It's nice to see that after 25 years of publishing we're noticed in the Wall Street Journal.
About the article itself: Being intellectual isn't enough. That merely describes a developed (or sometimes overdeveloped) mental capacity for detailed abstract thinking and an acquired taste for ingesting (and/or producing) academic prose. Are all Evangelical Biblical Commentaries and systematic theologies anti-intellectual? They're just not fashionable with the secular academy. (Carl F. H. Henry was not intellectual?)
Where Evangelicalism failed is in not heeding calls to engage the two-thousand year tradition seriously (e.g., the Chicago Call) and thus the content of what its best minds process is too narrow both chronologically speaking and culturally speaking: mega-church mimicry of the thin crust of mass American culture du jour won't creat an environment for intellectual rigor. But that is changing. The appearance of the Ancient Christian Commentary series and others like this are signs that a broader chronological engagement is sought, which is itself one way to escape cultural captivity and shallowness.
While some point out that Evangelicals who have become more intellectual have usually "converted" to Catholicism or Anglicanism or Orthodoxy, I'd put it differently. If the goal is to be simply more intellectual (because you get more respect in the wider world), most such people end up becoming liberal Christians of some sort or nothing at all. It's not than someone, like Dorothy's Scarecrow, final got a brain and the lights went on and he became a Catholic or Orthodox.
I believe it's more often the case than someone with interest in studying his faith discovers the depth of Christian tradition, for love of Christ and for the things of Christ. This is what captivates the mind, not worldly intellectual fashion. But here's the tricky part, something I must hasten to add. One might remain an Evangelical and not "convert." The claims and theologies of the "historic" churches may be engaged with intellectual rigor by Evangelicals. Obviously, since this may be a new encounter for many (as it was for me) a certain number will examine the competing claims of other traditions and perhaps be swayed by them. Or not. I think of the late Victor Walter, a Evangelical Free Church professor of patristics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the 1970s. Today, I think of colleagues and friends at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Mohler and Moore. Or The City journal mentioned in the article, by our friends at Houston Baptist University. To some, no doubt, they're not intellectual enough, by which I take it that these critics are more interested in the kind of intelligence it takes to convince readers that white is black and black with.
And finally, for many, you will never ever be considered as a candidate for being an intellectual, no matter what else you do, until you offer a pinch of incense on the altar of St. Charles Darwin. Some of the fiercest proponents of this position are Christian intellectuals themselves who'd like to keep their unwashed cousins out of the clubhouse.
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