The ability to abstract things is the academicians’ disease. It is also a great gift of God, and like money, power, and sex, it needs to be watched closely. Part of the reason it must be watched closely is because it almost never is watched closely. There are many fine servants who make tyrannical masters, and abstraction is one of them.
But I want to be careful here because in our postmodern times some of our chief offenders in this area are those among the intelligensia who spend a lot of time braying about problematic abstractions. They are intent on overcoming the incipient dualism of the mind/body problem, but little beads of sweat always appear on their foreheads when they try it, and they are not very successful. And then there is this other guy, who has never heard of the mind/body problem; he works down at the feed store, and rides bulls at the rodeo on the weekends. He lives incarnationally, effortlessly, and could not explain any of that egghead stuff to you.
For the academicians, incarnational means being able to talk about incarnational, preferably with words like incarnational. But for the genuinely incarnational, it means being able to laugh at the people who always write big fat books full of words. Faith without works is dead, and this includes the faith of intellectuals. Intellectual faith without incarnational works is dead. But such works would not include poring over one another’s books, handing them back and forth with compliments or critiques, circulating them in a small band of irrelevant smart people. That reminds of the time someone threw a bunch of Scotsmen down into a pit and they all got rich selling rocks to each other.
But I need to explain something else. The fact that this is a typical error among “smart” people means that I have to take a moment to explain what I mean by smart people. Smart people are those who are capable of being just as clueless as ordinary people, but they always do it at a higher rpm. Smart does not mean wise, and ordinary does not mean foolish.
Now this is why intellectuals (high rpm) and pseudo-intellectuals (pseudo-high rpm) can sit up until two in the morning talking about how a particular French filmmaker was deconstructing the suburban instantiations of gnosticism with his gritty authenticity, while down the street another man puts them all to shame by getting up three hours later to go duck hunting with his son. Contemporary intellectuals tell us all to overcome abstractions, but whenever Joe Somebody in a red state says “Okay!” and heads off to a NASCAR race to eat corn dogs, the intellectual goes white in the face. “When we told you to walk away from the realm of abstractions, we didn’t mean . . . to just walk away.”
This is not to blast all intellectuals. Some of them are wise, and when they are, their reflections and contributions are priceless. But most intelletuals are not wise; they are born in sin and rebellion just like the rest of the human race. And when everybody is toodling down the road to the Abyss, it is not a mark of superiority to have the fastest car.