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?

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