Christianity and the
Life of the Mind
Loving God with Your Mind
Loving God with Your Mind
“If love is the topic of your study, so much else falls in line.” - HL Hussmann
• Loving well requires understanding
• Understanding requires learning
How do we love with our minds?
* Disclaimer: “study” is not just academic, but it’s what I know…
Loving God with Your Mind
The greatest commandment:
…an expert in the law tested [Jesus] with this question: “Teacher,
which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul
and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.”
- Matt. 22:35-38
Loving God with Your Mind
“Part of the greatest commandment, then, is to love God with ‘all our
mind.’ But what does this mean? To love is to sacrifice and to serve. It is
to make a commitment to the beloved that is covenantal, not
contractual (i.e. not circumstantial). It involves honesty and
transparency. And it always leads to action on behalf of the beloved.
Therefore, we should expect that loving God with our minds, whatever
else it might be, will be an act of service and sacrifice, that it will be
honest and transparent, and that it will lead to action of some kind. This
means that we should expect it to be difficult. But like most difficult
things, also meaningful.”
- Me
Loving God with Your Mind
“Love” = agape
• Sacrificial
• Honest
• Active
• Difficult
• “Heart” = core of being,
unity of person, “innards”
• Orientation to God
• “Soul” = life, breath, seat
of emotions
• Affection, devotion of
life to God
• Mind (dianoia) = capacity
for knowing
• Development of
thought, study
Loving God with Your Mind
“What, then, are the actions that this sort of love leads to? Presumably,
they would be methods of training the mind to perform the functions
for which God designed it, as well as it possibly can. And since the
principle function of that part of our being is to think, the action to
which we ought to be motivated (if we really love God) is nothing more
exalted than study. I know it doesn’t sound very ‘spiritual,’ but alas, we
are more than just spiritual beings, and God wants all of us.”
- Me Again
Loving God with Your Mind
Obstacles
1) Anti-intellectualism in the Bible
2) Anti-intellectualism in the church
3) Anti-intellectualism in the culture
Loving God with Your Mind
1) Anti-intellectualism in the Bible
“When I was a Christian, I worked very hard at maintaining the tension between
faith and reason, much like I see many bright people still doing today. I poured
myself into biblical studies, learned the original languages, took classes on
apologetics and worldview, discussed and argued over theology with friends into the
wee hours of the morning, and even studied a bit of philosophy along the way. Like
many writers I read these days, I worked sincerely out of a conviction that the
Christian faith can be a well-reasoned faith. I labored all those years under the
impression that you don’t have to “check your brains at the door” of the church, but
can instead continue to feed both mind and spirit in a kind of symbiotic (even if
sometimes strained) relationship. What did not occur to me then but seems as
clear as a bell to me now is that while my intentions were good, I was actually
fighting against my own religion. At the very least, to whatever extent Christianity
is based on the Bible, it cannot be a consistently intellectual faith because the Bible
is a fundamentally anti-intellectual book.” - Neil Carter
Loving God with Your Mind
1) Anti-intellectualism in the Bible
• The tree of the knowledge of good and evil
• “The Bible opens with an innocent couple placed in a garden containing a
special tree at its center, a tree that would ‘open their eyes’ and ‘make them
wise.’ They were expressly forbidden from eating of that tree…Evidently a
raised moral awareness was a big no-no…The ‘bad guy’ in this story is the
one who encouraged them to gain such knowledge and for that he was
cursed…”
• Similar themes continue:
• Old Testament: Cain & Abel, the tower of Babel, “wisdom” as “fear of God,”
“lean not on own understanding” (Prov. 3:5-6)
• New Testament: Jesus and children, hiding things from the wise (Matt.
11:25), don’t plan for the future; Paul: gospel as “foolishness” (1 Cor. 1-2)
• “There is not one word in the gospels in praise of intelligence. On the
contrary, Jesus seemed positively against it.”
Loving God with Your Mind
1) Anti-intellectualism in the Bible
• Selective reading, charitable interpretation, anachronism
• Difference between pursuing knowledge, and relying on knowledge
• Childlike faith vs. childish faith
2) Anti-intellectualism in the church
• “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an
evangelical mind.” - Mark Noll
• Evangelical markers: conversionism, Biblicism, activism, crucicentrism
• “The life of the mind”
• Thinking as Christians
Loving God with Your Mind
2) Anti-intellectualism in the church
• Examples
• Neglect of non-biblical study
• Dogmatism about tradition
• Biblical literalism
• Lack of education requirement for
Christian teachers
• Rejection of scholarly consensus
• Isolationism
• Fear of higher education
Loving God with Your Mind
2) Anti-intellectualism in the church
• “The greatest danger besetting American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of antiintellectualism…People are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning
money or serving the church or preaching the Gospel. They have no idea of the infinite
value of spending years of leisure in conversing with the greatest minds and souls of
the past, and thereby ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking.
The result is that the arena of creative thinking is abdicated and vacated to the
enemy…For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as
well as for their own sakes, the Evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the
periphery of responsible intellectual existence.” - Charles Malik, at the 1980 opening of
the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College
3) Anti-intellectualism in the culture
• Consumerism / the “market”
• Entertainment / video culture / blogs
• Relativism / “alternative facts”
• Dishonesty / “fake news”
Loving God with Your Mind
How to care for the mind as a Christian
The “renaissance” of Christian philosophy
• 5 features
• 1. Examples of “faith seeking understanding”
• “…not faith added on top of understanding, not
understanding propping up faith, and certainly
not faith instead of understanding, but faith
seeking understanding…looking at [issues]
through the eyes of faith…The vision we were
given was not defensive.” - Nick Wolterstorff
Loving God with Your Mind
Example: Nietzsche, studied not for refutation,
but for understanding
“We’re Christians, right? Let’s begin to look at the
world, life, reality, human beings in the light of
that…and of course you answer the objections
when they’re posed, but you don’t allow the
entire enterprise to become defensive and
apologetic.” - Wolterstorff
Loving God with Your Mind
The “renaissance” of Christian philosophy
• 5 features
• 2. Nothing is in principle “off limits”
• “There was no index of forbidden books.”
• 3. Owning one’s tradition of thought
• “We were taught to see the entire tradition of Christian thought as our
heritage.”
• 4. “Doing” rather than merely “studying”
• 5. Interacting with mainstream scholars
Loving God with Your Mind
The “renaissance” of Christian philosophy
• The common thread:
The goal of study is knowledge
• The goal is not:
• Defense
• Upholding tradition
• Forming/maintaining group identity
• Peace of mind
Loving God with Your Mind
Take-home point(s):
• Study is not sufficient for Christian life, but it is necessary
• God made you to be curious
• C.S. Lewis’s desire argument
• Encountering God’s grace compels curiosity about the world
• “In the history of the church, Christian movements of long-lasting significance
regularly have involved thinking at the most serious and most comprehensive
levels. To be sure, such movements almost never arise because of intellectual
efforts as such. Much more often they come into existence out of deep inner
responses to God’s grace. Yet as such movements develop, they show great
concern for the way in which Christians view the world at large. They are vitally
interested in the Christian mind.” - Mark Noll
Loving God with Your Mind
Take-home point(s):
• Either Christianity is true or it isn’t
• Happiness is only achievable by doing
• It makes God happy
• “I believe God made me for a purpose,
but he also made me fast. And when I
run I feel His pleasure.” - Eric Liddell
• Wrestling with God