the intellect and the Christian faith

intro
i'm thinking along the lines of something akin to shell silverstein's 'where the sidewalk ends.' except here i'm thinking about my brain, your brain, the intellect in general. ray stedman (1917 - 1992), who graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary and pastored short-term at Lincoln Avenue Presbyterian Church of Pasadena, CA -- in which i will soon arrive(!!) -- spoke on the intellect and faith in his sermon 'God's Nonsense' (April 2, 1978). ...he begins in I Corinthians:

Scripture

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.' Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisom of hte world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe (RSV). ~I Corinthians 1.17-21~

not anti-knowledge/anti-intellect

...Stedman first provides a disclaimer, assuring us that he is not anti-intellectual: 'Knowledge is the discovery of truth, and God always encourages it. He gave us minds to use. There is nothing anti-intellectual in the Scriptures. I want to make that very clear. God has set man on a search to unravel and discover the millinos of secrets he has midden in the universe, many of the greatest, I am sure, yet undiscovered. Man is given the gift of reaon to search these out. To investigate into any realm of knowledge is perfectly right and proper. To give yourself to a discovery of the laws of physics(!!) and what is behind matter is perfectly right. To give yourself to investigation of the wonders of the human body, of medicine and pathology, is perfectly right. To set yourself to discover the secrets of the stars, or the secrets of the workings fo the human mind and the psyche in psychology -- these are all perfectly right. But that is knowledge, the discovery of truth.

wisdom

'Wisdom is the use of truth. ...Scripture says there is something faulted about human wisdom -- it does not know how to use truth. All truth discovered through human knowledge is misused, abused, twisted, distorted, and, therefore, we end up worse off than we were before. Now, I think this needs to be said today in a university community such as we have right here. It needs to be especially emphasized because so many Christians begin to worship human wisdom and to feel that secular writers know more about some of these matters applying to the use of knowledge than Christians do. And there is no question that many secular writers do know a great deal more about the discovery of truth than do many Christians. But what we must clearly understand, and what this great passage will help us understand, is that when it comes to the applications of truth, secular minds are juvenile, for the most part. They are twisted; they do not know what to do with their knowldge, and so are a lot of Christians who follow along these same paths and who have not approached the use of truth from the revelation and the wisdom of the Word of God.'

Stedman quotes Winston Churchill

Certain it is that while men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement as the centuries have rolled. Under sufficient stress, starvation, terror, warlike passion, or even cold, intellectual frenzy, the modern man we know so well will do the most terrible deeds....

the rest of that Corinthians passage

...it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified.... For the follishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. ~I Corinthains 1.21-25

STEDMAN'S POINT:

'...Recently in the newspaper [there were] reports of the discovery of a shroud, marked with the image of a man, that is supposedly the burial shroud of Jesus. It immediatly evoked tremendous popular attention. Why? Because something about us wants to demand that God perform a miracle or else we will not believe. We are right back to where the citizens of Nazareth were when Jesus came among them. They asked him to do a sign, but he would not do it because of their unbelief. To the proud men who demand miracles and to the foolish intellectuals who insist on explanation or else they will not believe, God gives the same answer -- the story of a crucified Messiah is held out to them as their only hope for deliverance. It is preached by the same kind of men and women as they themselves are, not brilliant people, not great, trained inds, not deep-thinking philosophers, but common, ordinary citizens, housewives, slaves, artisans, craftsmen, whoever, anybody can preach the story of a crucified Messiah. And yet that story, believed in, effectively accomplisheds what the wisdom of man and the power of man connot do -- salvation; people are actually delivered from themselves.

my point:

and this is the definition of Christianity: deliverance from self. it seems this is what distinguishes Christianity from Islam or Hinduism which are still anthropomorphic. Buddhism comes the closest to relief from self, but -- in my very humble opinion - Buddhism offers very little...since it in fact offers only nothing and leaves its adherants with no real answer to the basic human quest for meaning.

...personal postscript: and perhaps i am being delivered from myself as i experience a sense of loss of control to a dgree i've never yet known. i don't have control over finding a job. i don't have control over relationships. i don't have control over my trip's success at fuller (i'm leaving tomorrow to visit Fuller Seminary in SoCal and am hoping this visit will clarify my future). i can't predict the various outcomes of staying in the house i'm at or moving to a cheaper but less ideal location... nor the acceptance or declination of an americorps i was awarded. i don't even have satisfactory control over my own beliefs as life rattles them with my everyday confrontations with very different cultural norms, spanning from the most conservative of Christian cultures to the most secular of cultures... and it confuses me because -- though all is permissible, as Paul says -- not all is acceptable, so i'm finding my situation difficult to normalize in and adapt to. ...today i officially came to the end of myself. and somehow i think this is a good thing.