Outside Reading #5

INTELLIGENCE WITHOUT EXPERIENCE

“The will of God has been a much-debated subject, which I often find quite entertaining. It does us no good to keep the conversation in a classroom caught up in Christian theory. It has to be taken onto the streets, where the hurting people are. The will of God must be displayed by a praying people, unwilling to sit on the sidelines and see the devil continually steal, kill, and destroy, and then watch the theorist give God the credit. Masking our unbelief with a spineless theology is the great deception. This continual misrepresentation of the nature and heart of God for one another and for the world must stop. Stupidity often looks like intelligence in the absence of experience.”

-       Bill Johnson

Bill Johnson, pastor of Bethel Church, an evangelical charismatic Christian church in Redding, California speaks about the phrase “God is good” in his book titled “God is Good: He’s Better Than You Think”. In this quote, he talks about Christian’s tendencies to be theological experts and argue and debate about trivial matters, but there is no activation of people to live the actual Christian life and be disciples. I love how he says that we mask our unbelief with a spineless, intellectual theology that simple seeks to argue. I myself have been guilty of falling into this trap a lot. I think that so often we get caught up in our religious debates over this person or that person being right or whether we should say this about the Eucharist or that about spiritual gifts, when God gave us one call: to love and know Love. The practicality of the Christian faith, to make disciples, and the abandonment of human intellectualism  is something that I long to see more in myself and the Church in my generation.