[.ca] Full Gospel, Fractured Minds?: A Call to Use God's Gift ... (ISBN 0310263085)

Excellent book! Please buy it and read it!!:
I have read and enjoyed Full Gospel, Fractured Minds?, and I highly recommend it to everyone! I would recommend it only to Christians, but I think those who are skeptical of Christianity should read it too. I think this book is able to demolish some long-standing straw men in the minds of many skeptics. What I mean is that Christianity has a well-deserved reputation for being anti-intellectual; but this reputation, as just as it is, does not reflect the teachings of Scripture. For the skeptic who wishes to debate with a Christian, I have no problem with putting this kind of ammunition in his/her gun. The skeptic ought to be knowledgable in the history and arguments that Nanez lays out in this book. If we want to deal with the problem of anti-intellectualism in our ranks, we should accept help from all sides. As good as the book is, I hope that someone (Nanez maybe?) will pick up from where Nanez leaves off and give both barrels to the error of trichotomy. Trichotomy is inherently anti-intellectual, and if we are serious about demolishing anti-intellectualism (2Corinthians 10:4,5) we must demolish trichotomy. Man is body and soul. Period. Soul and spirit are synonyms. Let's lay this to rest once and for all. I would like to offer the following as my support for Full Gospel, Fractured Minds?. I wrote this to an email list in 2003 as I was grappling with the problems Nanez covers in his book: As some of you on this list know, I am always interested in problems of anti-intellectualism, irrationalism, mysticism, etc. in the church. Here's an idea: there is no such thing as anti-intellectualism. There is only vain philosophy. No mind can really be against itself. To think any thought, a mind must make use of the laws of thought (logic). To think `anti-intellectual' thoughts, a mind is engaging in an intellectual pursuit, albeit foolish. In a religious context, the ultimate purpose of such a vain pursuit is knowledge for practical living, or practical Christianity. To this end, an `anti-intellectual' thinker will commit logical fallacies and become committed to vain philosophies such as pragmatism and empiricism. This must be the case because knowledge for practical living is the need of every man, and the intended purpose of these philosophies is such knowledge. To obtain knowledge for practical living from God's Word, a Christian must follow the laws of thought and engage in a deliberately intellectual pursuit, or in short, he must be an `intellectualist.' This must be the case because God created us this way, and He wrote His Word this way. In other words, God's Word and man's mind are perfectly compatible, but only an intellectualist understands this. To an anti-intellectualist, man's problem is his mind: It is always getting in the way. He can't trust God because he thinks too much. He reads the Bible, but he tries to understand it with his `natural mind.' To conform to anti-intellectual teaching, the believing saint, who earnestly desires to grow in the Christian life, is compelled to embrace some asinine separation between his own `natural mind' and his `spiritual mind'; or his own mind and the mind of Christ in him; or between his mind and his `heart.' According to the anti-intellectualist, no matter how much he believes God's Word, and trusts God, he still has a `natural mind' that he must deny on a daily basis. The `natural mind' is thought to be his intellect, regardless of his faith in the authority of God's Word. If he reads the Word and grows in the grace and wisdom of God, and in godly character, he has not understood the Word with his intellect, but with his `heart.' The idea that the whole body of God's truth contained in the Scriptures is properly called THEORY (from theos - God) is anathema to the anti-intellectualist. If we wish to be biblical Christians (is there any other kind?) we must learn to think in theory. (One ubiquitous problem is that anti-intellectualists never define their terms, such as natural mind, spiritual mind, heart, etc.. Or if they try, their definitions are so poor that they don't accomplish anything. Definitions are necessarily specific, and anti-intellectualists hate specificity. This is expected of course. Definition is an intellectual activity. What else should we expect from them?) This absurd rejection of biblical intellectualism (which is nothing more than biblical faith) necessitates an appeal to empiricism as a means of obtaining knowledge for practical living, and to pragmatism as a method of judgement between right and wrong, good and bad. The point is, the so-called anti-intellectualist cannot avoid vain philosophy. By rejecting the (necessarily intellectual) Tree of Life, he turns to the only other tree that offers knowledge, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That is the tree of the `practical thinker'; the concrete-bound man who is unable, or unwilling, to think in theory.