The way of salvation —through Christ alone —is regarded as divisive, offensive, or simply unnecessary. Competing religious systems are set over and against Christianity as being more tolerant and more humane. Today, Christians are often labeled fundamentalist right-wing extremists. Unfortunately, due to the general intellectual weakness and pervasive theological ignorance of the church, this is a label that is all too often accurate. And more and more, all remnants of our nation’s Christian heritage are being systematically removed from the public square.

An Anti-Intellectual Spirit

Rather than engage these kinds of arguments and actions intelligently as 1 Peter 3:15 commands, many evangelicals continue to hide away under the mask of anti-intellectualism. Too many Christians think, Apologetics is too rationalistic, cerebral, intellectual, and abstract. I don’t need to try to rationally prove the existence of God or argue with others about whether or not He exists. I just need to show love and compassion. After all, what really matters is faith, hope, and love—not reason. Reason, they say, just gets in the way of faith, hope, and love. They follow God with their heart, not their head! Others will retreat into the abyss of fideism, saying, Religion is a matter of faith and cannot be argued by reason —one must simply believe. Faith, they think, is a blind leap in the dark, devoid of any rational reasons. They argue that faith and reason stand opposed to one another. This might account for the lack of biblical literacy evident among so many professing Christians today. Recently George Barna reported that “75 percent of Americans believe that the Bible teaches that ‘God helps those who help themselves’”!²

This same attitude is to blame for the overwhelming absence of a consciously Christian life and worldview within the church, without which the Christian lacks the necessary theological framework for analyzing, understanding, and addressing every aspect of life, society, and culture from a coherent biblical philosophy. I will address this in greater detail later.

Nonetheless, this anti-intellectual attitude simply flies in the face of what the Bible teaches. We are commanded to “always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15, NKJV) or to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God . . . [taking] captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). This passage in 2 Corinthians is critical and is one we often either misunderstand or misapply. The apostle Paul is urging Christians to engage in intellectual discourse and persuasive debate whenever they find themselves confronted by false ideas that contradict the biblical understanding of life and reality. This passage is not to be understood in purely individualistic or private terms related to taking our own thoughts captive; we need to understand the ideas and thoughts of others that keep them from the knowledge of the truth. Practically speaking, this means we are to be actively engaged in pressing God’s truth into every aspect of life and the world. N. T. Wright was helpful in further explaining the Christian’s proper relationship to the world in which he or she lives:

The new life of the Spirit, to which Christians are called in the present age, is not a matter of sitting back and enjoying the spiritual comforts in a private, relaxed, easygoing spirituality, but consists rather of the unending struggle in the mystery of prayer, the struggle to bring God’s wise, healing order into the world now, in implementation of the victory of the cross and anticipation of the final redemption.³ (emphasis added)