Thinking Christian

It’s time to pick up my series on Basic Discipleship of the Mind again with my fifth suggested “resource” for Christian thinking: experience; immersion in life. I’m stretching the word “resource” again here, but even though the word doesn’t fit all that well, it still represents an essential element in developing a Christian mind. I worded it this way previously:

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).

I don’t know anyone who can actually do all of that and still hold down a job. That’s okay, though, I didn’t write it as a to-do list that must be checked off, item by item. What I want to say is this: that thinking from within some kind of Christian bubble is not Christian thinking.

My daughter’s school assigned her to read Albert Camus’s The Stranger over summer vacation. Camus was an existentialist, probably the second most prominent after Sartre, and in my opinion better than Sartre as an author of fiction. He was definitely not a Christian, and The Stranger is definitely not a Christian novel. I read it in college—not as an assignment but because I’d been told it was a good and important book—and I’ll be reading it again with my daughter. What I remember most about it is that its atheistic absurdities helped cement my Christian convictions. I can’t predict how my daughter will respond to it—she’s a voracious reader but she tends not to like books this dark—so I’ll speak just for myself: reading good literature, including good atheistic literature (hard to find in the past few decades, but there has been some in the past) has been good for my growth as a Christian.

Being involved in the community has been good for me, too; and I couldn’t consider myself to be developing in Christian thinking if I weren’t at least somewhat aware of what’s happening in the rest of the world. Christian thinking is not thinking only about “Christian” concerns. It’s developing one’s Christian convictions in the context of the most urgent current questions. We cannot escape those questions; whether we know it or not, they affect us. This is the world in which God has called us to live and follow him. How much better to be aware of what’s going on in matters of race, gender, global religions, economics, environment, and so on, than to be mindlessly buffeted by their currents in our culture!

Yes, there’s too much going on in the world to keep up with it all. I don’t write on all of these topics because I don’t think I have a good enough grasp on them to treat them properly. I’m in this discipleship-of-mind process, too. Having been trained as a musician, I understand great music a lot better than I do theater and film; and I know I don’t appreciate great painting and sculpture the way it deserves. I don’t understand Islam as well as I think I should. I wrote last time in this series about allowing ourselves time to grow—and committing time toward growth. If I thought I had to arrive at the end by tomorrow, what hope would I have?

We are all on a journey. We’re walking toward Christ, walking with him—and walking through the world he has assigned us to live in. It’s the world we need to be interacting with as his disciples. It’s the world to which he calls us to bring an authentic, genuine, thoughtful witness for Christ.

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My series on Christian thinking was interrupted for a season, but it’s time to begin again. Fourth on my list of Resources for Thinking Christianly was Time. I wrote before,

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.

Discipleship takes two kinds of of time. This is true for discipleship of the mind as much as it is for discipleship in worship, in prayer, in service, in caring, or in sharing. It takes time day by day, week by week, year by year, to develop a Christian mind. It takes set aside regularly, intentional time, focusing on this area of growth.

I hope if you’ve been following this series you’ve caught a taste of why this investment is worthwhile. (If you haven’t been following, it’s not too late to catch up.) But time is so hard to find! I have a bookshelf I call, half-jokingly, my “guilt shelf:” all the books I know I should read but haven’t found time for yet. There are family priorities, chores around the house, and church and work responsibilities, and all the other disciplines of Christian growth filling my schedule. That “guilt shelf” is a microcosm of a whole “guilt life,” things I know I should do, but haven’t done yet. Or it could be if I viewed it that way.

I know, though, that it was God who put 24 hours in a day. If he had wanted to make the day 28 or 30 hours long he could have, but he didn’t. I know, too, that he has planned us for good works that he prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10). He doesn’t have an arithmetic problem. He didn’t plan for us to need 28-hour days to accomplish his intended work. We have time to do what he has called us to do.

Do we have time to do more than that? We all test God in that. We procrastinate, we waste time in front of the TV or with computer games, and in many other ways we give up opportunities to do what he intended. God is gracious and redeems our errors, but when we do that we live less than the best life he offers, and we contribute less than we could for the needs of others. We don’t do as much good as we could, and we don’t experience as much good as we could.

God calls us to grow in knowledge and understanding. That takes intentional time devoted to reading, studying together, praying, sometimes even disputing (as on a blog, for example). Other articles in this series suggest specific ways we can invest our time in discipling our minds; the point I’m making here is that it won’t happen without that investment. Such regular, week-by-week concentrated time is the first kind of time it takes to grow in discipleship of the mind.

It also requires the passage of years. As a young Christian I read a lot of apologetics, especially Francis Schaeffer, C.S. Lewis, and Josh McDowell. I was really naive. It’s embarrassing now. I thought, “this is all it takes! If everyone understood this stuff, everyone would believe!” Boy, was I wrong. I had some growing up to do. Since then I’ve noticed a pattern. Repeatedly in my life I’ve looked back at myself five years earlier and thought, “I had a lot of growing up to do then; I’ve learned a lot since.” Some things take years to learn.

I’m sitting here at this moment with ice on my shoulder and a brace on my knee, both the result of having gone through more than a few of those five-year stages. My body isn’t what it used to be. I wouldn’t dream of going back to those younger years of lesser understanding, though. The passage of time has been rough on my body, but good for my mind and soul. Still, I know that if I’m alive five years from now, I’ll look back on today and think, “I had a lot of growing up to do then; I’ve learned a lot since.”

