Thinking Christian

Recently posted on the Center For a Just Society website, my thoughts on “Hate Is Not a Family Value,” beginning with,

The other day I saw a car displaying the bumper sticker, “Hate is not a family value.” As slogans go, I thought, this one is just about perfect. Packed with emotional impact, in just six short words it exposes the hypocrisy of “family values” proponents. That’s the intent, at any rate, and it works well so long as one doesn’t break the First Rule of slogans: Don’t think too hard about them, just swallow them whole.

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Third on my list of recommended resources for thinking Christianly is “Your church and/or a local network of like-minded people.” As I wrote at the start of this series,

Like all discipleship, this is not meant to be a solo undertaking. In some communities you may need to take leadership in this arena.

Discipleship In Community
Following Christ is a community matter. Learning to love God with all our minds is no different than learning to love him in any other way: we weren’t meant to go it alone. The famous passage on renewing of our minds, Romans 12:1-2, is followed immediately by extended teaching on life in Christian community. If I may be permitted to skip one verse for a moment, Romans 12:4-5 reads,

For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.

And that introduces five chapters’ worth of instruction on life in the body. The verse I skipped there might be of special interest, actually, to Christians who tend to be more interested in the life of the mind:

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

Intellectual interests too often are paired with a sense of intellectual superiority. Of course we are all different and have different gifts, but this is according to God’s grace, and it means all believers are gifted by God, though not all in the same way (Romans 12:6-8):

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

Paul goes on to mark the real point (Romans 12:9-11):

Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.

In terms of our relationship with the community of believers, all discipleship has one purpose: serving in love.

Building Up One Another
We grow in community by building one another up: encouraging, exhorting, teaching one another in love. An unexercised mind will grow flabby. We need to test and challenge each other with the genuine difficulties of the Bible and culture.

Now, I wish I had some really excellent examples from local churches to tell you about. I have heard of them: a church in Winchester, Virginia, and another one in McLean where mind-discipleship is taken seriously. I know they exist; but I have not had much direct experience with such churches. There are several in my current church with a zeal for this, but finding opportunities for real fellowship on this level has not always been easy. The typical adult Protestant Sunday School is misnamed, in my view: if it were really school, there would be more obvious interest in expanding members’ horizons of knowledge. Quizzes, anyone? But no.

Taking Leadership
This is why I have suggested you may have to take leadership. My wife and I have led one Truth Project group and are in the middle of a second one. The fellowship there is outstanding. If you have opportunity to join a group or to be trained in leading it, don’t miss it! You could also start a study group or a (real) Sunday School class on some more challenging material, like anything from C.S. Lewis, Keller’s The Reason for God, Grudem’s Systematic Theology, or any of Strobel’s books on apologetics. I’ve heard excellent things about Reasonable Faith chapters, too, though I have not seen any first-hand.

The Broader Community
Fellowship may be broader than one’s own church. You might try going to an apologetics conference, like the one coming up in just a few days in Chesapeake, Virginia. Finally, there is the online community: not the real thing, but a proxy version of it, and a place to connect with people with special interests in particular topics.

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Number two on my list of recommended resources for Christian thinking is the Bible. In another time this might not have required much emphasis: of course the Bible is central to Christian thinking! But in age when many consider the Bible to be antithetical to good thinking, and when even many Christians take a thoughtless approach toward Scripture, we need to spend some time on this.

God’s Remarkable Word
The Bible is truly remarkable. It is the most accessible yet inexhaustible of the great texts of history. The youngest and simplest can understand its main message, and Jesus himself taught with stories that anyone with “ears to hear” could catch. But no scholar has ever plumbed its depths. Even the Apostle Paul, who wrote one-third of the New Testament, exclaimed, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Romans 11:33-36).

Attacked from every angle for centuries, the Bible endures. I was reminded just how long it has endured yesterday, when our Sunday School class looked at the life of Moses. His encounter with God at the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-4:16) was the longest recorded dialogue between God and any human. It is also the only time anyone directly asked God for his name (Exodus 3:13-14):

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM” [1] And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

This took place around 1450-1500 BC, in a world of thousands of “gods” but with no systematized theology or philosophy. Did the biblical writer (Moses) know the questions that would someday be asked about God’s nature? Did he know that some day scholars would speak of God’s aseity, his attribute of being self-existent, underived? Did he recognize 3500 years ago that God could be identified only in reference to himself? In a world where every other god was an idol, tied to wood or stone, sun or moon, could anything have been so profoundly unexpected as “I AM WHO I AM?” At first glance it seems a non-answer. Only upon much reflection has it become clear it was the only fitting answer.

