Evangelical Apologist: Church Anti-Intellectual, M
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R. Scott Clark
Puritan Board Senior
I think we knew this from Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind didn't we?
It's not likely to change because evangelicalism (as it has existed since the 18th century) is not driven or organized by knowledge or by things that must be apprehended intellectually and trusted, but by the immediate religious experience of the divine.
The essence of evangelicalism is the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experience. By illegitimate I mean immediate/unmediated or the attempt to know God in se, in himself, apart from the divinely ordained mediation of Word and Sacrament and sometimes even apart from the Mediator himself!
The flipside of evangelicalism and QIRE is fundamentalism or the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Certainty which seeks certainty typically in unrevealed or immediate/unmediated truth and often through an intersection between the divine and human intellects. Where QIRE is located in the affective faculties, QIRC is located in the intellective faculties. Unlike Machen-era fundamentalism which featured some significant intellectual achievement, Modern fundamentalism has not distinguished itself intellectually. This is because the function of QIRC is not to find truth so much as to provide certainty to the fearful by intersection with the divine intellect.
Neither QIRC nor QIRE requires serious intellectual activity to sustain it. For QIRE such is a distraction and thus discouraged for the former it is suspected as morally compromised by some conspiracy or liberalism or some other bogeyman.
The point is that neither evangelicalism/revivalism/pietism nor fundamentalism has the same intellectual power that drove the Reformation and post-Reformation movements because the religious interests that fuel them are distinctly different.
rsc
It's not likely to change because evangelicalism (as it has existed since the 18th century) is not driven or organized by knowledge or by things that must be apprehended intellectually and trusted, but by the immediate religious experience of the divine.
The essence of evangelicalism is the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experience. By illegitimate I mean immediate/unmediated or the attempt to know God in se, in himself, apart from the divinely ordained mediation of Word and Sacrament and sometimes even apart from the Mediator himself!
The flipside of evangelicalism and QIRE is fundamentalism or the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Certainty which seeks certainty typically in unrevealed or immediate/unmediated truth and often through an intersection between the divine and human intellects. Where QIRE is located in the affective faculties, QIRC is located in the intellective faculties. Unlike Machen-era fundamentalism which featured some significant intellectual achievement, Modern fundamentalism has not distinguished itself intellectually. This is because the function of QIRC is not to find truth so much as to provide certainty to the fearful by intersection with the divine intellect.
Neither QIRC nor QIRE requires serious intellectual activity to sustain it. For QIRE such is a distraction and thus discouraged for the former it is suspected as morally compromised by some conspiracy or liberalism or some other bogeyman.
The point is that neither evangelicalism/revivalism/pietism nor fundamentalism has the same intellectual power that drove the Reformation and post-Reformation movements because the religious interests that fuel them are distinctly different.
rsc
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