Taking every thought into captivity

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“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5)

“The most serious divide at Baylor is not about buildings, debt, tuition, or even presidential style. It’s about the relationship between faith and learning.” In this month’s Christianity Today, Wheaton College President Duane Litfin thus summed up the battle at Baylor which resulted in the resignation of Baylor President Robert Sloan. In support of his appraisal, Dr. Litfin offers contrasting quotes: one from a former Baylor president saying that the “Faculty are not here to engage in religiosity,” and one from Dr. Sloan saying that the “all-inclusive claims of the lordship of Jesus Christ” must be integrated into the full range of educational disciplines.

I’m not writing so much about Baylor as about the apparent battle between our minds and souls. “Knowledge puffs up,” Paul says, and we have experienced the arrogance that follows a little knowledge. In stereotype, evangelical Christians retreat into Bible colleges and reject the arts and sciences as worthy of godly pursuit. We’d rather risk being proud of our biblical knowledge than about knowing geology, it seems. In stereotype, respected research universities become fortresses of humanistic pride. They’d rather be dogmatic about secular faith than religious faith, it seems. The stereotypes are not unfair. Insofar as they contain truth, both responses are unbiblical.

In 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 Paul speaks of waging spiritual warfare on behalf of that church. In the first century, Judaizers (who would force gentile Christians to convert to Judaism), Gnostics (who denied the dual nature of Christ), as well as the merely worldly and selfish all occupied their respective strongholds against the lordship of Christ. Instead of retreat Paul promises engagement. While he determined to pull down imaginings and strongholds set up against the knowledge of God, he set out to capture (not destroy) the ideas that occupy the wrecked defenses.

What are the fortified places of our enemy today? What thoughts or speculations defend those strongholds? It’s intriguing to imagine what it would look like to bring those defenders into captivity to the obedience of Christ. Take it a step further; can those belligerents be cleaned up, turned around, rearmed, and added to the army of light as we have been?

In his rejection of fleshly weapons such as intimidation and deceit, there is no sense that Paul is setting down effective weapons for the sake of nicer ones. He is using divinely powerful weapons to attack spiritual strongholds. What seemed to the Corinthians to be a contest of will and sophistication was in reality a spiritual fight.

The most important battles are spiritual, after all. A physical fight or an intellectual argument will have winners and losers, but it’s never as simple as that. A loser who is battered into submission will change his tactics instead of his mind. A changed heart is forever; he’s not a loser but rather a convert.

Maybe today we can see the strongholds as fields into which we have divided God’s truth. It seems that everything we learn can tempt us to be proud within ourselves. Fields of knowledge become strongholds, then, when we have a, “Since I know this, God is not necessary,” moment. We might think of biology and Darwinism as an example of this. I think we’ll find the tendency present in every type of human endeavor.

I read once of the 17th-century discovery of calculus. The ability to mathematically describe how factors affect one another and discern patterns (maybe to predict outcomes) led some to think we might discover a God-like foreknowledge in the numbers. Foreknowledge implies control of the future, again similar to God. It’s human to, in the excitement of discovery, imagine the impossible and that we can build a tower into the heavens?a stronghold. It is not the discovery or pursuit of truth that stands against the lordship of Christ. Our problem comes in imagining that we are the master and our command of ultimate truth will fortify us against the rightful King.

When you look at a college catalog you see schools, degree programs, and areas of specialization that suggest the whole gamut of human endeavor. For example the road being built in front of my office suggests the accumulated knowledge of engineers, architects, chemists, financiers, politicians, educators, and communications specialists at least. Many of the workers may not have advanced degrees but they are still the sharp end of well-planned intent on the part of a highl