EDITORIAL
Discern the Times | Amy Orr-Ewing
Recently, I had a conversation with an eminent scientist about the current state of the evangelical church. He described to me how the scientific peer review process is underpinned by a healthy skepticism about our human capacity to delude ourselves. As human beings we may so desperately want to come to a particular outcome that our scientific research can easily become skewed toward “finding” that outcome. Hence the need for peer review—other objective voices and perspectives to check our work and keep us honest. Accurate footnoting and transparent citation in academia and publishing play a similar role. Subjecting ourselves to this level of scrutiny is grueling, humbling and time-consuming, but it is also essential.
This friend observed that self-examination seems more at home among the scientific, academic and publishing communities than the religious these days. It seems that evangelical Christians have lost hold of a healthy and biblical view of our own human capacity to sin, to self-deceive and to promote our own interest above the pursuit of truth. This makes us susceptible to narcissistic leaders and bureaucratic cabals that take over churches, movements, communities, political parties or organizations in the name of success, power, greater efficiency or respectability—but lose the very heart of the gospel and lose any connection with truth itself.
No wonder so many are walking away from organized religion. Rather than the current fad of anti-intellectualism, I want to suggest that evangelicals today are desperately in need of a reformed and reinvigorated Christian mind. A curious, honest, reflective faith that will take the time to read, learn and discover. An intellectually honest and humble approach that welcomes questions and insights from tradition, culture, science, philosophy and of course Scripture. This kind of faith has the potential to inspire, and draws others to the person of Jesus.
There are many commitments and actions that would be needed for a generation to commit to this kind of cultural and faith renewal. But certainly, one of them would be a commitment to truth whatever the cost. A commitment to unvarnished truth as a permanent value would protect a culture from corruption and other forces of power. It strikes me that cultural renewal within the church and wider society today will not be possible without this kind of honesty about truth.
I think this rigorous commitment to the integrity of truth is something that our generation of evangelicals needs to recapture as we navigate all kinds of power discourses within the church and out there in the wider culture. Truth matters. Humans are susceptible to self-deception, even in the cause of faith or something we consider to be the “greater good.” But the principles of intellectual integrity matter. Our very future as a faith community may hang on realizing this.