God has a curriculum for each of us. It’s not a crash course. It takes concentrated study along the way, and the more we do of that (and the better quality), the better our outcomes will be, all else being equal. But there’s no hurrying the completion of this degree.

I hope this sounds more like an encouragement than a disappointment. We have freedom not to have arrived, and that’s a good thing. It’s best we pay attention, though, to how we’re making progress on the journey.

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A reference in J.P. Moreland’s modern classic, Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul, steered me toward another classic, this one by William Wilberforce: Real Christianity. The link there is to a modern language update published in 2007. I’ve been reading it in ebook form, so I won’t be able to supply you page numbers, and the passages I bring you will be as Wilberforce wrote them. In view of what I am going to quote, I have some qualms about even referring to a modern language update. You’ll understand what I mean as you read what he wrote. But one has to start somewhere, and I can’t object to some editor giving Christians an easy launching point. (I’ve been doing something similar myself lately.)

Wilberforce (1759-1833) is well known as one of the most influential Christian leaders of the past several hundred years. A British politician converted to Christ in his mid-20s, he devoted the rest of his life to two grand passions, one of which was abolishing slavery. His decades of persistence against slavery were met with partial success in 1807 when Britain’s slave trade was abolished by Parliament; and with final success (as far as Britain and her colonies were concerned) in 1833 when Parliament voted £20 million to be given to slaveowners in compensation for freeing all slaves. The outcome of that vote was assured just three days before Wilberforce’s death. (This story is told in Michael Apted’s 2007 film Amazing Grace.)

A man with such credentials has my attention: he understands what it means really to believe God’s word. Wilberforce’s second grand passion was to lead his country men to the same understanding. Speaking of himself in the third person, he explains in the Introduction why he wrote Real Christianity:

The main object which he [the author] has in view is, not to convince the Sceptic, or to answer the arguments of persons who avowedly oppose the fundamental doctrines of our Religion; but to point out the scanty and erroneous system of the bulk of those who belong to the class of orthodox Christians, and to contrast their defective scheme with a representation of what the author apprehends to be real Christianity.

Now, where do you suppose someone like Wilberforce, a man of social action and of worship, would begin his discourse on real Christianity? Moreland noted how striking this was. Wilberforce did not begin with prayer or piety, though he made both central in his life; nor did he begin with service, though he was such a great example of using one’s gifts to improve the world in Christ’s name. He began with the life of the mind, with apologetics, even.

View their [English Christians'] plan of life and their ordinary conduct; and not to speak at present of their general inattention to things of a religious nature, let us ask, wherein can we discern the points of discrimination between them and professed unbelievers? In an age wherein it is confessed and lamented that infidelity abounds, do we observe in them any remarkable care to instruct their children in the principles of the faith which they profess, and to furnish them with arguments for the defence of it? They would blush, on their child’s coming out into the world, to think him defective in any branch of that knowledge, or of those accomplishments which belong to his station in life, and accordingly these are cultivated with becoming assiduity. But he is left to collect his religion as he may; the study of Christianity has formed no part of his education, and his attachment to it (where any attachment to it exists at all) is, too often, not the preference of sober reason, but merely the result of early prejudice and groundless prepossession. He was born in a Christian country, of course he is a Christian; his father was a member of the church of England, so is he. When such is the hereditary religion handed down from generation to generation, it cannot surprise us to observe young men of sense and spirit beginning to doubt altogether of the truth of the system in which they have been brought up, and ready to abandon a station which they are unable to defend. Knowing Christianity chiefly in the difficulties which it contains, and in the impossibilities which are falsely imputed to it, they fall perhaps into the company of infidels; and, as might be expected, they are shaken by frivolous objections and profane cavils, which, had they been grounded and bottomed in reason and argument, would have passed by them, “as the idle wind,” and scarcely have seemed worthy of serious notice.

Wilberforce instructed me in a further reason for discipling our minds, one I should have included in my list last Monday: accountability and stewardship before God.

It were almost a waste of time to multiply arguments in order to prove how criminal the voluntary ignorance, of which we have been speaking, must appear in the sight of God. It must be confessed by all who believe that we are accountable creatures, and to such only the writer is addressing himself, that we shall have to answer hereafter to the Almighty for all the means and occasions we have here enjoyed of improving ourselves, or of promoting the happiness of others. And if, when summoned to give an account of our stewardship, we shall be called upon to answer for the use which we have made of our bodily organs, and of the means of relieving the wants and necessities of our fellow creatures; how much more for the exercise of the nobler and more exalted faculties of our nature, of invention, and judgment, and memory; and for our employment of all the instruments and opportunities of diligent application, and serious reflection, and honest decision. And to what subject might we in all reason be expected to apply more earnestly, than to that wherein our eternal interests are at issue? When God has of his goodness vouchsafed to grant us such abundant means of instruction in that which we are most concerned to know, how great must be the guilt, and how aweful the punishment of voluntary ignorance!

But let us not suppose this will come without some effort; and why should it, anyway?

And why, it may be asked, are we in this pursuit alone to expect knowledge without inquiry, and success without endeavour? The whole analogy of nature inculcates on us a different lesson, and our own judgments in matters of temporal interests and worldly policy confirm the truth of her suggestions. Bountiful as is the hand of Providence, its gifts are not so bestowed as to seduce us into indolence, but to rouse us to exertion; and no one expects to attain to the height of learning, or arts, or power, or wealth, or military glory, without vigorous resolution, and strenuous diligence, and steady perseverance. Yet we expect to be Christians without labour, study, or inquiry.

This all sounds eerily like 21st century America. Friends, we have some work to do

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