This is an independent blog and is not affiliated with any particular church, group or conference. The term Bruderthaler refers to a specific ethnic or cultural Mennonite heritage, not to any particular organized group. All statements and opinions are solely those of the contributor(s). Blog comprises notebook fragments from various research projects and discussions. Dialogue, comment and notice of corrections are welcomed. Much of this content is related to papers and presentations that might be compiled at a future date, as such, this blog serves as a research archive rather than as a publication. 'tag

Monday, April 8, 2013

Are Evangelicals anti-intellectual? (Part 2 of 3)

Spinoza courtesy samefacts.com
Steven Wall with Randy Smart


    Concepts of the intellect, the intellectual and the anti-intellectual are very complicated.  Airey’s essay might not set us up to deal with these topics properly.  

    We will first champion the new regard recently opened to Evangelical intellectualism and then discuss the Evangelical intellectual process (in Part 3).

    Intellectually, Evangelicals have often been their own worst enemies.  While thinking persons of faith have tended to be highly regarded in the 20th Century, the traditions they represent have not (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, C. S. Lewis, Corrie ten Boom).  In Anglo-American culture, uncontested faith in an unchanging, personable God arguably stalled with the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which opened the way for a secular explanation of the universe sans God and thereby birthed the "godless" Enlightenment.  Faith as a living process anchored by a rational God (including the basis of the Mennonite gemeinde) began to falter in 1914 with the beginning hostilities in World War I and the horrors which followed.  Arguably, the entire spectacle over the Scopes’ Monkey Trials of the 1920s were symptomatic of these stumbles, and not their cause.  Soviet atheism did not disprove God, but sought rather to replace God and inhabit (perhaps even control) that realm of the transcendent.


    Mennonites do not adhere to an English-based religious understanding.  We are joint-authors of and expounders upon the German alternative to the anti-faith English Enlightenment, being the Aufklarung which has been noted for fostering space for belief in faith, phenomenology and transcendentalism (all being the rational realm within which the concept of God abides).

    After the 1950s, Mennonites in North America tended to express their native European Mennonism and Evangelicalism in American terms.  The left, increasingly influenced by Chicago’s seminaries, Elmhurst and the Ivy League, led Mennonism into a rationalist retreat along the lines of contemporary Protestantism.  The right either merely opposed these influences or having been intellectually empowered by Bible college educations (after Moody’s model, again in Chicago), often fell in with American Fundamentalists.  This separated the diaspora into two groups that have not since been able to leave the side of their new intellectual allies (to the right or the left) in order to again behave as a unified Mennonite faith tradition. 

    The two extremes have much in common.  Both operate on the edge of materialism – the left, being unable to believe in a spiritual god and the right being unwilling to trust such a god.  Both adapted their respective theologies appropriately.

    In the middle, the Mennonites had two groups – the Mennonist Amish and Evangelical Mennonites (which could possibly include much of the Church of the Brethren), the two differing only in their definitions and placement of the role of the church community and of the individual in the spiritual growth process.  Regrettably, these two groups are the farthest apart culturally within the diaspora.

    Recently, faith in the transcendent has again become rational, therefore intellectual.  We no longer have to be skeptical of all things in order to be “intellectual”.  Quentin Meillassoux has reintroduced the concept of intellectual surety of knowledge.  Jan Verwoert, the international art theorist, recently noted that in the US, “social life is organized by two governmental technologies that should exclude, but in fact reinforce each other:  the modern secular state and pre-modern theocracy.  Religion, a force thought to be crushed and buried under the profanities of capitalism and atheist doctrines of socialism, has resurfaced as a thing of the past that shapes the present.”

    Is Verwoert referring to Fundamentalism?  Fundamentalism is faltering in America.  What he is describing is the Evangelical fellowship or the traditional Mennonist gemeinde.  We are not only rational, but we might be in danger of being hip.

    At the same time, charges of anti-intellectualism must still be confronted.  Evangelical Mennonites are not anti-intellectual, we are merely hesitant to give up a faith that is just as real to us as are rocks, sunshine and rain, just to fit in with a culturally foreign academic elite.  Similarly, while we maintain perhaps too much interest in the End Times theology of the Fundamentalists, the 20th Century was hard on us.  For most of it, we felt as though we were literally days if not minutes away from the man-made destruction of the world.  Yet, this interest was normally tempered by faith in God – Pre-Trib, Post-Trib, a-Millennial, our intellectual leaders never faltered in preaching that the shape of the future was irrelevant to the context and content of our faith in the here-in-now within which we lived.  Similarly, an understanding that the Genesis accounts were historical was most often tempered by a humility in understanding that we were not there and we do not seemingly always comprehend the mind or vocabulary of God.  Our faith is not in 24-hour days, it is placed in a living Savior.

    Rather than listing a roster of intellects including Isaac Peters, Jacob C. Wall, Alma Döring, Ulah Kliewer, Ernie Toews, O. J. Wall, A. P. Toews, John R. Dick, George P. Schultz, A. F. Wiens, Paul Kuhlmann, and by extension, P. M. Friesen, Calvin W. Redekop and others too numerous to name, a simple and consistent theology might suffice as demonstration of a vital, intellectual faith – our commitment to reaching the world for Christ, that unlike our despairing Fundamentalist brothers and sisters, entails a commitment to reaching beyond conversion into the realm of establishing schools, trade centers, hospitals, vernacular Bibles, farms, communities and colleges and choosing to live while challenging the anti-historical faith of those to the left who exiled God to the past, or to the right, who exiled God to a prophetic future. 

