to use it. And in the use of it, I do not believe that he intended any questions to be off-limits—even the question of His own existence.

For God does not desire the worship and service of robots. If He did, He could have created at the beginning of time a million legions of angels and commanded them to worship him throughout all the endless ages of eternity. Instead, He created Man, “in the image of God created He him,” giving unto Man an eternal spirit and an intellect, a free will mind, with which man could choose to honor or rebuke his Creator.

And Man has been using his mind ever since, too often arrogantly to the wrath of God, occasionally humbly to the joy of God. But God expects Man to use his mind, for the faith can never be the product of ignorant dogma, superstition, or fear. It can only emanate from intellectual conclusion.

As long as I believed in the Lord Jesus because my Mother wanted me to believe, or my Father encouraged me to believe, or my friends pressured me to believe, or my minister scared me to believe—my faith was anxious and my life failed to reflect the love of Jesus. I attended the services of the church regularly, but I did so because it was expected of me and because I thought this was the premium that had to be paid for the Christian eternal life insurance policy. Like so many others around me, I was a weekend Christian, and my week day life continued to be engulfed in selfishness.

It was only when I began to question, when I began to think, that Christianity began to have any real meaning. I questioned everything. Does God exist? Was Jesus a hoax? Is life a joke? I questioned and questioned and questioned, and out of this I developed a faith in the Lord that transcended any belief which I had ever held before.

My life was transformed, for Christianity became a way of life rather than a weekend worship service or a dogmatic creed. Anxiety was replaced with joy as I began to break out of my shell and reach out to love and serve my fellow man.

My questioning continues. My faith grows. My intellect serves as a tool of my faith.

My experience reminds me of the interlocking theory of knowledge developed by the theologian, Thomas Aquinas. Living in a dark age when faith and reason were considered incompatible, Aquinas braved the censure of the Church to argue that faith and knowledge could never be in real conflict since they were both of divine origin. Empirical inquiry could only serve therefore to buttress man’s faith in God. It might undermine and even destroy false doctrines of the Church, but it could never challenge the citadels of truth contained in God’s revelation to man. It was this central idea which ultimately led to the liberation of the mind that in turn produced the Renaissance and the Reformation.

In like manner, another great intellectual, a secular one, John Stuart Mill, writing in the 1850’s in his remarkable essay On Liberty, argued powerfully that intellectual truth-seeking is essential not only to the maintenance of freedom (his major thesis) but is also crucial to the vitality of religious faith. Cautioning against the naive acceptance of the sacredness of orthodox religious doctrines, Mill asserted that even the strongest held religious opinions need to be “fully, frequently, and fearlessly” discussed if they are to be prevented from degenerating into dead dogma. “There is a class of people,” he observed, “who think it enough if a person assents undoubtingly to what they think is true, though he has no knowledge whatever of the grounds of the opinion, and could not make a tenable defense of it against the most superficial objections. Such persons, if they can once get their creed taught from authority, naturally think that no good, and some harm, comes of its being allowed to be questioned . . . This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition . . .”

The mutual compatibility of faith and reason thus emerges as a lesson of personal experience, history, and logic.

Nonetheless, our Restoration Brotherhood has long been characterized by its hostility toward the questioning mind, and as a result we have developed a reputation for a sort of fundamentalist anti-intellectualism. This is a cruel paradox, for the Restoration Movement was born in a surge of intellectual ferment in which brilliant minds revolted against established religion and questioned many of its most sacred assumptions.

But somewhere along the line the momentum of the Restoration Movement was lost. The momentum was exchanged for a monument which we built to ourselves. The Restoration Movement became an end rather than a means.

Smugness and complacency crept in, and combined with the inevitable arrogance and pride, the quest for truth was strangled. Faith in Him became secondary to faith in Us. We were the one and only true church. We had the infallible interpretation of the scriptures. And, of course, we had the secret to salvation.

We began to play God. And when men play God, they become intolerant. And intolerance leads to division. And so, we began to splinter into two dozen or more little groups, each one intent upon proving its own credentials as the one and only true representative of the New Testament church.

Sectarianism became our life blood. We devoted our energies to vicious invective aimed at those whom we had formerly considered brethren in the Lord, but who were now labeled as “Heretics,” or “Liberals,” or “Antis,” or “Regressives.” We even raided their congregations to save their converts. And let us not forget that from behind the walls which we had built around ourselves, we pompously condemned the Protestant world for its division while all the time piously claiming that we were “nondenominational.” (May the Lord forgive us of our childish blindness!)

It was only natural, of course, that within such a fractured and bleeding atmosphere of acute legalism and sectarianism the emphasis should come to be placed upon blind creedal conformity as the fundamental test of faith. Needless to say, such a perverted concept of Christian faith depended upon a spirit of anti-intellectualism for its very existence. Thus, we created an intellectual straitjacket for our members. Faith became dogma, and faith withered to a pitiful sore of hopeful anxiety.

