Click to join the conversation with over 500,000 Pentecostal believers and scholars
| PentecostalTheology.com
Book Reviews / Pneuma 29 (2007) 131-178
143
Rick M. Nañez, Full Gospel, Fractured Minds? A Call to Use God’s Gift of the Intellect (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005). 272 pp, $18.99, cloth.
Isn’t reasoning anti-spiritual? This is the question that Rick M. Nañez, an educator and missionary with the Assemblies of God, is forced to answer. Nañez had wanted to write a guide for Pentecostals or Charismatics who wished to rediscover and explore the life of the mind along with profound experiential piety. He quickly realized that the strong preju- dice against the careful use of reason that exists in Pentecostal and Charismatic circles had to be answered first.
Nañez’ work is divided into two parts. Part 1 analyzes the pathology of the anti- intellectualism harbored by many Pentecostal or Charismatic believers. Nañez begins with a discussion of what the Bible teaches about the mind. He defines anti-intellectualism as a preju- dice against the use of careful reasoning. Two chapters discuss several passages in the NT often quoted by those who disparage the use of reason. Next, Nañez sets out his reading of the history and nature of anti-intellectualism, which he sees as having risen during nineteenth- century revivalism and continuing in the turn-of-the-century Holiness and Pentecostal move- ments. The point is that anti-intellectualism is neither godly nor “spiritual.” Here Nañez may be painting with too broad a brush, especially when he suggests that revivalism becomes emo- tionalism and a kind of lazy pragmatism that is unwilling to work for deep knowledge and insight.
The second part is conceived as a guide to rediscovering the life of the mind. In successive chapters, Nañez discusses such topics as reason, education, theology, philosophy, and other topics from the perspective of what studying these subjects can do for the believer. The last chapters urge us to reconnect to the great Christian thinkers of the past. At the end, Nañez challenges Pentecostals and Charismatics to become missionaries of the Book to a culture that is “mesmerized” by digital images and has forgotten the power of the written word.
Scholars, thinking pastors, or students who are under pressure to abandon their scholarly gifts will benefit from such an insider’s examination of the anti-intellectual ethos of many Pentecostal and Charismatic circles. I do wish that Nañez had provided more guidance on how to go about developing habits of thinking and reading critically. I see little here. For example, he might have given a short list of classics that one could begin reading, and then offered suggestions for further study.
For me, a greater issue is that Nañez seems to offer a solution that is too rationalistic. Nañez does not sufficiently address how we can cultivate both careful reasoning and pro- found spiritual experience, nor does he seem to suggest how we can bring the power of the Book to a “postmodern” or “late modern” culture. How do we bring the “page” to those who are “digital”? How might Christians benefit from images as well as from reasoning? For all Christians, and not just for Pentecostals and Charismatics, an unbalanced rationalism is neither biblical nor ultimately helpful.
Reviewed by James M. Henderson
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/157007407X178346
PPNEU 29,1_f9_131-178.indd 143NEU 29,1_f9_131-178.indd 143
3/30/07 8:48:23 PM3/30/07 8:48:23 PM
1