That’s just one example of myriads, chosen just because it came to my attention so recently. Even where the Bible has been most seriously challenged—the hard questions of history and of doctrine, the difficulties of example and practice—it continues to hold up to the test. Not that everyone would agree with what I have just said (the challenges keep on coming), but where there are questions, there are good answers.

The Reality Anchor
Thinking must be anchored in knowledge, and knowledge must be anchored in what is real. There was a time when I would have said that God’s word was essential to keep thinking on track with what is true. But it’s more basic even than that. The modern world has suffered a long crisis of epistemology (theory and study of knowledge) beginning at least as far back as Descartes and Hume. College sophomores try to impress one another with deep philosophical musings like, “how can you be certain the desk you’re writing on is really there?” That question has a pedigree, and for all its surface sophistry, from human resources alone it has proved devilishly difficult to answer. Modernism failed to make knowledge certain; postmodernism has given up on it altogether. One message of postmodernism is that knowledge is unsure, if it exists at all; and to study postmodernism for any length of time is to begin to wonder what — if anything — is really real.

This deep uneasiness with knowledge is a recent development in history, but its roots were always there. The foolish man was trying to build his house on the sand, and though it took until the 20th century, the rains have come and knocked it down (Matthew 7:24-27).

God’s word, on the other hand, provides grounds for confidence in what we know, in that he has created us in his image as knowing agents. Based on that confidence, we can at least get started in our quest for knowledge. The Bible cautions us at the same time to be careful, for we are flawed: we do not know all that we think we know. Some things are clear, though. The desk is there. God exists, and has made himself manifest in Jesus Christ. And so on. God’s word is the rock of reality, the reference point for truth and solidity in knowledge.

The Guide to Truth
Thus we can reject postmodern skepticism. We can get started on a quest for real truth. In fact, though others often scoff at it this way, we can get started on a quest for capital-T Truth; for we believe Truth exists, and that not all of it is out of our reach. Some of it we gain through observation and experience (science is observation and experience writ very large). Some of it God has given us directly through his word, which is not only the starting point for our thinking journey, it is also our guide along the way.

The Remarkable, True Guide to Reality
It is deep enough to challenge the most serious thinker. It solves for us the question, “can we know anything at all?” And it guides us all along the way as we pursue knowledge and truth (Truth). The Bible is absolutely essential for Christian thinking.

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Last week I included the Holy Spirit on a list of resources for thinking Christianly, with this qualification:  

God is certainly not a “resource” in the same sense as the rest of this list, yet the list would be incomplete without him. We can’t progress in any form of discipleship apart from the Holy Spirit’s work.

You’ll notice I am using “discipleship of the mind” and “thinking Christianly” almost interchangeably here. They’re not really the same, though. One of them—discipleship—is prerequisite for the other. Discipleship is following and learning from Jesus Christ. Growing in our ability to think Christianly is one fruit of that learning.

Our dependence on the Holy Spirit cannot be overemphasized (distorted, yes; overemphasized, no). When I was a very young Christian, a friend shared with me how to be filled with the Spirit. He used a booklet at the time; you can read the same life-changing material online. I strongly recommend it to you as a preface to what I say here. It has made all the difference for me!

If there is a locus classicus for Christian thinking, it must be 1 Corinthians 2:6-16:

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
  nor the heart of man imagined,
  what God has prepared for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

I will only try to highlight the most relevant nuggets for our topic here. Paul speaks of a wisdom not of this age, decreed before the ages, which will not pass away. He calls it a “secret and hidden wisdom,” but it is not so in a gnostic sense (available only to the initiated few). When Paul writes of secrets and mysteries in his letters, almost always he is referring to something formerly hidden, now being made known. Thus he could say that he imparts this wisdom: it is something that can be passed along. And thus he can also say “these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit.”

Through the Spirit. The Spirit of God is he who guides Christ’s followers into all truth (John 14: 25, John 16:13). He “searches everything, even the depths of God,” which only God himself can plumb. To know God fully is God’s prerogative alone. Yet by his grace he has granted Christians the presence of the Holy Spirit within us. One of the Spirit’s purposes is to give us understanding. Paul even goes so far as to say “we have the mind of Christ”!

This contrasts with the experience of “the natural person,” the one without the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, the one (as it says shortly after in 1 Corinthians 3:3) who is “walking like mere men” (NASB translation). Christians, we do not need to live like mere humans! God lives within us, to guide us, teach us, empower us.

