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| Spinoza courtesy samefacts.com |
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.
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