What’s the point of evangelical intellectualism?

Following on from Tim Suffield’s article, which I responded to here, Rhys Laverty has followed on with a further attempt to make the same case, that we need evangelical intellectuals and that the way we should go about making this happen is for churches to support these intellectuals. 

Now, I think both articles suffer from the same handicap. It starts with a failure to provide evidence for the big claims. These include particularly the argument that evangelicals are anti-intellectual.  What is the evidence for this apart from that one frustrated author once managed to make a best seller book out of the claim that the scandal of the evangelical mind was that there wasn’t one.  The claim just feels like one of those statements that become truer the more repeated.

It is more likely that given the size of evangelicalism that you are going to have a range of people with different backgrounds, gifting and temperament. Some will have curious and enquiring minds, some will tend towards the cerebral.  Others will not.

Secondly Rhys claims that we are soon about to see historic universities closing.  I’m again not sure on what basis he is claiming this.  Some evidence would be handy.  It is possible that we will see the number of universities reduce if we see a short fall in student numbers due to demographic changes but this does follow hard on a significant and explosive expansion in higher education.  Indeed, the church survived fine with just one or two universities for many years.

However, of greater importance is this.  I don’t think that either Rhys or Tim have made a case for why we need Christian theologians/intellectuals.  That, perhaps apart from that pastors tend to have books by academics on their shelves.  It is worth asking though whether those books are specifically useful because they are by academics or because of their content and whether it is simply a case, that those men and women have more time to study and to write than others.

It is also worth noting that primarily the kind of thing we are consulting is commentaries.  If we have other books on our shelves, that tends to be out of interest, rather than necessarily dependence.  The reason we tend to consult commentaries is to check up on exegetical questions around translation, syntax and grammar, to see what conclusions different people who have worked on the Greek and Hebrew texts have come to.  Often frustratingly, the commentaries will be inconclusive, especially on the big issues that you really want a conclusion on.  Sometimes, they are intentionally so. There’s nothing more frustrating than wading through the commentary only to be told that the author doesn’t see it as their job to answer the question you specifically were asking.  “That’s for systematic theologians and pastors” they say.

Furthermore, it’s worth observing that the need here isn’t for lots of new theologians with new and novel ideas. In fact, there’s a level of work generation involved in that.  It’s only because a couple of academics came up with some novel theories about justification that we have needed lots of other academics to reign in the wilder theories, often ending up somewhere close to where we were before and often very close to what the average pastor had already worked out through a mixture of pastoral application and preaching through books of the Bible.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for theologians or for the pursuit of academic gifts and interests, not least that this can be a way of enjoying God and glorifying him.  However, I am not convinced that Rhys or Tim have really made the case yet.

Now, if they were just writing their blogs and chatting about interesting stuff that is in their heads, then that would be fair enough. However, they are making a pitch here. They are saying “give towards the personal support of academics” and when resources are finite the converse of that has to be “don’t give towards church planting, pastoral staff, missionary work or charitable deeds.”  This means that the onus is much more on them to explain why it is so important for us to support evangelical theologians through patronage.  As of yet I’ve not heard that case made.