The evangelical inferiority complex
It's Saturday. Must be time for another classic snippet from the early days of The Briefing—this time about evangelicalism's intellectual inferiority complex:
Evangelicals tend to have an intellectual inferiority complex. We want to be respected intellectually and we can be seduced by this into compromising our message.
Sometimes the seduction stems from a desire for better apologetics (i.e. defending the faith to outsiders). The liberals tell us that modern man will not believe fairy stories about people parting the Red Sea or rising from the dead. They tell us that we need to strip the gospel of these ‘mythical’ first-century elements so that it is comprehensible to 20th-century man.
We are keen, of course, to see 20th-century man converted, and so we water down or leave out the miraculous element. We do not do it as blatantly as the liberals—we still want to affirm the bodily resurrection of Christ, and so on. But it is interesting to note how this ‘modernizing’ influence has changed the way we speak. When we are discussing or teaching a passage of Scripture, how often do we say, “What Paul is saying here ...”, or “I think what the Psalmist had in mind was ...”? And how often do we say, “What God is saying here ...”?
The subtle influence of liberalism, along with our inferiority complex, has resulted in our emphasizing the human aspect of things. We refrain from language that sounds too overtly supernatural because we feel awkward about it. “Thus says the Lord” as a concept is disappearing from evangelical preaching.
This is, perhaps, a small thing—the way we speak about the Bible—but it is a revealing symptom. Would you feel happy talking to your non-Christian friend about angels? If you would feel embarrassed about it, have not the liberals already begun to win you over?
(From ‘Under Threat’, Briefing #26, June 1, 1989.)
Do you think evangelicals still have an intellectual inferiority complex? If so, how does it show itself?
A good word…If we succumb to evacuating God as He has revealed Himself in His Word we wind up with a Deism, a god who has walked away, or a god who is less than the Lord God of hosts.
When we do this we experience what Marcus Clarke experienced: “Marcus Clarke is best known for his book “For The Term of his Natural Life.” To him, Australia was a “land of monstrosities, of trees without shade, flowers without perfume, birds that could not fly and beasts which had not yet learned to walk on all fours”. In the Australian bush he learned to find the “beauty in loneliness,” and in “haggard gum trees blown into odd shapes or distorted by fierce, hot winds”.
“In 1866 he was completely overwhelmed by the proposition that the only possible theory was that of materialism. The loss of his religious faith left him utterly bereaved.
“Happy is the man who can believe,” he wrote. “I cannot. I am no desperate destroyer, no denier of God in heaven. I am rather as one who, wandering through the pleasant gardens of Faith and implicit belief, has stumbled upon the stern rocks that border them; the rocks of Reason, and Practicality and Materialism, and stunned by the fall is no more able to return to the pleasant paths and rest with ease upon the dewy turf but must cling to the rugged and sharp stones around him, lest he fall into the raging sea of despair and utter incredulity that boils and seethes beneath him:’ Desperately feeling the need for forgiveness but deprived of the means of gaining it, he “sought oblivion in an opium den”.
When we succumb to the pressure of secularism we leave the Lord God of Hosts. And we become subject to our own idolatries that leaves us destitute of our greatest joy, knowing Him!
Hey all,
It seems to me that what I’m about to say is perhaps a different issue from the one Tony was raising, and yet it uses a similar vocabulary.
My experience has not been so much that Evangelicals have an intellectual inferiority complex, rather, in the environment in which I live they are known to be too intellectual and literal in their translations and exegesis of the Bible.
Perhaps the outcome is arguably similar. That is; Evangelicals are in danger of forfeiting the God of the Bible for the Bible itself, or indeed OUR study of it…?
I cant say I agree with the argument, though for some the danger is too real. It is however the one I most often hear these days.
Couldn’t it be that this “intellectual inferiority complex” as you call it, is written into the very DNA of evangelicalism? Historically, I’d suggest that’s that the case, considering that contemporary evangelicalism grew out of a desire to compete against the claims of modernism that arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There has always seemed to be this great desire from evangelicalism to be intellectually recognised and respected as a movement and bewilderment when it is not. What do others think?
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