How The Intellect Tells Powerful Lies
Welcome to the next daily installment of this true story, which you can find posted here each afternoon until it comes to an end.
Chapter 86: How The Intellect Tells Powerful Lies
There are some things that the intellect will never, ever grasp. It’s only tool for grasping them is acknowledging something like this “There are things that I cannot grasp, yet they are real.” The more books one reads, the more degrees one has, the more one can explain more of the things about life. But that still leaves a person with all of the same limitations that he had before.
There are things that cannot be grasped by the intellect. When we pretend otherwise, we do ourselves a mighty disservice, a disservice tantamount to lying to ourselves and everyone else repeatedly for decades. There are things that cannot be grasped. I will try to get closer to explaining them, but they cannot be grasped with the intellect. There are other faculties I have for grasping them.
Using the intellect for grasping them is as effective as building a house with a butter knife as screwdriver instead of an actual screwdriver. You can feel like you get the job done more or less, but not well. The intellect lets you convince yourself that it understands matters of faith, when it, in fact misses what is actually taking place.
Some people use the study of apologetics to explain how God may have done certain things in the Bible. The field leaves me lacking, for it spends a great deal of time attempting to explain the unexplainable to a world demanding an explanation.
Faith and intellect are two different faculties in the healthy, functioning adult human, and neither are there to replace the other. For decades I was unable to understand that. When I saw Katie shift from what was automatic and natural to what was intellectualized and trained by the academy, I knew that society had done her a great disservice. It was a familiar disservice to me. I too was taught to worship at the cult of the intellect, rather that acknowledge the many special faculties of the human body, among them, a capacity for faith.
That includes a perception to understand the world through that faith and in ways that the intellect fails to grasp. The effective intellect will be able to reason, “That is another part of me that cannot be intellectualized sufficiently to be understood. It is simply a mystery and the best use of my time is to accept that it is a mystery to me, unimportant for me to entirely grasp at this time.”
How it pained me to see Katie’s mind shift from something automatic to something intellectual. There is an intuitiveness that women, for some reason, generally far surpass men in. They are, from a young age, more intuitive in certain areas of life. What a great disservice is done to our society when the most intuitive among us are trained to ignore that readily accessible part and to turn to intellect as the fulcrum of human existence. There is just so much more to a human.
And yet feelings and emotions are elevated in its place. They are not the same as that intuition and they are certainly not the same as faith. A contorted view of humanity is left — intellect and emotions, and all else must fit in one of those two boxes. While I cannot entirely know what it means to be made in the likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-27), it seems that the ability to suppress one’s capacity for faith is not the focal point of being made in the likeness of God. The human capacity to do the exact opposite and to have great faith, seems to be far more important to God.
While the Bible does not suggest the importance of getting many advanced degrees, it puts tremendous emphasis in the power of faith. Jesus speaks of a type of unfaithfulness that can be driven out through fasting and prayer, an unfaithfulness that renders a person more spiritually effective when it is dealt with (Matthew 17:21). In that same passage, we see that just a small amount of faith even gives a person the capacity to do tremendous things (Matthew 17:20). Hebrews 11:6 says that without faith it is impossible to please God.
Faith is so central that some Christian denominations tie faith in Jesus to salvation, or the ability to be saved from sin and to go to heaven. Ephesians 2:8-9, as an example, ties grace, faith, and salvation together. 1 Peter 1:5 similarly ties together grace, faith, and salvation. There has been much debate in the history of Christianity over the precise role in the Bible over the topic of faith, but there is agreement on the fact that faith is a central part of it. Here, I am intellectualizing the importance of faith, but that faith in God needs no intellectualizing. It can simply be there and be allowed to grow unchecked.
The response of “Believe in Jesus? What does that even mean? We do not have time for this,” would also be an example of intellectualizing. There are some things that you just know and you can say that you know them and you can do that without fear, or thought, or hesitation. You just know it. “Does your mother love you?” would be met by some people in a very different way than, “Does Jesus loves you?” Other people would have a similarly natural reaction to both. Both Jesus and mother deeply love you, but one of those two relationships — the one with Jesus — is able to be made very complicated by a world that wants to distract. There need be nothing stressful or intellectual about being able to simply say that you know that Jesus loves you.
Yes, God put it on my heart to walk directly toward Eagle Eye Katie and to have that question for her.
-Allan Stevo
This is a selection from my forthcoming book, “The Amtrak Vignettes.” A neat story began with the writing of “The Amtrak Vignettes” in October 2023. Every day until that story comes to an end, I intend to share a part of it here. It is a part of my faith journey as a Christian, a faith journey that has been deepened since the Ides of March 2020. Some of it gets pretty wild and nothing that a “reasonable” person would find himself in the midst of. Few will be scared off by it. Instead, many will grow deeper in their faith. I know that, because I know my readers well, and I know that few come here expecting me to give a milquetoast version of anything. Come here to be challenged. Stay here to have your life changed. That, I believe, is what will come of this work. You can support that work by signing up below.