The Two Tasks of Evangelism

J.P. More­land and William Lane Craig are in the habit of quot­ing Charles Malik. I was reminded of this as I was watch­ing a lec­ture led by Peter Kreeft on ‘beau­ti­ful, intel­li­gent Chris­tian­ity,’ I believe the lec­ture was aptly titled Shock­ing Beauty. The lec­ture is on YouTube and it was a com­ment by the user who uploaded the lec­ture that reminded me of Charles Malik’s quote. You see, the user who uploaded the video com­mented on the video that argu­ing with athe­ists is a total waste of time. That one can’t be a ratio­nal Chris­t­ian because, in their view, ‘faith lies in the realm of the Spir­i­tual and not the ratio­nal,’ thus, a dichotomy is cre­ated: ‘faith is a gift of God and beyond ratio­nal­ity’. Need­less to say, how any­one can lis­ten to Peter Kreeft and come to this view is entirely beyond me.

This is a press­ing dan­ger to and in Chris­tian­ity. If not cor­rected, it will play a vital role in the demise of Chris­tian­ity as a valid, ratio­nal and war­ranted belief sys­tem. Chris­tian­ity will become just another social reli­gion, tai­lored to the needs of the indi­vid­ual. One reli­gion cherry picked among many.

More­land and Craig recall how Malik was asked to deliver the inau­gural address at the ded­i­ca­tion of the new Billy Gra­ham Cen­ter on the cam­pus of Wheaton Col­lege. The topic on which Malik spoke was “The Two Tasks of Evan­ge­lism”. The two tasks of evan­ge­lism, accord­ing to Malik, was “sav­ing the soul and sav­ing the mind”. In any case, Malik went on to say:

I must be frank with you: the great­est dan­ger con­fronting Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­ity is the dan­ger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its great­est and deep­est reaches is not cared for enough. But intel­lec­tual nur­ture can­not take place apart from pro­found immer­sion for a period of years in the his­tory of thought and the spirit. Peo­ple who are in a hurry to get out of the uni­ver­sity and start earn­ing money or serv­ing the church or preach­ing the gospel have no idea of the infi­nite value of spend­ing years of leisure con­vers­ing with the great­est minds and souls of the past, ripen­ing and sharp­en­ing and enlarg­ing their pow­ers of think­ing. The result is that the arena of cre­ative think­ing is vacated and abdi­cated to the enemy. Who among evan­gel­i­cals can stand up to the great sec­u­lar schol­ars on their own terms of schol­ar­ship? Who among evan­gel­i­cal schol­ars is quoted as a nor­ma­tive source by the great­est sec­u­lar author­i­ties on his­tory or phi­los­o­phy or psy­chol­ogy or soci­ol­ogy or pol­i­tics? Does the evan­gel­i­cal mode of think­ing have the slight­est chance of becom­ing the dom­i­nant mode in the great uni­ver­si­ties of Europe and Amer­ica that stamp our entire civ­i­liza­tion with their spirit and ideas? For the sake of greater effec­tive­ness in wit­ness­ing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, Evan­gel­i­cals can­not afford to keep on liv­ing on the periph­ery of respon­si­ble intel­lec­tual existence.[1]

There is no rea­son for there to be a dichotomy between the Spirit and the mind. As with all things, the mind must be kept in sub­jec­tion to God, but this does not mean we neglect the mind as some sort of com­pet­ing influ­ence. Unfor­tu­nately with the above, too many Chris­tians will jump to the con­clu­sion that this is pro­mot­ing the intel­lect over the Spirit. For shame.

[1] Charles Malik, “The Other Side of Evan­ge­lism,” Chris­tian­ity Today, Novem­ber 7, 1980, p. 40.