Alisa Childers answers:
Transcript:
Anti-intellectualism will keep you from understanding your Bible and from living a vibrant Christian life. And I want to refer to a very particular passage that a lot of times people will pull out when they want to be a little bit anti-intellectual. And so that is 1 Corinthians 8:1 that says, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”
Now we’ve talked on the podcast before about using principles of hermeneutics, how to interpret your Bible properly. And the one thing that you never want to do is form an entire theology based on one Bible verse where you haven’t considered its broader context, where you haven’t asked questions like who wrote this, who did they write it to, what was the historical context, what was the cultural context, what was happening, what was going on in that time and place, what kind of a book is this, how did the original audience interpret this. We can’t base theology on something that sounds one way to us without investigating its deeper context.
So let’s take that verse, 1 Corinthians 8:1, knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.
So right before that phrase, knowledge puffs up, this is the apostle Paul, he wrote this, “now about food sacrificed to idols.”
So the context of him saying knowledge puffs up had to do with food sacrificed to idols. And what he goes on to explain is that some Christians knew that idols weren’t real and others didn’t know that, and so they believed that eating food sacrificed to idols made it ceremonially unclean. And so what Paul’s point was here was he was exhorting the believers who had the greater knowledge and understanding that idols weren’t real, to show love to those who had a weaker conscience and to refrain from eating food sacrificed to idols in front of them so it wouldn’t stumble them. And his point was that you don’t know something just so you can lord over somebody, but so that you can know that, but you can exercise that knowledge in love and build other believers up and not our own arrogance.
And the other principle that we talk about a lot is to let scripture interpret scripture. You never want to form your theology based on just one verse of scripture. So let me read a few other passages from the Bible that talk about knowledge.
Proverbs 1:22 says that fools hate knowledge.
Proverbs 1:5 says a wise man will hear and increase in learning, and a man of understanding will acquire wise counsel.
Hosea chapter 4 says that God’s people perish for lack of knowledge regarding the law.
And 2 Peter 2:1 tells us to add to our faith goodness and to goodness knowledge.
In Philippians 1:9, Paul prayed that your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment. In fact, Paul even praises knowledge as a part of spiritual warfare.
And again, we’re going to do a whole episode on the theology of spiritual warfare. But primarily when the Bible talks about doing spiritual warfare as a Christian, it’s talking about battles in the realm of ideas. It’s about truth. It’s about speaking truth into lies.
And so in 2 Corinthians 10:5, Paul says we demolish. Notice all the words here. I want you to think about the words and how they have to do not with power encounters with demons, but actual knowledge and truth propositions.
So here’s what it says in 2 Corinthians 10:5. “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.”
Isn’t that powerful? Spiritual warfare is demolishing arguments, pretensions, anything that raises itself up against the knowledge, things you know of God.
Proverbs 15:4 says, the discerning heart acquires knowledge.
Proverbs 1:29 warns of the destruction that follows a hatred of knowledge.
So over and over in scripture, we’re commanded to seek out knowledge. And over and over again, we’re warned of the consequences if we don’t.
And I mentioned earlier that Jesus himself said, “Love the Lord your God with all your mind.”
He was saying we have to love God with all of our intellectual capacity. So anti-intellectualism, if you have that as your presupposition, you will not understand the Bible because you won’t dig deep enough to use good tools of hermeneutics, to be hungry for the knowledge that you find in scripture.
And frankly, here’s another thing that I notice and it just makes me wonder, but there are people, and I think we probably all need to search our hearts on this one, but there are people who want God to give them instant relief from whatever is afflicting them. Or maybe they want information about their future and they want God to show up with these power encounters. They want God to answer all of their questions about the future and relieve their suffering, but they don’t want to crack open His word that he’s already given us. Like God has given us His word, which is His self-revelation. It’s how we know how we’re supposed to live as Christians, how we’re supposed to conduct ourselves in church and together with other believers, how we’re supposed to live the things that we’re supposed to leave behind and repent from and turn from, how we can assess doctrine and decide if somebody is a false teacher or a true teacher, if someone is a wolf or a sheep. We have to know the word of God and not just cherry-pick to match what we already wanted to say, but to dig deep into what God has already revealed. So that, I think, is a question for all of us if we might be falling into some of this anti-intellectualism is to say, am I just wanting the relief from this thing, but I don’t want to bother cracking open the scriptures to get to know God myself, because He has revealed Himself in scripture.