Thanks be to the Lord for opening our eyes! Thanks be to Him for the new breath of life that is stirring within the Restoration brotherhood today. The sectarian heritage is being renounced. We are returning to the ideals of those who founded the Movement, and in doing so, we are breaking the shackles of legalism and anti-intellectualism.

But it is not easy. Like prisoners liberated from a dungeon, the process of adjusting to the light is painful. The new freedom is even frightening, and so some, the security of the dungeon is preferable. But for most, the taste of freedom will be irreversible.

Yes, we are headed in the right direction, and we are making great strides, but we need to be constantly reminded that we have not yet broken all the chains of our former bondage. Many of the old habits and attitudes are tugging at us to return to the false security which exists behind the sectarian walls. And certainly one of these is the spirit of anti-intellectualism.

There can be no doubt that the anti-intellectualism which characterized the church of my youth has definitely waned in its fanatical intensity. Among our brethren today, higher education—even in the Bible—has become respectable. Harvard is seldom ever condemned anymore as the citadel of religious subversion, and our young people who are graduates of the northeastern schools are no longer automatically dismissed as “educated fools.” Non-inspired literature is accepted for study in Bible classes. Every man who can lead in prayer is no longer handed a New Testament and urged immediately to become a full time minister. Yet, I would contend that only the intensity of the feeling has diminished, for I am convinced that the Restoration Brotherhood still remains in the grips of anti-intellectualism.

The evidence of this fact is abundant. Take for example the problem of preacher training. We have at least come to the realization that some degree of academic preparation for prospective ministers is desirable, if not essential, in a society (and a brotherhood) with a rapidly increasing educational level; but our response to this realization has been incredible. We have rushed to establish “Schools of Preaching” in which individuals are crammed with creedal points supplemented with appropriate memory verses. Modern theology is ignored as “modernism,” and little, if any, exposure is given to psychology and philosophy, despite the fact that both of these subjects are indispensable tools for a 20th Century minister attempting to be relevant and useful in an urban society. The unfortunate result is that graduation day too often gives birth to a polished sectarian who is ready to do battle in defense of his particular group’s infallibility, but who is woefully prepared to minister to the real needs of any urban congregation.

Our Christian Colleges are hardly better. They do attempt to provide their students with a broader education, but the result is anything but liberating to the mind. The approach is more akin to a process of propaganda in which the student is indoctrinated with the orthodox opinions on matters political, economic, social, and religious. Controversy is avoided like the plague. In fact, there is often a conscious effort to protect “the Faith” of the student body by attempting to isolate it from the mainstream of intellectual upheaval. Accordingly, “non Christian” speakers are taboo at chapel services, and this intellectual ban even extends to those persons who represent divergent viewpoints within the Restoration Brotherhood.

The yearly lectureships sponsored by the colleges thus stack up as nothing more than elaborately staged indoctrination festivals where the hierarchy’s viewpoint on each issue is propounded by carefully selected brotherhood spokesmen. Opposing viewpoints may be mentioned and will certainly be refuted with “airtight” logic, but the advocates of the opposing view will remain mute from the lack of an invitation to engage in dialogue.

This technique of thought control reminds me again of Mills’ essay On Liberty. Mill warned that the prevailing opinion on any matter, particularly religious matters, would inevitably deteriorate into dogma, prejudice, and empty mechanistic formula unless it is exposed regularly to the challenge of free discussion:

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion . . . Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.

It should be noted in passing that the blame for this tragically stifling intellectual environment of our Christian Colleges cannot be placed entirely upon the shoulders of the administrators. To a great extent, they are simply catering to the wishes of their clientele. They are well aware that the parents of their students want their young people to be protected from the “liberal theories” which predominate at the state universities. They know too that the parents expect the colleges to serve as “defenders-of-the-faith.”

Evidence of this constituency awareness is to be found in the massive public relations campaign which one of our leading Christian Colleges felt obliged to finance recently before the establishment of its new graduate divinity school. The campaign had a dual purpose. It was designed first of all to convince the brotherhood of the need for such a program. But it was also aimed at allaying fears that the program would liberalize the faith by concentrating more on theology than Bible “fundamentals.” The implementation of the program was such a delicate undertaking that it was considered prudent to discard the traditional name for the degree—Bachelor of Divinity—since it was feared that the very title would conjure up visions of “modernism.”

