Very early in my academic life, I had to come to terms with the hard fact that I, unlike many of my outgoing peers, had not been blessed with the gift of persuasion. I would watch the laziest of my classmates be called on in class, utter total you-know-what, and have the teachers beaming. Then, of course, I’d be called on out of my daydreaming, and the following silence would make it inescapably obvious that I had no clue how John Smith founded Jamestown. I have always thought it probable that God comically used those experiences to traumatize me into using my brain.
Yet my first years of being a professed Christian were ones of culpably slow and minor growth. My introduction to theology came when I was 15 or so, and I began dabbling in the Reformed doctrines. I had influences on both sides of the great Calvinist/Arminian divide, and in a very amateur-ish way I would take the unanswerable objections from one side over to the other, and so it would go, back and forth. I had a lot of unanswerable objections, I found, because I was hardly even trying to answer them myself. And this sort of half-hearted pursuit of theological truth went on, I am sorry to say, for quite a long time.
But here I am three years later, introducing myself in a blog that imputes some degree of intellectual maturity to my name – God must not have given up on me. Having come from this sort of outlook on intellectual activity myself, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were still some challenging voices out there insisting that a group of Christians – especially women – should be put to more practical work. Look at the need in this world!, they say. How can you justify sitting around and thinking while people are dying of starvation? Unfortunately, this hyper-pragmatism is characteristic of a great number of people in evangelical America who actually look down on the pursuit of intellectual growth, as if we could have any sort of culturally influential ministry with no biblically-based theory. From my perspective as a recent high school graduate, it seems that consequently, the Church is dangerously close to letting this postmodernizing world mark Christianity off the list of plausible worldviews. But we have been told that we have a reason for this hope. It is imperative that we learn to communicate that reason to a world that has come to see Christianity as so-called “intellectual suicide.” Au contraire, we must say - to hold to any other worldview is literal suicide. I pray that this will be a forum where such bold proclamation of the superiority of our God can take place.
I am hardly coming to this group with an abundant store of knowledge that I’m just aching to share. On most days, I have more immediate questions than answers, and as Calvin did, I count myself among “those who write as they learn and learn as they write.” I hope you’ll bear with me and join us in the process of “iron sharpening iron” that I’m certain will happen here.
