Whenever people clamor for the practical and prefer to speak about the horizontal dimension–for instance, relationships and success–they are saying that they love God less than they love themselves. They are more interested in using God as a means to their own selfish ends than in glorifying God and enjoying him forever. And yet, there are others who so pride themselves on knowing all the correct doctrines that the doctrines become the object of their worship rather than the divine person these doctrines are meant to describe. Both settle for less and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator. Some take doctrine, others take life, we are told. But that is quite impossible. Show me a person who is content with a merely intellectual religion and I will show you an unfulfilled and pitiful man or woman. Equally, if I should meet a person who is quite happy to be occupied only with happy, joyful, pleasant feelings or energetic and zealous activities, it is easy to predict that such a person will end up resenting those feelings and despising those activities in due time. Both the “dry” intellectualist and the “wet” sentimentalist are lazy; both fail to love God well. You see, even if God did heal everybody and make everybody rich, this kind of religion would still be wrong—not because people would be demanding too much, but because they would be settling for too little! God wants to open the heavens of his spiritual riches in Christ and give us our inheritance as his children. He wants to tell us who he is and how he saved us from his wrath, and there we are asking him if he’s got any candy in his pockets!

One of the great culprits in this whole enterprise is anti-intellectualism. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter points out that the Reformed Faith built America’s only indigenous intellectual tradition, and as Puritanism degenerated into revivalism, the nation lost its intellectual balance. While the Reformed evangelists of the Great Awakening were also presidents of Princeton and Yale, evangelists ever since Charles Finney have actually boasted in their lack of education. Evangelicalism has a legacy of anti-intellectualism that has not only crippled its witness to the watching world, but has opened the church itself up to the most remarkable reaches of stupidity and incredulity.

Read the rest of this commentary here.

- Michael Horton, The White Horse Inn