"Intellectual assent" refers to agreeing or accepting something based on logical understanding or reasoning, without necessarily expressing or feeling emotional or personal conviction towards it. It means acknowledging or agreeing with an idea or concept intellectually, but not necessarily with genuine belief or commitment.
Full definition
We reclassify his sayings as objective teachings to which we can
give intellectual assent rather than letting them strike home as the personal challenge he intended them to be.
He is brave and kind, he tries to obey the Ten Commandments, or in any case the last six, and he gives
full intellectual assent to the Golden Rule.
By grounding religious claims in human experience, Schleiermacher did not have to begin with metaphysical speculation nor by
requiring intellectual assent to the dogmas of the church.
Black's own The Theology of Dallas Willard: Discovering Protoevangelical Faith provides a systematic analysis of Willard's rather unsystematic theology, which emphasized character development
over intellectual assent to a detailed vision of doctrinal perfection.
«We agree that justification is not earned by any good works or merits of our own; it is entirely God's gift... Faith is not
merely intellectual assent but an act of the whole person, involving the mind, the will, and the affections, issuing in a changed life.
The Fourth Gospel asserts, «You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free» (John 8:32); but it goes on to refer to «doing the truth» and «the truth that is in Christ,» stressing active participation rather than abstract contemplation or
intellectual assent alone.
Interestingly, linked with McGrath's description of the historically conditioned attractiveness of various thought systems is an account of their capacity to engender in the human imagination a vision of a possible society that can appeal and
attract intellectual assent as well as seeming to argue for its conclusions.
The first he called the «cognitive - propositionalist» model — an intellectual approach to theology that dominated for most of Christian history, named for its assumption that theology
concerns intellectual assent to propositions which correspond with reality.
He reports that women students in his classes and women theologians impressed him with the rightness of their cause and
so intellectual assent came early.
Books can help; listening to others who «have been there» can
bring intellectual assent; but once we have met the Jesus of Matthew 25:35 - 45 and Luke 4:18 - 19 in the hovels and barrios and streets of our own and others» lands, we can never again read the Bible in the same way.
The relation
of intellectual assent to these other dimensions of Christianity is not one of perfect correlation.
In the case of Christianity, the fallacy has led many to think that to embrace the Christian faith one must
give intellectual assent to a body of standard unchangeable doctrines which have been handed down, supposedly, from the beginning of Christianity.
Although I was raised in a Christian family and charismatic, fundamentalist church, attended a Bible college, and had professed the Christian faith for years, it wasn't until this experience that
my intellectual assent of God's truth became deeply personal.
Faith (emunah in Hebrew) was not understood to be
intellectual assent to propositional statements.
This leads to poor conversions because there's
an intellectual assent but not a lifestyle change.
Faith is closer to courage than it is to
intellectual assent.
Rebirth, not
intellectual assent, takes one up into the life of God, which has descended to us in the flesh.
Certainly not, in the sense of
intellectual assent to the existence of a Supreme Being.
The intellectual assent to an indifferent and aimless cosmos is usually defended on the assumption that our senses give us such a world and that in all honesty we should accept this world in the precise shape our sense perception transmits it to our minds.
Intellectual assent to the reduction of the world to its atomic elements acting blindly in terms of equilibrations of forces, an assent that has gradually come to prevail since the birth of modern science, has made any sort of teleological view of the cosmos seem unscientific and wool gathering to us.
More conservative theologians, on the other hand, believed that his constant criticisms of Bibelglaube (faith in the Bible rather than the one to whom the Bible witnesses), «credo - Credo» (
intellectual assent to the tenets of the Creed) and faith as a bloss Fürwahrhalten etner Lehre (a mere holding of certain doctrines to be true) risked throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Precise thinking about the laws of reason helps us understand that the gift of faith is something more than an act of
intellectual assent.
Moreover, it is not necessary for
an intellectual assent to the tradition to precede the act of faith.