    The intellectual faith heritage of Evangelical Mennonites, like that of our Amish cousins, was not sacrificed in order to become current with the ideas of others or to be welcomed within their society.  This is not anti-intellectualism, but rather a consistent focus on the things of God rather than on the fleeting intellectual fads of the world.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Mennonite Culture

606 agriculture AIMM Alcohol Alt-Oldenburger Amish Amish Prayer Amish voyeurism Anniversary of Russian Mennonites Architecture Archives Athletes Baptism Bess und Bettag Bible Study Bluffton College BMC Bob Jones University Bruderthaler Burial Customs Camp Funston Canadian Government Catherine the Great CCC Chaco Civil Rights Colonist Horse Congo Inland Mission Conscientious Objectors Consensus Cultural Criticism Death decals Definitions Dialogue diaspora Discipline Discrimination Divorce Drama Drugs Easter Emergent Church Movement ethnic violence Ethnicity Evangelical Mennonite Brethren Evangelical Mennonites Evangelicals exile Famine Fastpa folk art Footwashing Frente Menonita Front for the Defense of the Mennonite Colonies Furor mennoniticus Gardens gay Gay Marriage Gelassenheit Gemeinshaft Gender Studies General Conference German German Bible Gnadenfelde Goshen School Grace School grief Halodomar hate crimes Heirloom Seeds HMS Titanic Holocaust Holy Kiss Horses Hymns Identity Formation identity politics Immigration Immigration Song Inquisition Inter-faith Mennonites Jewish Diaspora Kairos Kleine Gemeinde Krimmer Mennonites Language LGBT Lustre Synthesis Lutheran and Mennonite Relations Magistracy Marriage Martyrs' Mirror MC-USA MCC Kits Mennonite Brethren Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Mennonite Decals Mennonite Diaspora Mennonite farming innovations Mennonite Flag Mennonite Heritage Plants Mennonite Horse Mennonite Identity Mennonite Literature Mennonite Refugees Mennonite Women Missions Molotschna Cattle Breed Movies Music Non-resistance Pacifism photography Pietism Plautdietsch Flag Plautdietsche Poetry Politics Postmodernism quilts Radio refugees Rites Roman Catholic and Mennonite Relations Roman Catholicism Russian Mennonite Flag Russian Mennonites Russian Orthodox Church secularism Shunning Southern Baptists Taxation Television Ten Thousand Villages Terms Viki-leaks Water Dowsing Wenger Mennonites Women's Studies World War 2 World War I

People

A. F. Wiens (1) A. H. Leahman (1) A. J. Wall (1) Abraham Gerber (1) Abram Groening (1) Adam Carroll (2) AIMM (3) Albert Wall (7) Allison Mack (1) Anne-Marie Goertzen Wall (1) Annie C. Funk (1) Aron Wall (1) B. F. Hamilton (1) Benjamin Mubenga (1) Benjamin Sprunger (1) Bernhard Dueck Kornelssen (1) Berry Friesen (1) Bitter Poets (3) Bob Jones University (2) Brandon Beachy (1) Brendan Fehr (1) Bruce Hiebert (1) C. Henry Niebuhr (1) C. R. Voth (1) Calvin Redekop (3) Carolyn Fauth (3) CBC News (1) Charles King (1) Chris Goertzen (1) Connie Mack (1) Corrie ten Boom (1) Dale Suderman (2) Daniel Friesen (1) Danny Klassen (1) David Classen (1) Dennis Wideman (1) Diane Driedger (3) Dick Lehman (1) Donald Kraybill (1) Donald Plett (1) Dora Dueck (1) Dustin Penner (1) Dwaine and Nancy Wall (1) Edna Ruth Byler (1) Eduard Wust (1) Elliott Tapaha (1) Elvina Martens (1) Eric Fehr (1) Esther K. Augsburger (1) Ethel Wall (1) Frente Menonita (1) Fritz and Alice Wall Unger (1) Gbowee (1) Georg Hansen (1) George P. Schultz (3) George S. Rempel (1) George Schultz (1) Gordon C. Eby (1) Goshen College (4) Gus Stoews (1) H. C. Wenger (1) H. F. Epp (1) Harold S. Bender (1) Heidi Wall Burns (2) Helen Wells Quintela (1) Henry Epp (1) Henry Toews (1) Ian Buruna (1) Isaac Peters (6) J. C. Wall (3) J. T. Neufeld (2) Jakob Stucky (1) James Duerksen (1) James Reimer (1) Jason Behr (1) Jeff Wall (1) Jim Kuebelbeck (1) Joetta Schlabach (2) Johann F. Kroeker (1) John Howard Yoder (1) John Jacob Wall (1) John R. Dick (1) John Rempel (1) John Roth (1) Jonathan Groff (1) Jonathan Toews (2) Jordi Ruiz Cirera (1) Kathleen Norris (4) Kelly Hofer (3) Kevin Goertzen (1) Keystone Pipeline (3) Leymah Gbowee (1) Linda May Shirley (1) Lionel Shriver (1) Lorraine Kathleen Fehr (2) Margarita Teichroeb (1) Marlys Wiens (2) Martin Fast (1) Matt Groening (2) Melvin D. Epp (1) Menno Simons (3) Micah Rauch (1) Michael Funk (1) Moody Bible Institute (2) Nancy Wall (4) Norma Jost Voth (1) O. J. Wall (2) Orlando J. Wall (3) Patrick Friesen (4) Peter Wall (1) Philip Landis (1) Phillip Jakob Spener (1) Rachael Traeholt (2) Randy Smart (3) Rhoda Janzen (1) Rob Nicholson (2) Robin Martins (1) Robyn Regehr (1) Roger Williams (1) Rosella Toews (1) Ruth Lederach (1) Sam Mullet (3) Sam Schmidt (1) Scot McKnight (1) Stacey Loewen (2) Stanley Hauerwas (2) Steven Wall (6) Susan Mark Landis (1) Taylor Kinney (1) Tom Airey (2) Victor Toews (4)