It will take a different spirit altogether to overcome this great danger of anti-intellectualism.
The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. 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 no 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. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. Our churches are filled with people who are spiritually born again, but who still think like non-Christians. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. Malik emphasized that as Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. “No one has issued a more forceful challenge to Christians to become intellectually engaged than did Charles Malik, former Lebanese ambassador to the United States, in his address at the dedication of the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois. The following extracts from an excellent essay on the Reasonable Faith website ( ) provide some key ideas from this section. This section essentially deals with the idea that “apologetics is vital in fostering a cultural milieu in which the gospel can be heard as a viable option for thinking people.” The book is divided into the following sections.
This book is very much at the heavy end of the intellectual spectrum but has much interesting material for anyone wanting to delve very deeply into modern apologetics.Īpologetics is defined as the discipline that tries to answer the question: what rational warrant can be given for the Christian faith? "Reasonable Faith: Christian truth and apologetics" (William Lane Craig) - Crossway Books, 2008 edition
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