Acts 13:6-7 - The Gospel for Intelligent People

In this blog series, I’m going to take a look at the book of Acts from a strategic point of view. What was going on in the days of the early church and what can we learn from it today in the 21^st Century?

“The proconsul, an intelligent man, sent for Barnabas and Saul because he wanted to hear the word of God.” Acts 13:7 NIV (My emphasis added)

I like intelligent people. I love hearing about someone’s field of expertise and hear them explain things, It helps me realise how unintelligent I am! The world of Podcasts and books has opened the world to new areas of knowledge and learning. We can now get more learning for free through Podcasts than the greatest libraries in history, all on our phone.

Intelligent people often become leaders. Paul was intelligent, very intelligent. The Book of Romans is up there with Plato and Aristotle as some of the greatest thinking in human history. Most company CEOs are highly intelligent. If we want to advance the Gospel, we’re going to need intelligent people to do it.

I’m grateful that some of the greatest minds currently alive are following Jesus. I think of Francis Collins, head of the human genome project in the USA, who is making great strides in his field, and is helping intelligent people realise that the Gospel is for them too.

I truly believe that the message of Jesus should intrigue the intelligent. In this passage, Barnabas and Saul’s message piques the interest of an intelligent man. There’s been so much of Christianity that has been “check your brain at the door” stuff, it’s not helpful.

I grew up going to a very Christian school, and I was taught an American, fundamentalist type of Christianity. This put the Bible squarely at odds with science. I still learned science, but not things like evolution. In this instance, I was taught strongly that unless a literal 7-day view was held of creation, all of Jesus’s work on the cross was for nothing.

Pretty strong stuff.

It was typical of an education created in the 1960s (and was still alive and well in the 1990’s when I went to school). However, this reading of the text was quite surface level. I’m not here to suggest you should believe in evolution or not, but what I’m trying to say is that picking and choosing scientific data to prove what you *think* the text is saying is not a good idea.

A better reading of Scripture is to let the text tell us what the author was intending for us to know. That means being willing to lay down our preconceived ideas. In the case of the creation narrative, plenty of work has been done by orthodox Christian scholars to show that the text is not trying to make scientific claims, but theological claims. That’s the opposite of reading science into the text, it’s actually a better exegesis of the text.

Why is this important? 

Saying “The Bible says it so that settles it” is lazy. We need to show the intelligent people of this world that a thoughtful reading of the Bible means we don’t need to throw out logic, we don’t need to throw out science, we don’t need to throw out their area of expertise. Scripture is robust enough to deal with scientific findings.

Another area we need to convince intelligent people on is our ethics. For the first time in centuries, Christianity is perceived as not holding to a high enough moral standard. Interestingly, this moral standard is the opposite to what we would think. This moral standard is now about what is affirmed, rather than what is prohibited. For instance, if you are not affirming of the LGBTQ+ community, the moral standard is not considered high. That’s a complete change from even 20 years ago.

What is more, intelligent people have read the Bible, they know what it says on moral issues, at least at a surface level. How do we convince intelligent people of our ethical standpoint?

The simple answer is, you can’t. Only God can truly change the human heart. But that doesn’t mean that we need to abandon orthodoxy. What we need to do is to show that our ethics is both logical and reasonable, whilst at the same time showing the cracks in their view.

To show that the Biblical text is worthy of deriving our ethics from, we need to convince people of the Moral Argument. That is, that there is no objective right or wrong without something or someone to ground it. Social progress doesn’t cut it. Seeking what’s best for human flourishing doesn’t cut it. It is at that point, and only at that point, that we can start to show that Scripture is the best place where one can derive human ethics. It when this happens that the door can be opened in someone’s life for God to change their heart.

So much of the work of reaching intelligent people is done at the philosophical level. If we are to reach intelligent people, our churches need to do much more philosophical work in our preaching and teaching. We need to spend more time doing the work of Apologetics.

All of that being said, if the life behind the messenger doesn’t stack up, it’s all for nothing. Sadly, there have been too many examples of great ministries, but no substance behind the minister. You can’t convince someone of Christian morality if your morals are out of whack. We desperately need ministers who can live what they preach.

In the First Century, the message of Jesus was for everyone, including the intelligent. Our methods may need to change to reach the intelligent people of the day, but the message doesn’t. We don’t need to compromise what we believe; we just need to speak to the topics the intelligent people pf this world are thinking about and show that the Gospel is both reasonable and logical for them.