Abstract: Over the centuries, many religious thinkers — precisely because they are religious thinkers — have put a premium on intellectual attainment as a prerequisite for salvation. This has sometimes yielded an elitism or snobbishness that is utterly foreign to the teachings of the Savior. The Gospel as taught in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints values education and knowledge, certainly. But not unduly. Intellectuals, while heartily welcome among the Saints and, when faithful, much appreciated for their potential contributions to the Church, have no claim on any special status in the Kingdom simply because of their (real or pretended) intellectuality, whether here or in the hereafter.

A recurring theme in the texts that I read with my Islamic philosophy class during the coronavirus-truncated Winter 2020 term at Brigham Young University — particularly, I think, in the Faṣl al-Maqāl (“The Decisive Treatise”) of Ibn Rushd and in Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (“Alive, Son of Awake”) — is the notion that the full theological and philosophical truth should be restricted only to the elite. It should, so these two twelfth-century Andalusian texts argue, be carefully and deliberately withheld from people disqualified by their (presumably inferior) natures from being able to deal with it. In some interpretations, Ibn Rushd may even have argued that only intellectuals of the most rarified class — and, really, only their intellects, not their emotions or individual personalities — would attain immortality or eternal life.

I’m afraid that intellectuals are often prone to elevate themselves among the electi and to look down from that lofty perch upon the mere auditores.1 Ancient Gnosticism, for instance, which took its name from the Greek word γνωστικός (gnōstikós, “having knowledge”), was all [Page viii]about what and how much one knew. Consider this passage, from the Gospel of John:

So the people were in two minds about him — some of them wanted to arrest him, but so far no one laid hands on him.

Then the officers returned to the Pharisees and chief priests, who said to them, “Why haven’t you brought him?”

“No man ever spoke like that!” they replied.

“Has he pulled the wool over your eyes, too?” retorted the Pharisees. “Have any of the authorities or any of the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd, who know nothing about the Law, is damned anyway!” (John 7:43–49, J. B. Phillips translation)

What about the masses? Who cares?

Such dismissiveness is not confined to scriptural stories of long- gone peoples. Decades back, I sat in a seminar room in Denver where a presenter at an academic conference was setting forth her reading of James W. Fowler’s fairly well-known 1981 book Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. In that book, Fowler (1940-2015), an American theologian affiliated with Emory University, distinguished seven stages of spiritual growth. I remember the thought crossing my mind that the characteristics of the highest stage of Professor Fowler’s seven levels were curiously similar to the views and attitudes of, say, a professor of theology at a liberal Protestant divinity school.

There seems a powerful tendency among people who theorize about God — perhaps particularly in the absence of contradicting experience or revelation — to imagine Him in their own image.