Intellect and Spirituality

Melinda's post on the false dichotomy between the intellect and spirituality brought to mind a quote about Jonathan Edwards I just read in A God Entranced Vision of All Things.  Donald S. Whitney, in his chapter on Edwards and the spiritual disciplines, shows how Edwards's intellect and spirituality, rather than being opposed, fed off of each other in a spiral upwards towards joy in God:

In contrast to Edwards's example, most people seem to lean one way or the other, favoring devotion or doctrine, piety or theology.  But strong piety will not excuse us from the study of theology, nor will a strong theology compensate for a lack of piety.  Edwards models the fact that a real understanding of the truth of God will set the heart on fire, and that the heart set on fire by God will burn with a love for learning his truth.  As it was with Edwards, sometimes the things of God should appear so beautiful to our minds that we can't help but study and meditate on them and so ravish our hearts that we want to weep or sing (p. 128, emphasis mine).

If your spirituality--your love for and delight in God--is lacking, it may be that you are neglecting your intellectual understanding of Him.

Comments

[Ben]

Thanks for addressing the fictional antagonism between head and heart. Much needed.

[Santiago]

The two cannot be separated. True theology doesn't stop at the mere formulation of doctrine, but goes on to apply that doctrine to the life of the believer. Therefore the pursuit of doctrine without application is vain, and the pursuit of application without doctrine is baseless.

[alan powers]

Excellent commentary. I believe it was the late A.W. Tozer who said that Truth must pass through the mind on its way to the hearr.

[Daniel Wynne]

"God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth." John 4:24
I heard a great teacher say something to the effect of "How can you worship God in truth if you don't know you are worshiping the true God?" (I think it was Greg)

[Tom]

Historical Christians don't worship a god "known" through a profound born-again experience. They worship "objective historical facts" about a supposed god, "known" through debate.

They think if they just get their "objective historical facts" straight they will automatically transform, become "immortal", and live on past the grave, whereas others who do not posess these facts cannot possibly live transform or live on.

[William Tanksley]

Tom, that's merely wrong. We worship a God who is real, known through and by personal relationship. Because God is real, there are objective historical facts that can reveal things about Him. If you ignore those facts, you are ignoring God; if you are ignoring God, you cannot possibly enjoy a personal relationship with Him.

If you have a personal relationship with God, you have transformed already -- anyone who is not changed cannot seek after or desire God. You will of course want to learn more about God, to deepen the relationship.

And Tom, we will all "live on past the grave." Merely assenting to or rejecting the truth will not alter that. The question is not whether you will live; it's whether you will be with Joy, or running from it.

[Ben]

Well said, William.

[Tom]

William, if you are referring to the doctrine of Hell, there are several options to choose from.

Some believe in a literal judgement where Satan, the angel expelled from heaven, will literally be thrown into a literal "lake of fire".

Some believe that the last judgement is like a courtroon, where your crimes are read in a case of God v individual. If you are found guilty, in this case of not accepting that Jesus was a historical god, and this Jesus has indeed come back, as he said he would, and represents you as mediator in the heavenly sanctuary between you and God, and agrees to take your punishement for you, and indeed has already taken it for you he was on earth.

The punishment also has several options. Some think you will be immediately and instantaneously "terminated", in other words, "non-existance" (Whatever that is). You will simply cease to exist without any torture. Some find it distasteful for god to be a torturer.

Other think you will be bodily reserrected and then killed again.

Others think you go to a "bad place" and endure pain. Whether the pain lasts "forever", or for a shorter time, is also a matter of belief.

If you mean by being "with Joy" you are referring to a spiritual place, a bliss, a nirvana, a heaven, a paradise of some sort, where Joy is the name for your God, then that is OK. If you think this Joy is the same god as YHWH then you are mistaken.

"Running from it" could refer to fleeing in terror as you are caught and punished. It implies a painful torture in the afterlife. Is this what you think?

[Tom]

Historicism: The Last Religion of the Educated.

In nineteenth-century Germany, historical ways of understanding reality - or historicism (Historismus)- triumphed on an unprecedented scale.

Although historicism cannot be defined as a strictly German phenomenon, as Friederich Meinecke attempted to do in his "Die Entstehung des Historismus", the German experience during the nineteenth century is nonetheless of crucial importance in understanding the historicization of human thought and its far-reaching influence on humanistic discourses in the Western World.

Historicism bespeaks a "Weltanschauung", observed Karl Mannheim, "which came into being after the religiously determined medieval picture of the owrld had disintegrated and when the subsequent Englightenment, with its dominant idea of a supra-temporal Reason, had destroyed itself...Historicism alone...provides us with a world view of the same universality as that of the religious world view of the past.

Charles Bambach suggests the key figure in historicism is Heidegger by recasting the historicist's epistemological question about the nature of historical knowledge as an ontological question about the meaning of historical existence.

Heidegger, claims Bambach, felt he was deconstructing the entire traditional discourse of Western Metaphysics since Socrates.

The divine as the quintessence of meaning (imbegriff der sinnhaftigkeit) is simultaneoulsy thought of as a metaphysical-suprahistorical totality of world-order and as an innerworldly-historical event.

This central paradox of orthodox christianity has proved continually troublesome to those who have attempted to rationalize it. After all the paradox is a direct affront to Aristotle's principle of non-contradiction: A is non-A: Christ is both human (historical) and honhuman (nonhistorical).

The issue bedeviled theologians during the Arian controversy: was Christ coeval with God the Father or did God the Father bestow Godhood on a historical human being?

While the Nicene Creed affirmed the paradox as teh benchmark of orthodoxy, the epistemological and hermeneutical dilemnas that provoked the controversy never complete subsided.

In Protestant culture, the roles of intellectual elites and institutions of learning are of crucial importance for understanding "secularization". Not only did the Reformation question ecclesiastical control and deminish sacerdotalism and sacramentalism, but on a cognitive level the importance of independent inquiry into the Bible (Sola Scriptura and ad fontes) set the precedent for a later, more pervasive, faith-threatening conception of "Kritik".

"Teachers in the Protestant theological faculty", according to noted Berlin historian Friedrich Paulson in 1902, "assume a fundamentally different attitude from their Catholic counterparts: they do not aim to be servants of the church, but first of all servants of science (Wissenschaft), servants of the church only through science (Wissenschaft).

-Thomas Albert Howard
"Religion and the Rise of Historicism"