In an interview with Crucible in 1992, Dr. Os Guinness made the regarding Evangelicals developing the mind of Christ:
Evangelicals have been deeply sinful in being anti-intellectual ever since the 1820s and 1830s. For the longest time we didn’t pay the cultural price for that because we had the numbers, the social zeal, and the spiritual passion for the gospel. But today we are beginning to pay the cultural price. And you can see that most evangelicals simply don’t think. For example, there has been no serious evangelical public philosophy in this century…. It has always been a sin not to love the Lord our God with our minds as well as our hearts and souls… We have excused this with a degree of pietism and pretend that this is something other than what it is – that is, sin…. Evangelicals need to repent of their refusal to think Christianly and to develop the mind of Christ.
80 years prior to that interview, J. Gresham Machen stated the way this effects practical life:
We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer, and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion…. What is to-day a matter of academic speculation, begins to-morrow to move armies and pull down empires.
From what we see in culture I think we’ve arrived (and not in a good way). What say you?
Source: The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark A. Noll
