Friday, May 29, 2020

Christianity's intellectual problem

  Understand, I am not saying that Christians cannot be intellectual.  Many are, or were, such as C.S. Lewis, Thomas Aquinas, NT Wright, J.N.D. Kelly, Karlo Broussard, Brant Pitre (Pitre and Broussard are both southern, and Cajun at that, so much for stereotypes!) and many others. My French professor said (when I said that I like to read books), that I am (in French) very intellectual.  I think she gives me too much credit.
 I bring this up, because occasionally, I'll hear some Christians (usually Protestant, and, more specifically, Baptist), criticise philosophy.  Usually based on, I would say a misrepresentation, of Colossians 2:8.  Reading the verse in context, it seems to be a reference to a certain type of philosophy.  You have to remember, that the type of people that the Colossians would have been dealing with.  According to the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible that the term is used to refer to the Jewish way of life.  It goes on to say (not word for word), "it is true, that every philosophy that disregards or denounces what God reveals as true, etc is vain".   That being said, I want to point out, this is in no way universal amongst Baptists OR Protestants.  The fact that people mistake the word "intellectual" for atheist, is kind of a problem.  Christians NEED to be intellectual.  We need to know philosophy. Aristotelian metaphysics is more useful than you think.  If we can't tell people WHAT we mean by God, we are never going to convince them of his existence, and THIS requires philosophy. 

1 comment:

  1. Thank you, Adam. I actually believed that philosophy was “bad” because of what someone said. Now it’s cleared up for me.

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