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Anti-intellectualism remains strongly entrenched in many parts of the church, but it is grounded in fear, not in faith. Instead of seeing the benefits of a vital conversation between the academy and the average person in the pew about how a third-millennium man or woman might still follow a first-century Jewish sage, many Christians view scholarship as a threat to church doctrine. They believe that professors who make clever arguments against the virgin birth, for example, are careless vandals poking holes in the dike of faith. To shore up that dike, they believe they need to show “true faith” by accepting uncritically the tenets of their particular tradition without question. Such defiance is captured in a popular bumper sticker: “THE BIBLE SAYS IT, GOD WROTE IT, AND THAT SETTLES IT!”
Ironically, biblical scholars are actually interested in the same “trinity” of ideas, but they put question marks where others put exclamation points. What does the Bible really say? What does it mean to say it is inspired by God? And why do we believe that God’s voice is exclusively in the past tense? Perhaps, as my denomination is fond of saying, God is still speaking.
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Robin Meyers (Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus)