Thinking Christian

A few weeks ago one of our ministry partners wrote an email asking me to clarify part of my BreakPoint article on Four Priorities. He was specifically inquiring about the fourth priority I had suggested, that of increasing our mental awareness and engagement. It was a good question, and I’ve decided to share my answer more broadly here….

Thank you for your thoughtful email. It’s good to hear from you. I’m catching up now from my weeks of dealing with pneumonia and etc., and I hope you don’t think I forgot about you!

I appreciate your comments about prayer and service. Regarding mental awareness and engagement, I would first of all place that in the context of knowing God and His word. That is absolutely of first importance. The words “know” and “knowledge” appear at least 377 times in the New Testament, depending on which translation you use. In my Bible, that averages out to more than two occurrences per page. Add in the 123 or more occurrences of different forms of “teach” and you reach something like 600 related occurrences.

By contrast, “faith” is used 227 times, “believe” appears 105 times, and “love” 172 times. (I’m using QuickVerse for Macintosh to look up those numbers, by the way, and I’ve known QuickVerse to miss words it should have found, so these numbers may not be entirely accurate.) We are transformed by the renewing of our minds, as you know. The fact that God has revealed Himself primarily through a book in this age is significant.

So knowledge is obviously important, and I am quite sure what I’ve said so far is very close to your heart, that you are deeply committed to it. Knowledge is good in itself;to learn and to understand is to become more like Christ. “Knowledge puffs up,” the Bible says, but if it meant that absolutely, there could hardly be such a constant emphasis on it throughout Scripture. Any gift or skill can become a source of pride.

What about engaging with the world on these matters, though? On this I prefer to think in missiological terms. A missionary to an African tribe or a city in China has three initial tasks: First, to know and follow Christ increasingly every day; second, to know the language of the people to whom he is ministering; and third, to understand the culture where he is ministering. Then comes the essential job of translating his knowledge of God and His word into terms the people there can understand. They in turn need to learn the Word of God, and at the same time to unlearn their false and idolatrous practices. The missionary must understand the common falsehoods of the culture well enough to show how they fail the test of truth.

That’s the basic mindset underlying what I have said about being mentally prepared. Now I’ll illustrate with an example. Suppose I present Jesus Christ as the truth who sets us free, and do not explore terminology with my audience. In today’s culture we will likely stumble badly over that word “truth.” I know what I mean when I use it, but typically hear it that way. I have had an actual encounter on the web with a man named Jacob who was convinced there is no such thing as actual truth, that it’s all “socially constructed” and therefore contingent on your culture. So I asked, “what about 2+2=4? Would you say that’s socially constructed? Could 2+2=5?” He answered, and I quote,

It is not *necessary* to use the terms “right” and “wrong”—we participate in a culture in which those are familiar resources that we draw on to describe the world in significant ways. Is it necessary to describe the world in any one way in particular? I don’t think so. Why? Becuase the world I live in is not a functionalist system—I am not a cog in a machine.

The teacher trains the child to emit the signs that the teacher was taught to emit and their teacher was taught to emit and the people that certify teachers were taught to emit. Or said differently, of course 2 + 2 = 5 is an illegitimate answer. The child will probably be corrected, or retrained, if they said that it equalled 5.

What is a “correct understanding”? What do you mean by that turn of phrase? My guess is that a “correct understanding” is one that you happen to agree with or think that others should agree with.

Now, I agree with you completely that no amount of arguing will persuade a person like Jacob to change his mind, apart from the powerful work of the Holy Spirit. But I don’t think Paul’s model for ministry was entirely expressed in that 1 Corinthians passage. We also have:

“And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks.”

Acts 19:8-10: “And he entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly, reasoning and persuading them about the kingdom of God. But when some became stubborn and continued in unbelief, speaking evil of the Way before the congregation, he withdrew from them and took the disciples with him, reasoning daily in the hall of Tyrannus. This continued for two years, so that all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks.”

2 Corinthians 5:11: “Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others.”

2 Corinthians 10:3-5: “For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”

Also from 1 Peter 3:15-16″ “but in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.”

And Jude, verse 3: “Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.”(Based on the context I believe this involves confronting false teaching.)

The 2 Corinthians 10 passage is especially important, because it speaks of a spiritual warfare that includes destroying arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. This aspect of ministry is not opposed to spiritual ministry, it is an essential part of it. We might also note the many, many times in Acts and in the Epistles that the early Christians appealed to evidences in presenting their case. 1 Corinthians 15:3-6 is one classic example.

This is not only about influencing non-believers, but also about Christian spiritual formation. More than one study has shown that among young people who are raised in strong churches and yet move away from the faith in early adulthood, the most commonly cited reason has been that they just didn’t think it was true. They’re confronted with many different truth claims, and they don’t have the information or training to recognize there are good reasons to believe Christianity is true. Typically (very typically) they imbibe the modern message that we’re all free to choose (or create) our own truth, that whatever truth you decide is true is true because you decide that it is.

In contrast, I have heard from several blog readers that they have been significantly encouraged to learn that secularism has viable answers, and that this has strengthened their faith considerably.

Thus I conclude, based on the example and instruction of the apostles, and our responsibilities as missionaries and disciplers wherever we live, that Christians are called to understand the issues of the day in light of the truth of God’s word, and to engage the culture in those issues so as to be able to explain the truth clearly and persuasively.

You asked further, what did I mean by Christians “walking off the playing field”? This I did not cover in any depth in the BreakPoint piece, but it has been documented by many strong Biblical thinkers including R.C. Sproul, William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, Mark Noll, Os Guinness, James White, and Harry Blamires.

In a lecture that I can only paraphrase rather than quote exactly, J.P. Moreland (one of my favorite authors) spoke of the lack of Christian influence in areas like bioethics. Other thinkers are not listening to Christians, he says, it’s not only because of spiritual differences, but because we haven’t done our homework, haven’t fully entered into the ongoing conversation, and therefore are seen as not having much to say.

Harry Blamires wrote over 50 years ago from Britain,

Everywhere one meets examples of the Church’s abdication of intellectual authority which lies at the back of the modern Christian’s easy descent into mental secularism. A few weeks ago, in the chapel of a Church training college, I heard a bishop impress upon his congregation that Church colleges do not exist to give Church teaching but rather to provide opportunities for communal worship. This false antithesis, with all its dangerous implications, was pressed home. The duty of common worship was urged with all the force of episcopal authority. With the same authority the significance of doctrinal teaching was depreciated. A passing reference to the evil materialistic idolatries prevalent to-day complete a neat circuit of error and illogicality.

Of course when one speaks of the loss of intellectual morale in the twentieth-century Church one has in mind much more than the depreciation of the doctrinal demand by unthinking ecclesiastics. My thesis amounts to this. Except over a very narrow field of thinking, chiefly touching questions of strictly personal conduct, we Christians in the modern world accept for the purpose of mental activity, a frame of reference constructed by the secular mind and a set of criteria reflecting secular evaluations. There is no Christian mind.

One reviewer summarized Mark Noll’s discussion on this in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,

By “mind” Noll does not mean theology or biblical studies per se, where, all things considered, evangelicals have done quite well. His target, rather, is evangelicals’ failure seriously to confront the “whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political science, literary criticism and imaginative writing, historical inquiry and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science, social theory and the arts.”

The problem, in short, is evangelicals’ appalling parochialism, their unwillingness to break out of the vast but all-too-comfortable ghetto of evangelical churches and colleges and publishing networks and engage an intellectual world long ago captured by Marx and Darwin and Freud.

The challenge indeed goes back to Marx and Darwin and Freud, and also Nietzsche, and Wellhausen and Strauss and other 19th century Biblical critics who undermined Scriptural authority with their own persuasive arguments. Persuasive, yet wrong, that is. These thinkers mounted an intense intellectual onslaught on Christian truth. Christian leaders at the time (not all, but too many of them) responded poorly. Experiencing the pain of the intellectual onslaught, they wrongly concluded that the way to relieve the pain was to disengage from the discussion. So they walked off the intellectual battlefield, ceding the great centers of learning to the secularists, and in the process gave over much of the twentieth century world to Marx, Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, Wellhausen, and Strauss.

The situation is improving: Marx and Freud have now been largely discredited. Skeptical Biblical criticism has given way to a surprising (though not well-enough publicized) degree of consensus and confidence in the historicity of the New Testament, even among non-Christians. (How they manage that tension I do not understand.)

The current most prominent blazing battles are, as ever, flip sides of the question, “Who is God and how ought I to relate to Him?” Critical disputes are raging over naturalism (i.e. anti-supernaturalism which, though not the same issue as neo-Darwinism, overlaps with it), and also, as noted above, the nature of truth. Also rising in prominence is the charge that “religion” or “fundamentalism” is at the root of the world’s problems, where no distinction is made between the beliefs of various religions. (If Muslim fundamentalism is at the root of much terrorism, the solution is to eliminate fundamentalism in any form; and fundamentalism also includes everyone who believes the Bible is God’s word.)

These are hardly the only issues on the table, but they may seem to be some of the most foundational. Other vital and very contentious disputes (over abortion and gay “marriage,” for example) would look entirely different if we had more agreement on these matters. Regardless of what one sees as the root intellectual battles in our culture, though, the point is the same: Christians’ voices must be heard in these discussions, and in order to be heard, we need to know what we’re talking about. We need to know it well enough that the other side will recognize that we know it.

I hope this helps to clarify my points, but please feel free to keep the conversation going. Thank you for your partnership!

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