Christian Intellectuals

Some conversations stay in your mind. Some twenty years later, I remember such a conversation with my wonderful cousin Elizabeth and her very smart then-husband, Peter.

It was about religion. And in one small part of it, Peter asked which American public intellectuals subscribed to Christianity. At the time, I had no answer.

1. A glib answer.

Since then, I have wondered whether it was fair to direct toward me a question with the words "American" and "public intellectual" in it. But that answer is too glib.

2. Christianity is un-selfconsciously a religion for the simple.

A more serious answer would have been that Christianity should not be judged by a standard that it rejects. After all, Jesus knew that the simple would embrace what the sophisticated would reject. He thanked God for that; he prayed:

I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight. [Luke 10:21 (KJV).]

Christianity does not purport to rely on its intellectual attractiveness to draw believers. True, it does engage the mind. (When I was a Presbyterian, we used to say that that was what Presbyterians were for.) But there is, according to Christian doctrine, also an indispensable supernatural component to belief; and that is the work of the Holy Spirit ("Holy Ghost" in the KJV).

3. Faith depends upon more than our minds.

So, speaking to his disciples about his soon-to-come death, Jesus said:

But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. (John 14:26 (KJV).)

The Holy Spirit brings people to God. So the Fourth Century one-time rhetorician, Augustine of Hippo (Saint Augustine), in his Confessions, admitted that, intellectually, Christianity did not appeal to him, and Christian scripture seemed crude. But one day he was in a garden, and he heard a child’s voice say, "Take up and read!" Christian scripture lay nearby, and he took it up and read it. It suddenly absorbed him, and he became a believer. He believed that voice to have been supernatural. His mother had long prayed for him.

4. But sometimes believers over-depend upon their minds.

Sometimes, I think that we believers purport to rely upon our minds to navigate faith rather than hope in the Holy Spirit to tether us to God.

It seems to me that the particular way in which fundamentalists interpret scripture has some relationship to a habit of not crediting enough the intervention of the Holy Spirit. Fundamentalists impose on the Bible a simplistic, literalist hermeneutic: the universe was created in seven days, Noah took every species into an ark, and so forth. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe this concept of fundamentalism would be rejected by fundamentalists, but I have the sense that fundamentalists tether their whole faith to the Bible. And therefore the idea is very threatening to them, the idea that the Bible might not be entirely trustworthy in the way that they understand trustworthy, which is to say, literally true.

5. When we over-rely on reason, we resemble un-believers.

I have a sense that fundamentalists crave a way to consume scripture with the mind, and only with the mind, and without the active help of the Holy Spirit to navigate the complex thickets of scripture. Non-Christian intellectuals are like-minded with fundamentalists, in that they may be enthralled with the sufficiency of the mind. Perhaps Thomas Paine represents the non-Christian intellectual in pure form. The Age of Reason (1794) is his conversation about religion. At its outset, he writes:

The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.

But a bridge to God cannot be built upon intellect alone. Faith is not built upon that rock. In fact, even though I have surmised that the fundamentalists are over-focused on the Bible and on a particular way to read the Bible, I have no doubt that the Holy Spirit moves in them and guides their minds.

6. But faith should fully-engage the mind.

But, all that said, the intellect should be fully engaged in belief. Some of the best Biblical teaching that I personally have heard is from a fundamentalist preacher in Riverside. His preaching is excellent because he brings many skills to scripture, and he has a fine mind, and he teaches with a depth of knowledge.

7. A short list of Christian public intellectuals.

And twenty years after my conversation with Elizabeth and Peter, I now know of a handful of living public intellectuals who are believers. These are persons of publically-acknowledged intellectual accomplishment, who, in their writings or in their public statements, show their Christianity. None of these are religious professionals, such as professors of theology. I can list five:

Christian Wiman – poet, university teacher, and editor of the long-published magazine Poetry.

Marilynne Robinson – Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, and essayist. (Gilead)

Annie Dillard – Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction writer, and essayist. (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

Pat Buchanan – writer, political pundit, former presidential speech writer.

Jon Meacham – former Editor-in-Chief of Newsweek; Pulitzer Prize winner, biography. (American Lion: Andrew Jackson)