Inevitably, the sermons delivered by the average products of our Preaching Schools and Christian Colleges are steeped in anti-intellectualism. In fact, many of our pulpits tend to be intellectual wastelands. Sunday after Sunday our congregations are still bombarded with worm worn cliches from orthodox sermon outline books. Either the “plan of salvation” is rattled off with machine gun precision in phrases that could be chanted in unison or else a creedal point is hammered home with legalistic gymnastics befitting a latter day Clarence Darrow. Thought provoking lessons of substance are rarely heard. Hardly anyone takes the time to prepare a mature discussion of the nature of Jesus, the operation of the Holy Spirit, the concept of redemption, or the essence of Christian love.

Nor does anyone seem to really care about grappling with the vital and complex problems of living in a world of social revolution and rapidly changing values. Let’s face it, we are irrelevant. “We are majoring in minors and minoring in majors.” We have a fixation about preaching the “plan of salvation” over and over again to audiences in which 90% of the people have already responded to the plan—and the remaining 10% are children who are too young to do so.

We are caught up in a breakdown of law and order, a moral nosedive, and the greatest social revolution that the modern world has ever experienced, yet our ministers drone on and on about … well, about what? Is it any wonder that our young people are dropping out and that our faithful regulars seem bored stiff?

Our people are hungering and thirsting for relevance. They are seeking meaning within a society that appears to be falling apart at the seams. Yet, we avoid social topics, political issues, and ethical questions, for these are controversial, and furthermore, they smack of the intellectualism of the social gospel advocates. In our fear of becoming so identified with the world that we cannot speak to it, we have become so utterly remote that we are equally incapable of speaking.

Another place where our anti-intellectualism shows is in our Bible school publications which we have the audacity to call “educational materials.” Most of the adult quarterlies which are currently being utilized by our congregations are nothing more than propaganda pamphlets geared to a junior high school mentality.

Our “study” of the Bible is wholly uncritical. We search the scriptures diligently not for the purpose of finding the truth, but for proving the truth that we think we have already found. Thus we focus endlessly on superficial proof texts rather than probing the scriptures in depth for their spiritual meat.

Equally distressing is the pathetic way we tend to worship the King James version of the Bible. Despite the voluminous errors of this translation and despite significant advances in Greek scholarship and textural criticism in recent years, we continue to cling nostalgically to this “inspired” version whose cryptic and mysterious English serves as the fundamental legal basis for many of our equally cryptic doctrines.

We denounced the Revised Standard Version as “Communist inspired” and even joined in efforts to slander the reputations of many of its scholarly translators. But the recent flood of new translations has overwhelmed us, and so we have begun to retreat somewhat from our dogmatic defense of the King’s English of 1611. Some of the more enlightened of our brethren have sought refuge in the American Standard translation, although its literalness often results in grammatical monstrosities that make the King James version appear rather modern. We can’t quite seem to grasp the idea that the art of translation involves far more than a simple word for word interchange of Greek and English equivalents.

This attitude toward the Bible contributes to the intensity of the strongest continuing manifestation of our anti-intellectualism, which includes the attitude of our leaders toward science. We have declared war on science, and we have demanded nothing less than unconditional surrender. An example of this is the attack upon the theory of evolution. It seems to me that the exact age of the earth and the date of man’s origin are irrelevant, for the purpose of Genesis is not to tell the how and the when, but to show that God was the Creator. Nothing in the record requires us to argue that the earth is but 6,000 years old, and has not science proved that the earth is much older?

All this creates a credibility gap for our young people, which causes them to doubt other of our interpretations.

What are we going to do if the theory of evolution is proved? Even more traumatic, what will be our response to the synthesis of life? Will we withdraw from reality completely and paranoically deny such scientific accomplishments, as the Christian Scientists have done with respect to the germ theory of disease? We must realize that we have nothing to fear from science, and that the advances of science have a salutary effect upon religion.

There is no way around the conclusion that in an age of higher education and space exploration, a religious faith clinging desperately and pathetically to intellectual indoctrination and the principles of pre-Newtonian science is bound to appear irrelevant and futile.

We have simply got to come to the realization that no one has a monopoly on the truth. That there is ultimate truth there can be no doubt. But man is fallible, and his fallibility produces error. Many of the “truths” which we hold so dear today will no doubt be laughed at tomorrow as nothing more than old wives tales and childish superstitions. The most that we can do is devote ourselves to the search for truth, and that search requires a never-ending process of critical self-evaluation.

This is not a plea for a transformation of the church into an egghead’s philosophical society. It is only a plea for openness. If we are so confident that we have arrived at the truth, why should we be so fearful of subjecting that truth to the test of reasoned inquiry?

Let us, therefore, throw dogma to the wind and cease our stifling of discussion and our creedalizing of thought. Let us welcome the liberating effect of education, and let us repent for those whom we have banished for daring to think. Let us revitalize our religion by replacing our dead faith in a sectarian creed with a vibrant faith in a living Savior who loved the truth and died that it might triumph.—Austin College, Sherman, Texas