Smart Jesus

Spirituality Column # 27
May 15, 2007
Current! In Carmel (IN) Newspaper

Smart Jesus
By Bob Walters

Jesus is smart.

In a cosmic game of Jeopardy, I’ll take Jesus and you can have the field.

Too often Jesus Christ is seen as an emotional figure, accessible through faith but otherwise popularly consigned to an existence outside the realm of true intellectualism.

Secular philosophers would say that the active pursuit of belief in Jesus Christ, as the fully God, fully man, crucified-dead-risen eternal son of God who is our never-ceasing intercessor in prayer with Almighty God the Father and the way to our own individual eternal salvation … means checking your brains at the church door.

To me it is interesting that until roughly 150 years ago virtually every institution of higher learning in the western world created since the time of Christ was founded based on the pursuit of understanding Christ.

Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, the Sorbonne, little Franklin College (founded 1834) south of Indianapolis – almost every college everywhere before state and land grant universities – each had its genesis as an educational institution for the training of clergy and Christian or other religious principles.

In those days you had to learn about Christianity before you could critique it.

Sadly today Christ is often dismissed as an emotional apparition and left off the educational palette when in fact Christ represents the sum total of all knowledge man’s brain ever has, does, or will know.

Christ is the Logos Creator (read John 1); the Word of Creation. He was there at the Beginning and is the Word that breathes life into the human spirit and all Creation. We have the freedom to believe or not believe, of course, but the entire point of the Bible is the intellectual exercise of understanding our relationship with God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Cosmos and, very importantly, with each other.

It’s OK to be emotional about our faith – I frequently am – but the reasoning brain is necessary to truly pursue God.

Think about it.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), a Carmel resident, thinks about and feels Christ in very real terms.