An interesting blog post at The Evangelical Outpost: Six Thoughts about Jesus.
On of the thoughts:
Some people assume that Jesus was a carpenter while others (on better evidence I believe) think he was a rabbi. Whether he worked with wood or with words, I think it is indisputable that Jesus was a philosopher. As philosopher Dallas Willard wrote in his essay, “Jesus the Logician”:
There is in our culture an uneasy relation between Jesus and intelligence, and I have actually heard Christians respond to my statement that Jesus is the most intelligent man who ever lived by saying that it is an oxymoron. Today we automatically position him away from (or even in opposition to) the intellect and intellectual life. Almost no one would consider him to be a thinker, addressing the same issues as, say, Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger or Wittgenstein, and with the same logical method.
It truly is then, as Mark Noll once wrote, a “scandal” that evangelicals have failed so miserably in their commanded task of “putting on the mind of Christ.” As a group we should be fertile ground for producing intellectuals. After all, we are disciples of the greatest thinker in history.
Reminds me of a little book by Peter Kreeft I read a while back: The Philosophy of Jesus
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It is sad that among other things the protestant reformation acted to sever so many Christians from the Church’s intellectual tradition. Of course, reminding people that faith and reason are not incompatible has been one of the primary themes of Pope Benedict’s pontificate. We Catholics have a strong intellectual tradition. Not that you’d know it sometimes from the ordinary guy in the pews. It is a scandal for us as well that we are so ignorant of our intellectual heritage and fail miserably to promote it. That’s one reason I thought this video was so awesome.
via Jen
