"I’m afraid what happens is that a focus on gaining information rather than on nurturing faith produces a rationally satisfying but secular Christianity, a Christianity where there is impressive growth in knowledge but little growth in the all-important relationship to God part. The essence of secularity is to miss the spiritual reality that can only be gained through intimacy with Christ—an intimacy of relationship in participation with Him in living the kind of life He modeled for us. Jesus was keenly conscious of the spirit world and spiritual reality. The Pharisees were at least conscious enough of the spirit realm to fast regularly and to deal with demons. The Sadducees appear to have been rather totally secularized. We may be somewhere between the two. But we’ve bought into a Greek knowledge-seeking approach, mentioned in 1 Corinthians 1:22 where it is noted that Greeks were committed to the quest for knowledge...The Greeks had the theory that the thing wrong with humans is lack of knowledge. So their answer to human problems was to supply information, a system that should be seen to be bankrupt, especially by Christians. But our whole schooling system is based on this bankrupt theory plus its corollary, the assumption that if people have the right information, they will behave rightly.

Training programs and sermonizing that focus people’s attention on information rather than on behavior deaden faith. People lose their faith in evangelical seminaries and churches not because the knowledge is wrong or theologically off the tracks, but because an overload of knowledge without putting it into practice deadens relationships. Such overemphasis on doctrine also leads people (especially academics) to be suspicious of experience. This is strange, since it is precisely experience that is necessary to enable knowledge to be valuable. Virtually the only kind of knowledge advocated in Scripture is experiential knowledge (not simply theoretical or academic)...John 8:32 should be translated, "You’ll experience and obey the truth and the truth will set you free"" -Charles H. Kraft (Fuller Theological Seminary)