"Intellectual Christian" Is An Oxymoron?
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Ignorance Or Sarcasm
A fellow traveler posted this comment on my Substack letter last week:
“An ‘intellectual Christian.’ Isn’t that an oxymoron? Tell me more…..”
Kent
It’s impossible to know if Kent meant this question seriously or sarcastically. Either way, I thought I’d devote this week’s letter to explaining what any well-informed, serious person already knows: “intellectual Christian” is anything but an oxymoron.
Intellectual Christians
Christian thinkers have profoundly shaped the intellectual world generally and Western civilization in particular. Here are just a few of them:
Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was fascinated by the mystery of the human mind. Long before modern psychology, he explored memory, self-awareness, desire, free will, and our restless longing for God. He also had remarkably modern ideas about time, which he argued isn’t just something measured by clocks. It’s a mysterious phenomenon embedded deep within our very being.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) showed that reason and faith are not enemies. Our IQ and SQ, you might say, are two complementary ways of discovering truth. Drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas tackled some of life’s biggest questions: How is the cosmos organized? What is good? What is our purpose? How should we live? And what can reason alone tell us about the existence and nature of God?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was one of history’s great geniuses. He invented calculus at about the same time as and independently of Isaac Newton. He also tackled some of the deepest questions about reality, reason, and God. In his famous book Theodicy, Leibniz confronted an age-old puzzle: If God is all-powerful and perfectly good, why does evil exist?
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) brought philosophy down from the clouds and made it intensely personal. He focused on the individual - our choices, fears, doubts, identity, freedom, and direct relationship with God. Kierkegaard insisted that faith is not merely agreeing with a list of religious ideas. It’s a courageous, deeply personal decision to trust God even when reason cannot give us absolute certainty. It’s what later became known as the “leap of faith.”
Edith Stein (1891–1942) was a brilliant philosopher who began life as an atheist and became deeply interested in consciousness, empathy, and how we understand the minds of other people. Her search for truth eventually led her to Christianity. Stein later became a Carmelite nun and sought to bring together modern philosophy and the Christian thought of Thomas Aquinas. Born into a Jewish family, she was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Her life demonstrated that intellect, faith, and extraordinary courage can coexist in the same person.
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) was one of the clearest and most influential Christian thinkers of the twentieth century. A former atheist and Oxford scholar, Lewis had a rare gift for explaining profound ideas in language ordinary people could understand. In books such as Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and The Abolition of Man, he explored morality, suffering, free will, human dignity, and the dangers of believing that people are nothing more than biological machines.
Alvin Plantinga (1932–) is one of the most important Christian philosophers of our time. He challenges the popular claim that believing in God is irrational unless it can be scientifically proven. Plantinga argues that believing in God can be perfectly reasonable - just as our belief in other minds, the external world, and the reliability of memory can be reasonable even though none of them can be proved with absolute certainty. He also offers a powerful response to the problem of evil and argues that the real conflict is not between science and Christianity, but between science and atheistic materialism.
Christianity & Universities
Today’s so-called bastions of higher learning were invented and proliferated worldwide by Christians. Here are just a few examples:
The University of Paris, founded around 1150, grew out of Christian cathedral schools.
Oxford University, where teaching was underway by 1096, and Cambridge University, founded in 1209, were shaped by Christian scholars and clergy.
Harvard College, founded by Puritans in 1636, was established in part to train ministers.
The modern university, for all its present-day hostility toward Christianity, was born from the Christian conviction that truth is worth seeking because God’s creation is rational and intelligible.