That is not to say that the Spirit pours knowledge into our brains unmediated. He can do that and does sometimes (rarely, in my experience), but normally, like everything else in the Christian life, there are disciplines associated with growth. In the case of Christian thinking, those disciplines include things like the list I posted last week. The Holy Spirit is not God’s shortcut to growth; he is our guide and helper along the path to growth.

(Some misunderstand 1 John 1:27 to mean we have literally no need of teaching, but that would be an odd stance for John to take in a letter that was clearly intended to teach. He was instead warning against certain claims of false teachers claiming to bring some proto-gnostic knowledge.)

So what does this mean in practical experience? (I refer you again to the message on how to be filled with the Spirit.) There must be a true desire in us to be filled by God and to follow where he leads. We must recognize our dependence on God, and confess our need for him, especially in light of our sin. Along with that we can gladly acknowledge that God is there for us: he loves us and is pleased to fulfill his promise to fill us with his Spirit. It’s a matter of knowing that it is his will (Ephesians 5:18) and that he will always answer when we pray according to his will (1 John 5:14-15).

From there it’s a matter of walking, not like mere humans, but still walking, a step at a time. As we study, God will reveal himself to us. Those of us who are walking that path know the truth of Jesus’ words (John 17:3) in his prayer to the Father: “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

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Last Monday I had a stimulating talk with Alex McFarland on his Sound Rezn radio broadcast, on the topic of strategies to help promote discipleship of the mind among American churches.

Some readers have informed me they’ve had trouble accessing the audio at the original link I provided. The show’s producer gave me permission to post a link to that interview portion here. Thank you for listening!

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How does one learn to think Christianly? Where does one begin? Here are my top ten recommendations for anyone who wants to be more intentional about discipling his or her mind. You could view this as a kind of table of contents, for I intend to share further thoughts on all of them over the next few weeks (and as I do that, I’ll come back here and create links to those posts).

Ten Resources for Thinking Christianly

1. The Holy Spirit. God is certainly not a “resource” in the same sense as the rest of this list, yet the list would be incomplete without him. We can’t progress in any form of discipleship apart from the Holy Spirit’s work.

2. Your Bible.

3. Your church and/or a local network of like-minded people. Like all discipleship, this is not meant to be a solo undertaking. In some communities you may need to take leadership in this arena.

4. Time. Discipleship takes time, so allow yourself the grace of letting it be a lifelong process. Nobody can learn everything all at once. But be sure to schedule your week to allow time for study, reflection, and prayer, or else as the years go by they will only be lost opportunities.

5. Experience: immersion in all of life, including genuine community nearby, the larger community of world awareness, and the global, transgenerational community of great art (including music, theater, film, literature, and visual arts).

6. Good books: Christian books old and new, great literature, books from contrary perspectives, and books on a wide variety of topics, as long as they’re good books. There are a small number of outstanding periodicals that would also fit under this category.

7. A notebook and a pen, or the computer equivalent. Thinking and writing go together.

8. Formal learning opportunities: classes or degree programs in a local college or seminary, online courses, or conferences and seminars.

9. The Internet: apologists’ websites, theological web sites, debate sites, blogs, podcasts.

10. Practice: in your community or on the Internet, share your thinking. Let it be tested by those who agree and by those who disagree.

Please recall from earlier posts in this series that none of this is an end in itself. It is for the purpose of following Christ and making his glory known. I’ll fill in this outline with follow-up articles over the next several weeks.

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This afternoon I’m talking with Alex McFarland on his Sound Rezn radio show. Welcome to all of you who are visiting here after hearing our discussion. Others who want to listen, during or after the interview, click here for information on how to find it.

I’ve listed some resources here related to topics I expect we’ll cover.

Reclaim the High Ground: To restore our strategic influence in our culture, both intellectually and ethically

Basic Discipleship of the Mind: What it means, why it’s crucial for strong Christianity, and how to grow in it.

A sample of ministries taking an intentionally strategic approach to connecting resources to local churches and fellowships:

• The Truth Project
• Reasonable Faith Chapters
• Discover God Initiative

There are many apologetics ministries that equip individuals and minister to groups. These are some that are actually equipping churches for ongoing discipleship of the mind.

Articles

• Apologetics: Why Your Church Needs It
• Apologetics “No Longer An Option”

Books

• Love Your God With All Your Mind by J.P. Moreland
• Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit’s Power by J.P. Moreland
• The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll
• Fit Bodies Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What to Do About It by Os Guinness
• Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge by Dallas Willard

Keep up with the Thinking Christian blog: subscribe to the RSS feed.

If this is helpful, would you think about partnering with the overall missions strategy work my wife and I do through Campus Crusade for Christ? Thank you — our work depends on your prayers and support.

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