It has always been a struggle for me to move the knowledge of the Scriptures from the head (intellect) to the heart. I want to feel close to God, but there are many times I read the Scriptures and still feel distant. This article has helped me in very practical ways to move towards a deeper relationship with God. Hope this helps you as well.
In Christ,
Brandon H.
Five Strategies for
Avoiding Intellectualism
Interview with John
Piper Topic: Study & Scholarship
[Audio Transcript] Pastor
John, you have, for years stressed an approach to Reformed theology that is
both hard-thinking and deep-feeling. Each of us will tend to fall on one side
or the other, either an anti-intellectual feeling, or an anti-feeling
intellectualism. Both are to be avoided. In today’s question, a listener wants
to know this: “Dear Pastor John, in your 30+ years of ministry, what have you
practically done to avoid mere intellectualism — cold academic study — in your
Bible reading and in your exposition?”
1) The first thing
I would say is that I need to be, we need to be, deeply persuaded that this
really, really matters: this non-cold, non-intellectualistic, warm, practical,
affectionate relation to the living Christ. We need to be persuaded. This
really matters because there are a lot of people out there — I keep bumping
into them — there are a lot of people out there who either for personality
reasons or sometimes theological reasons think it doesn’t matter what your
emotions do. That is, they think emotions are the caboose at the end of the
train. They are just not essential at all. And it sounds like the person who
wrote this question is persuaded that they matter, and it might be good to ask
why. And here is my reason.
The first and
greatest commandment is not to know the Lord our God — which is, of course,
assumed — but to love the Lord your God. And that includes with all your heart
(Matthew 22:36–37). And Paul says at the end of 1 Corinthians: If you don’t
love the Lord you are accursed (1 Corinthians 16:22). Love the Lord. And Jesus
says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and
whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew
10:37). In other words, the love that we must have isn’t just a kind of dutiful,
commandment-keeping love. That is not what you have for your kids, nor your
parents. It is the deepest, heartfelt, affectionate, relative kind of love, the
kind we have for mother and father and son and daughter — only more, more for
Jesus. And if we don’t have it, we are not worthy of Jesus.
So, this is the
first thing I would say. We must be totally, John Piper must be totally
persuaded that knowing God truly without loving him duly is eternally deadly,
deadly. I must be persuaded of that. So, I am trembling at the thought that I
could go about my academic work or my scholarly work or my writing work or
preaching work or study work in some kind of cold frame with no awakened love
for God, affection for God. So, the quest for overcoming what he is referring
to as intellectualism is a life and death battle. That is the first thing.
2) The second thing
I would say is that we should therefore read all things — Scripture and
everything else, especially the word; the Scripture, but also the world and
everything in it — we should read everything on the lookout for evidences of
God’s value, not just evidences of his truth. The devil owns that God is true
and probably knows more true things about God than we do. But the devil will
not own that God is supremely valuable and supremely satisfying. The devil
values himself above God. God’s presence gives no joy and no satisfaction to
the devil whatsoever.
Therefore, our aim
in reading the Bible should not be demonic. We are not aiming to rise just to
the level of the devil. Our aim is, of course, to see what is really there,
what is true about God — but always more, always more; namely, with a view to
feeling what is valuable about God, treasuring the treasure that God is. The
aim is to see the millions of reasons why God is a treasure, not just the
millions of evidences that God exists or has certain attributes. All of our
theological refinement should be for the sake of doxological embrace and
enjoyment. This affects the way you read. This is what I try to do. I try to
read. You read on the lookout for evidences of value, evidences of
preciousness, evidences that he is beautiful and sweet and satisfying.
Peter says in 1
Peter 2:1–3, “Long for the pure, spiritual milk” — and I think he means the
milk of the word — “that by it you may grow up into salvation — if indeed you
have tasted that the Lord is good.” What is the point of that if: if you have
tasted? The point is that all the drinking in the world without tasting will
not grow us up into salvation. The aim of drinking the word is tasting the
Savior. It is the tasting that is the nutritional encounter with the living God
that grows us up into salvation. So, that is the second thing I would say. In all
of our reading, be on the lookout for evidences of God’s value, not just
evidences of his truth.
3) Which leads now
to the third thing that I would say, namely, that the goal of valuing or
treasuring or feeling the preciousness of or enjoying the beauty of God in all
of our reading confronts me immediately with the impossibility on my part of
making it happen. You can’t make yourself value God. You can make yourself
read. You can make yourself list off attributes of God that you see. You can
make yourself list of ways that God behaves. But you can’t make yourself feel
how wonderful they are. That is why the psalmist cries: Open my eyes that I may
see wonders in your Word (Psalm 119:18).
So, the third point
is: Pray, pray, pray. And we pray not only for illumination to see what is
really there about God, but to feel. We pray Psalm 90:14, “Satisfy [me] in the
morning with your steadfast love.” Why in the world would the psalmist pray
that, except that the human heart doesn’t naturally feel it when it hears and
sees the beauties of God? God has to work this. We ask God to make us satisfied
in God. So, prayer is absolutely essential not only that my eyes would be open,
but that my affections would be awakened.
4) The fourth thing
I would say is that, beyond the Bible, I read authors who have understood God
deeply and felt him mightily and expressed both the understanding and the
feeling with clarity and power. For me, that has been mainly Jonathan Edwards
and John Owen and C.S. Lewis and the Puritans. You need to find the great seers
of God and the great lovers of God and the great expressers of the seeing and
the loving, so that they can feed your soul with true and large affections.
I know you, Tony,
would put John Newton in that category and so would I — kind of a latter-day
Puritan who saw things deeply and expressed things beautifully and felt things
deeply. So that is number four.
5) And then,
finally, I would say: Open your mouth and bear witness to family and friends
and neighbors and colleagues to the beauty of God and your joy in him. It is
precisely in giving expression to our joy that intensifies the joy itself. A
shared joy is a doubled joy. God loves mission. God loves witness. God loves
sharing. God loves loving people. And he does not love hoarding. Therefore,
when we turn on our affections and express them to other people, God is pleased
and our joy is intensified.
So, those are my five strategies against cold intellectualism. There are lots more strategies, but maybe that is enough to set the trajectory of discovery.
John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including A Peculiar Glory.
