The quote in the headline is from that great and glad saint, Martin Luther, who knew that reason and philosophy (in particular, Aristotelian philosophy) had gotten the church into the predicament it was in at the time of the Reformation. Last week I wrote an article on the problem with reason inspired by the work of another Martyn, D. Martyn Lloyd Jones in his book, What is an Evangelical?
There is nothing wrong with man’s reason, of course, except when it is raised above God’s Reason, as the LORD Himself indicated…
Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:7-9 (ESV)
In all of his writings on this, though, it’s important to say that Lloyd Jones was not anti-intellectual…
Not Anti-intellectual
Of course, Jones himself was a medical doctor before becoming a pastor, and he himself was surely one of the brightest men of his generation, but he had seen foolish reasoning and philosophy turn many against Christ, and such was true, not only of philosophy, but also academia and scholasticism…
“…the evangelical is not only distrustful of reason, but he is also distrustful of scholarship. Here we are, belonging to IFES, students and members of universities, and I am saying that the evangelical is distrustful of scholarship, and I maintain that! What do I mean? Let me try to make it plain. The evangelical starts from the Scriptures. He also reads the history of the church, and there he finds that the history proves what has been emphasized in the Scripture, that when men trust to reason and to understanding they go astray. He also finds that the men whom God has had to raise up and to use to call back people to the faith have often been very simple men. Not always, of course – I mentioned Luther and others, and I could have mentioned Calvin – but so often this has happened, that the revival in the church and the calling back of the people to the true faith has been done through the medium of someone quite unknown.
“(This) does not mean he is anti-intellectual; it does not mean that he becomes obscurantist; but it does mean that he keeps reason and scholarship in their place. They are servants and not masters.”
Note: the “evangelical starts from the Scriptures”. We always start there! How then, does reason serve us? Like this…
The business of reason is to teach us how to believe. It is an instrument, and the trouble always arises when people allow reason to determine what they believe. In other words, instead of submitting themselves to the Scripture, they turn to science, to philosophy, or to one of a number of other disciplines, and their position is determined by these things.
“Not what you think, but how you think, that is the place of reason, and I would say exactly the same of scholarship.” Lloyd Jones says.
Nor is the good doctor asking us to stay away from University study of these matters…
I recall one well-known evangelical leader who always used to tell such men, ‘Whatever else you study at Oxford or Cambridge, don’t study theology or you’ll lose your faith.’ That is something which I do not commend…That is the spirit of fear, and it leads to an obscurantism where you bury your head in the sand, and you are not aware of what is happening…There is no need for us to be afraid of scholars if they are not Christians because they base their position on reason, and it is a simple matter to debate with them because they do not know the Scriptures. You can easily show them that what they have been saying they have spun out of their own minds.
In all this, the great question we must ask in all manners of study is this – What does the Bible say? The Scriptures are our authority. They are not reason – they are revelation, revelation from God. And here is the result…
Men who have felt called to ministry…have gone into the seminaries as evangelicals and true evangelists…have come out denying everything, and sometimes even departing from the faith altogether. If that has not happened, they have come out dead, trying to be scholars and having lost the edge of their zeal and their enthusiasm…Therefore, if an evangelical is not distrustful of reason and of scholarship; he is blind to this clear testimony of the history of the Christian church throughout the centuries.
How many times was the Apostle Paul called the “fool”? Yet today he is the wisest of all, for his attention and concern was not on the “debater of the age” but on the Lord of the Ages. May it be so with us as well.
Entrusted with the Gospel 