Having knowledge is not on the list of the fruit of the Spirit.

You please God with your heart, not your knowledge. You enter heaven with your heart, not your mind. Having knowledge is not on the list of the fruit of the Spirit.

 Intellectual Christianity is an attempt to be a Christian with the absence of love and care for others. It tries to use information about God’s word to compensate for the lack of love and care that God calls us to have.

For the last 50 years in America, we have seen this rise in intellectual Christianity. It is a trend that unknowingly attempts to replace real love and care for others with just the acquiring of information about God and his word.

I believe it would be much better to have deep love for others and only know the basics of God’s word, than to know everything about God’s word, and have no love at all.

God made people to be very sensitive and responsive to love and care, we gravitate towards that. When a person tells you of the things of God, but he does not have love inside him, people feel that and the sense the hypocrisy. We can sense that what we are seeing and hearing is a person who wants to impress us with their knowledge of God. People want to see and feel genuine love and care deep inside a person, not just pretending to care.

The intellectual Christian thinks that the more he knows about the scriptures, and theology in general, the more God is pleased with him, and the more holy he is. They either don’t realize that God makes love the key element of salvation and the only real evidence of salvation, or they just intentionally ignore it.

When one intellectual Christian meets another, there is a false sense of safety, that we must be right because we both are the same. When those two become a group, and form a body or a church, groupthink sets in and it becomes the norm. We begin to think we don’t need to love or care or suffer for God, we simply just need to keep talking about God’s word and information around it.

The intellectual Christian is full of knowledge of God’s word but has no real understanding of love. It is as if the bible doesn’t even mention the word love to them.

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore the more important aspects of the law—justice, mercy, and faith. You should tithe, yes, but do not neglect the more important things.”

Matt 23:23

The greatest example of the intellectual Christian is the pharisees. They were the epitome of that group think mind frame. The pharisees understood God’s word better than any one else, yet they had no idea who God really was or how to enter heaven. The question is how do we transform with God and His Holy Spirit from a intellectual believer, to a loving and caring believer?

Intellectual Christians try to obtain salvation on technicality because they either can’t grasp the idea of love, or they want to ignore that aspect of God’s word, and try to find a way around it, to enter the kingdom from another angle or path. They are like the husband who does not know who to be affectionate with his wife or kids, and works a lot of hours. He buys them things to compensate for his absence and lack of attention and care. That never is a replacement for the true act of love and the members of the family usually see right through it.

Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible. 

Matt 19:26

Is there hope for the intellectual Christian? There is hope for everyone with God.