“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”
- Romans 12:2
Filed under: Atheism, C.S. Lewis, God, Philosophy, Video
Tuesday, August 26, 2008 • 5:15 am 0
Saving the Soul and Saving the Mind
In the autumn of 1980, Charles Malik, a distinguished academic and statesman delivered the inaugural address at the dedication of the new Billy Graham Center on the campus of Wheaton College. He told the his listeners we face two tasks in our evangelism, “saving the soul and saving the mind” – and the church, he warned, is falling dangerously behind with respect to the second task. We should do well to mediate on Malik’s words that are just as real in 2008 as in 1980:
I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have not idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history of philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does the evangelical mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominate mode in the great universities of Europe and America that stamp our entire civilization with their spirit and ideas? For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.
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Charles Malik, “The Other Side of Evangelism,” Christianity Today, November 7, 1980, p. 40. For the original address, see The Two Tasks (Wheaton, Ill.: Billy Graham Center, 2000).
Filed under: Evangelicalism, Evangelism, Philosophy
