Intellectual Disciplship

                The other day I was reading a post by the president of the seminary I go to (Al Mohler, for those who are interested) and I came across a phrase that he used and it has been sticking with me for about a week.  The phrase in which he employed was “Intellectual Discipleship”.  This has really got me to think about health of this type of discipleship and how it is being fostered in the church.  I feel like this is an area of the church that is really struggling.  Let me lay out a clear definition of this type of discipleship.  Merriam-Webster defines intellect as “the capacity for rational or intelligent thought especially when highly developed.”  Now before I continue any further I need to be clear that if any of this is not done for the glory of God then it is empty much like I think that you could participate in a bible study and not be doing it for the glory of God, you could be going to church and not be doing it for the glory of God, and you could even be doing “apologetics” and not doing it for the glory of God.  After making that Caveat what do I think are some of the contributing factors of the failure of intellectual discipleship?  The first being an increasing disparity between knowledge and information, second is that we are on the heals of a weird hodge-podge of post-modern-emergent-seeker-sensitive-liberalism that serves to do nothing but engage itself in radical deconstructionalism and foster environments where the “in” thing is to have existential crisis.  After careful understanding of this I would like to offer an exhortation to the brothers out there that one of most God-honoring things that we can do is offer our minds to God as a sacrifice to him and to stir one another up in this fashion as well.

                In the world known as my facebook there are as many 20 updates of all shapes and sizes in an hour.  There are so many things going on with my friends it is hard to keep up but therein lies the issue because how does one person keep up with all that?  That is just one microcosm of what is going on out there.  How am I supposed to keep up with everything that is going on in the world of blogs, newspapers, news sources, the markets, and The Minnesota Wild?  Now before I make my point I am in no way decrying or saying that we should abandon all these things because the same internet that I can get great God exalting resources I can use it for sinful behavior as well.  What I am questioning is the lack of thoughtful interaction with these mediums more specifically through careful digestion of the material.  The resultant flood of information makes a thorough understanding of the material nearly impossible.  This coupled with the pressure of “keeping up with the Joneses” in the world of information economy where the faster someone breaks the news the better.  What I fear from this trend is that there is more information out there than one knows what to do with but I feel it is coming at a great expense to true knowledge.  Where I fear this happening the most is in the world of Christianity because I feel like there is so much information about God but there is little true biblically-defined-intimate knowledge of God.  The question is how does intellectual discipleship help us in making sure that the ship gets righted?  I think fostering an environment where there is careful reflection on things that are presented to us because if this doesn’t happen then there is a risk of being bombarded to the point where our discernment defense is depleted and the enemy will seek to persuade us with arguments that Paul would say are “plausible” but are not the truth.

                The next area of failure that I would like to consider is what/where we have come from in the past 30 years in the church and some of the spillover/unintended consequences that have resulted in the diminishing of intellectual discipleship.  There has been a strange epistemological shift that we have witnessed in the past 30 in the church.   Epistemology, for those who are unaware is the study of knowledge.  There are a couple of movements within the church that I feel like have contributed to this crisis.  Before I go any further I feel I should digress for a moment and say what I think is the crisis that we are facing.  For some reason that is beyond me certain people in the name of “humility” in the camps that I am going to name have found it necessary to question doctrines/methods via deconstructing them and actually replacing certainty with doubt.

                One of the most alarming things I have read is that one of the leaders of the emerging movement was writing and questioning the importance of believing in the virgin birth of Christ.  The way that he presented it was if we were to find out that Jesus had and earthy father would that change our beliefs.  He also presented the fact that for him it would not because to him the virgin birth is not essential to his faith.  I think that would have far reaching implications because that would mean that the bible is filled with lies and that God is a liar.  The next implication is that then Christ would not be a perfect sacrifice because then there would have been the passage of sin from his earthly father to him. And that there would be a remnant of sin left that is not atoned for which would mean that we are still in our sins.  To me what good does it to question this when I think God has clearly established this in the bible.  The thing that worries me is that if for him that is not an essential to his belief as a Christian then what is?  This is just a microcosm of the movement as a whole.  The methodology in their epistemological constructs looks something like this: “humbly” question something, deconstruct it, not replace it with anything, and call those who stand for the particular position that has been established narrow-mined-oppressive-bigots who “get off” on being exclusive.  The true irony of the whole thing is that those who stand for truth and defend it are often called intolerant but where most people don’t travel is the philosophical layer underneath that when they who claim intolerance against us they are actually intolerance of our intolerance.

                During my junior year of college I attended a seemingly ironic church where it completely lacked what the church was called.  It was your traditional seeker-sensitive church where you could bring your friends and there would be nothing controversial said and the types of things the pastor would talk about were things that were shallow.  For instance we would talk about marriage and most of the things that would be said would be mere platitudes with some scripture sprinkled in.  There is a lack of confidence in the sufficiency of scripture.  I would always walk away feeling like I learned about more about me, my problems and how to solve them.  That is precisely the issue because my knowledge base was about me and strictly terminated upon me.  For those of you who are cursed to know me will state that I am boring compared to God.  There was no confrontation of the Holy which left me fine in who I was and that is what the goal of the devil is because when we are confronted with the Holy then things must change because we realize how truly inadequate we are.  Don’t believe me ask Moses after Sinai, ask Isaiah after Uzziah died, ask Paul when he was confronted on the road to Damascus, and ask John when he was on Patmos.  When we are confronted with ourselves there is only temporal change which the devil can still have a foothold in.  When we are confronted with God the eternal changes and that is something the devil cannot effect because who can separate us from the love of God?  The seeker-sensitive movement is so detrimental because it seeks to deconstruct the confrontation with the Holy because they fear that if people are confronted that they will turn away and not come back.  However, Jesus says that my sheep hear my voice and that if we are faithfully expositing scripture the scripture itself will separate bone from marrow and lead people to changed lives that are eternal not just temporal.

                In Romans, Paul says to offer our bodies as living sacrifices to God because this is your spiritual act of worship.  This is means our minds too.  I think that a lot of people when reading that think that Paul is just talking heart and hands or affections and works.  However the mind is a critical thing in the act of discipleship because it serves to instruct those other areas.  I see a real need for this instruction because I think that to have the mind deepened in the knowledge of God through careful meditaion of scripture, minds zealous for prayer, and taking every thought captive serves to expand the affections of the heart and hasten the work of the hands.  The detriments of the movements mentioned above have little to-do with this because they seek to make us overloaded-doubtful-shallow people.  However, we who are in Christ need not be ashamed of the Truth and we who are in Christ should be the most confident of Truth because our Master (the same who knows the exact number of snowflakes in the heavenly storehouses) has called us His friends and because of that we have been invited into the war-room and have seen the Heavenly battle-plan for eternity.  My prayer is that we would be people that the devil is afraid of because of our confidence is placed in the person whom Truth is embodied, that we would be the brightest lights in the universe, that we would stir one another up by throwing coals in the furnace of our brother’s minds so that they burn with zeal for truth.