Are you a thinker?

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Raphael, St Paul Preaching in Athens
Raphael, St Paul Preaching in Athens (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In terms of the imagination, the spiritual world cannot match the sensual world because gratification in the sensual is immediate; in the spiritual, it is delayed. A Christian who takes the intellectual track is often rebuked with this verse in 1 Corinthians: “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power” (2:4). Some people take that to infer that Paul made a mistake in coming to the Athenians in Acts 17 with a philosophical bent. 

However, this verse to the church at Corinth implies nothing of the kind. In fact, Paul reminds us to become all things to all people (1 Cor. 9:22), meaning that you start with where the audience is. If there is an intellectual barrier, you start there. If there is a sensory barrier, you start there. If anything, Paul had to spend so much time writing an apologetic to the Corinthian church, arguing about all the problems that had arisen, because they had mindless commitments that harnessed their senses without harnessing their rationality.

Is it not amazing to us that two of the chief defenders of the faith in the Old Testament and in the New—Moses and Paul—were both well-versed in the language, the thinking, and the philosophy of their cultures? Is it at all accidental that when the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, wanted to reshape the thinking of the Jewish exiles, he selected the best of their young men to educate in the language, the literature, and the philosophy of the Babylonians, and then used them to reach their own? He knew what it would take to reach the foreigners in his midst.

We are fashioned by God to be thinking and emotional creatures. The emotions should follow reason, and not the other way around.

Zacharias, R. (2008). Beyond opinion: living the faith that we defend. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.

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