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The not-so-well-educated should not despise the well-educated, nor should the latter despise the former. Yet, so often those who obtain advanced degrees leave behind all the humility they may have once had. A case in point is the evolutionary scientific community. It has such a snobbish (and defensive) attitude toward anything that smacks of the creation account of Genesis that it does not even want it mentioned in high school and college textbooks. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington is so totally under evolution’s influence that it will not even allow any creationist models or materials to be exhibited. One of the darlings of the atheistic, humanistic, evolutionary mindset, the late Carl Sagan, would not even respond when brother Tom Warren accepted his challenge a few years ago to debate the question of origins. (If the account of Biblical creation is so ridiculous, why not debate it and thereby let its absurdity be fully exposed?) It is unabashed intellectual snobbery that makes the evolutionist look with pity and disgust upon poor, unenlightened folk who still believe the Bible.
This same snobbery can be seen among Christians, unfortunately. Some preachers, pastors (elders), professors, and publishers have the goal of leading their behind-the-times, backwoods, old-fashioned, ignorant, tradition-bound brethren into the realities of the present, as they view it. After all, many of them have been off to a seminary or divinity school somewhere and have learned some things the rest of us never learned (most certainly). They have studied under some theologians who have been “doctored” two or three times over and who are so well-educated they deny the inspiration of the Bible and the Deity of Christ. Far too many thus taught have come back from such schools with the mission to teach, preach, and write so as to convert us spiritual “red-necks” who have never “outgrown” the simple unadulterated Gospel.
This strain of self-proclaimed “scholars” in their snobbish “scholars conferences” on “Christian” university campuses is the primary source of the so-called “New Hermeneutics.” They have “learned better” how to interpret the Scriptures than did the apostles, our fathers in the faith, and did we. They have “learned” that doctrine does not matter, but that attitude, sincerity, “love,” and the “person of Christ” are the realities. They have “learned” that the church of Christ is “just another denomination,” and they are doing everything in their power to make it so. The only thing that surpasses the degree of their heresy is the extent of their snobbery.
This trait is just as ugly in us as it was in the Jews and Greeks of old (John 7:48—49; 1 Cor. 1:22—25). True wisdom is never carried away with itself.
[Note: I wrote this article for and it was published in The Lighthouse, weekly bulletin of Northpoint Church of Christ, Denton, TX, March 29, 2015, of which I was editor. This is an abbreviated version of a longer article originally published in THE GOSPEL JOURNAL, October 2001, which can be found in the Longer Articles portion of this Website.]
Attribution: From thescripturecache.com; Dub McClish, owner and administrator.
