Full Gospel, Fractured Minds?: A Call to Use God's Gift of the Intellect - Softcover

Nañez, Rick M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0310263085 ISBN 13: 9780310263081

Publisher: Zondervan Academic, 2005

Synopsis

Do you sometimes feel you have to check your intellect at the church door, leaving reason behind to embrace the Christian faith? Do you hunger for a “full gospel” that includes the mind as well as heart and Spirit? Full Gospel, Fractured Minds? challenges charismatic and Pentecostal believers to discover the power of a well-maintained mind―a mind on fire―to match a heart on fire and to create a life that operates within the full counsel of God .Nañez shows how human reason helps us understand and interpret God’s Word as well as defend the gospel. He shows what the Bible teaches about the mind, and explores the backgrounds of nineteenth-century and modern culture, anti-intellectualism, Pentecostal history and beliefs, and popular misconceptions about human intellect in relation to the Christian faith. Full Gospel, Fractured Minds? helps men and women practice a Christian faith that reflects the whole person and the full gospel. “Rick Nañez calls Pentecostals and charismatics to seek a balance between mind and Spirit. This book will stir you to seek all that God has for you.”―From the Foreword by Stanley M. Horton, PhD

About this title

About the Author:

Rick Nañez has (MA, Luther Rice Seminary) and has done doctoral work at Trinity Evangelical Seminary in Newburg, Indiana. In twenty years of pastoral service, he has ministered in a suburban, a Native-American, and an African-American Church. He has held credentials with the Assemblies of God since 1987, and has traveled to twenty-eight countries. He has taught on the importance of the 'life of the mind' on four continents and is currently an appointed missionary to Quito, Ecuador. He has been married to Renee for nineteen years and they have two boys, Joseph and Christopher.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Full Gospel, Fractured Minds? The Heart and the Head: What the Bible Teaches about the Mind The Protestant clergy were fi lled with 'head knowledge'; they were not taught of the Spirit and were therefore ignorant, even 'anti-intellectual' because God's wisdom can never be acquired by the mere 'human' mind. EARLY PENTECOSTAL LEADER, 1915 'Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?' Jesus replied: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' JESUS CHRIST Carnal and proud minds are contented with self; they like to remain at home; when they hear of mysteries, they have no curiosity to go and see the great sight, though it be ever so little out of their way; and when it actually falls in their path, they stumble at it. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN Christina was a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two who was diligently pressing her way through life. She was active in sports, loved poetry, and worked as an enterprising computer programmer. Life was good to her, but a nightmare-come-true would soon dash her hopes and ambitions. A day before a scheduled gallstone surgery, Christina had an unnerving dream that the members of her body refused to follow the commands of her mind. Oddly and tragically, within twenty-four hours her nocturnal vision came true. She could not stand, her hands wandered, she couldn't feed herself, her posture slumped, and even her voice was erratic. 'Something awful has happened,' she cried out. 'I feel disembodied.' Christina's body members were refusing to include her mind while performing their duties. In essence, her mouth, hands, and feet were in rebellion against her mind! The above account isn't fiction; it is documented in Oliver Sacks' national bestseller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In the prime of life, Christina was permanently handicapped by a rare disorder in which the parietal lobes of the brain failed to receive communication from other parts of the body. Christina's lobes were in excellent working order, but, as Dr. Sacks puts it, 'they had nothing to work with.' As a result, the patient had no tendon or joint sense at all, and her movements were clumsy. Though her emotions and feelings were very sensitive, she realized that her body was 'blind and deaf to its mind.' By accident, Christina had brought on her own 'body blindness.' In an attempt to strengthen her health, she had consumed sizeable amounts of vitamin B -- 6. In moderation B -- 6 is a good thing; however, she had overdosed on it. Approximately two hundred years before Christina encountered her frightening disorder, another body began to experience similar symptoms. The condition of this other body was also self-induced. She too overdosed on good things; she gorged herself on emotion, intuition, and experience. Her name wasn't Christina, but Chris tian. And the wreckage was not to be found in a physical body but in a spiritual body --- the body and bride of Christ. Beginning about 1800, much of the church in America began to undergo a radical mutation. For various reasons (dealt with throughout this book), it started to separate the heart from the head, faith from reason, experience from logic, believing from thinking, and intellect from emotion. In a nutshell, the mind and the spirit were set up against each other as archenemies. Thus, just as Christina's physical body had refused to hear the commands of her head, so also the body of Christ failed to listen to its Head. Though Jesus has clearly commanded his followers to love God with all their minds (Matt. 22:37), and though the great apostle Paul challenged the body of Christ with the words 'in your thinking be adults' (1 Cor. 14:20), teaching on the importance of using one's brains for God's glory began to fade. What had been a relatively rare teaching throughout church history began to spread like a plague during the nineteenth century. During the formative stages of 'revival religion' in the new republic of America (1800 -- 1850), many among the Chris tian masses slated science as an adversary of faith and of the Bible. The healthy art of critical thinking was relabeled as 'negative thought' and was placed in the same category with atheistic criticism of the Scriptures. God-given reason was inaccurately lumped together with the 'goddess of reason' and was thus redefined as an enemy of belief. Furthermore, many believers began to confuse an education in the liberal arts with the secularization of education through liberalism. The spiritually revitalized but intellectually passive multitude of the nineteenth-century evangelical revival reclassified faith as an urge or a feeling and mistakenly separated reason and emotion --- the Siamese-twins of the soul. Instead of pointing out that non-Christians were twisting the definitions of science and maligning the origins and proper use of reason, the intellect, and logic, many nineteenthcentury believers simply exited from these arenas of contention. Rather than responding with an offensive strategy and defending the faith once for all delivered to the saints, they simply retreated from study in such areas. Thus, human reason (or, as we say, 'the head') came to represent the fallen faculty of worldly creatures --- the part of a human being that cannot help but get one into trouble, especially in matters of faith. By contrast, emotion (or, as we say, 'the heart') was appointed as the ruling monarch of the spiritual life. The Heart and the Head: What the Bible Teaches about the Mind 21 When the church separates the head from the heart and reason from revelation, she becomes guilty of driving an artificial wedge into God's unified reality. It is true, of course, that this is the same mistake that was made by those outside of God's kingdom. Religion was for the private world of feeling; the mind was for dealing with the problems of life. Thus, it shouldn't surprise us to witness within the church a general confusion about life when she attempted to carve up God's reality as the world did. In some respects, therefore, in forfeiting the honorable origins, definitions, and place of human intellectual faculties, nineteenth-century evangelicalism (along with fundamentalism and Pentecostalism later) seems to have actually helped foster the fragmented worldview that is so prominent today. Like the victim of the neurological defect described at the beginning of this chapter, the voice of the church has been weakened in the world. Its abilities to stand intellectually, to hold a strong moral posture, and to offer its helping hands have been affected greatly. Moreover, like Christina, so many within the twenty-first-century American body of Christ struggle to feed themselves, are without tone, and lack flexibility in their 'intellectual sinews.' While in mental convalescence, Christina's emotions, though vibrant, were out of touch with her body. In much the same way, hosts of Full Gospel believers excel in the devotional, emotional, and experiential aspects of their faith, but they leave much to be desired in the sphere of the life of the mind. Only through ongoing, rigorous, mental exercises did our young, ailing pilgrim make progress, training the physical members of her body to once again follow the commands of her mind. And it will only be through the same type of painstaking effort that the Pentecostal--Charismatic movement can recover from her comfortable but fl awed approach to issues concerning the intellect.

About this edition

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0310263085
• ISBN 13: 9780310263081
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 270