The Christian Mind - a talk in progress (not complete)

The Christian Mind

 

I learnt from an expert once, always begin a sermon or a book with a good story. If it is humorous, all the better for being memorable. If it is self-revelatory, it may grip the hearer or the reader, and if it provides a summary of the writer's life: well please allow me to give you an insight into my life.

Here is a story of a Cornish family, which came to the new land of Australia. Some were convicts, some were builders, none had ever entered the halls of a university.  As a young man newly converted to Christ, I would be the first in our family history to enter a university. During the 70's (that's 1970's) I graduated from High School. And now, not knowing which way to turn, I looked for work. I had missed out on a scholarship to University as my grades were not sufficient. But unexpectedly I was offered a late place at Wollongong Teachers College. I was their last enrolee for that year, as many others had turned down the offer. Hitching a lift to the University I arrived late, and found my way to the administrative offices.  I was armed with a bag in which was my lunch, a bible, and a little booklet by John Stott, that an auntie had given me, "Your Mind Matters."  And There it stood, the Administration Office. It was my access to a University education! Enclosed in glass,  these administrators who had the magical task of allowing young minds like mine to enter these sacred halls gazed out from their desks over a beautiful green lawn towards the botanical gardens.  And I, filled with anxieties, strode towards these goddesses tasked with guarding this University from interlopers like me. I strove to the first doorway into these offices and, to my embarrassment and consternation, found myself sitting on my behind outside the offices with a bump on my head. I had walked into a beautifully cleaned window, so clean that I assumed it as an open doorway.  I brushed myself off and walked to the next doorway. And found myself again in the same embarrassing position, on my butt. Again I moved to the next window doorway and again found myself now with three lumps on my brow gazing up at the clear glass doorway.  I learnt later that year I needed glasses. But at that moment, my humiliation was so complete, and, to deepen my embarrassment, I could hear the laughter from within that administration block. Suddenly all my dreams were crushed. Suddenly I knew I was too stupid to enter the University, and I knew I would have to return home to the scorn of my parents, who regarded all university students as nothing more than "long haired dropouts."  Until, one young administrator slid the glass door open and kindly invited me in to finalise my enrolment. Her kind smile helped a little to alleviate my embarrassment, and my unusual entrance into university life made me quickly well known to all my lecturers, being the butt of many funny stories among the staff. However, I had begun a course in education that would continue for another 8 years and then a further 8 years.

As I reflect after more than 45 years of education and Christian ministry, the significance of that little booklet in my backpack, and the incident that commenced my university education, has some parabolic significance for this little booklet about the Christian Mind. John Stott's book Your Mind Matters was first published in 1972. It was an important essay encouraging Christians to see the importance of thinking.

As I write this booklet, I am soon to preach later this morning from Paul's book of Romans and chapter 8. Here are the words that invaded my sleep waking me early this morning.

1 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh,4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.7 For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot.8 Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

 

 

ADDRESSING THE RATIONAL SPIRITUAL DISTINCTION.

As Philip Jensen writes "Christianity is a rational spirituality. Because Christianity is about the supernatural it is right to place it within the category of spirituality. Yet at the same time the Christian message is deeply rational. It resolutely resists the attempts of people to describe it as irrational. That the opponents of Christianity see it as irrational is not altogether surprising—especially the atheists who pride themselves in their own rationality. For them all religious belief is superstition. Christianity is just a delusion. There is no spirituality or supernatural except in the fearful minds of deluded people. But what is surprising is the number of Christians who accept this attack on Christianity. They seek to answer the criticism by claiming a superior and different kind of truth than reason. They say that God is known spiritually by experience, myth, aesthetics, or by love.

For both groups the word 'faith' has become the agreed point of departure. 'Faith' is for them an irrational awareness of the presence of the supernatural. It is a spiritual faculty that some people seem to have and others to lack—though it is open to all. But it requires ridding oneself of rationality. It requires looking beyond what can be proven. Such a view reinforces the opponents of Christianity in their opposition. It also makes the Christian open to any weird and wonderful heresy and false teaching that is the passing fad of religious people. For whatever experience people have, or promise that you are able to have, becomes the latest evidence of God's blessing that you should try."

However this passage speaks to more than only a rational versus spiritual knowledge.

 

There is a mind which is fleshly and there is a mind that is set on the things of the Spirit.

 

5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.7 For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot.8 Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

 

Just as the administrator at Wollongong Teacher's College opened the door for me to bring me in, to enrol me in the University, so only the Holy Spirit of God can bring a person into the Kingdom of God and introduce them to a new way of knowing, a rational spirituality, a reasonable faith (As Herman Bavinck called it), a knowledge of God that also includes a right knowledge of all things. A mind set on the Spirit.

That booklet by John Stott challenged me to think deeply about everything that came into my life. I needed to have a Christian mindset, a worldview that could cope with the many conflicting ideas of the secular university.  It meant that I needed to think deeply from a Christian worldview.

As Jensen rightly concludes:

"The failure (in Christians separating the spiritual from the rational)  lies in the rejection of the doctrine that God has created the world including humanity in his image to rule the world under His authority. That God has not created the world in chaos but as an orderly and habitable place in which we can live.  As Christians we do not have to make an excuse for believing in God thinking that believing in Him is irrational and only spiritual."

Theologian E.Y.Mullins notes:

"Physical science has tended to narrow the idea of truth to propositions which can be proved in exact mathematical terms. But this narrowing of the conception is due to a confusion of truth itself with a particular form for expressing it. There are many ways of expressing the meaning of reality. The claim to truth cannot be based upon any one way to the exclusion of others. The test of the claim to truth is the test as to the reality with which it deals, at least this is the primary and fundamental test. Spiritual realities will not yield the same formulae for expressing their meaning as those found in the sphere of physics. But they are none the less real and may find interpretation in terms of truth. Again, the appeal of the truths of religion is of the strongest kind. It is an intellectual appeal in the narrower sense of the word. The reason is satisfied because the truths of the Christian religion may be presented in a coherent system which has unity and self-consistency. The moral nature is satisfied because the result is the triumph of the moral nature over sin and self and the world. All the higher personal life is satisfied because in the Christian experience human personality comes to its own. Self-realization, a consciousness of having found the meaning of life and destiny, is bound up in the Christian experience."

While there is a distinctive Christian view of knowledge that includes more than just a purely empiricist "scientific method" of knowledge, there are also some boundaries that are distinctively Christian in our understanding of knowledge.

 

Jensen concludes his article "It is in this doctrine of creation that rationality is found. It is because the Creator has made the world in this fashion and by his word that the world is orderly and rational. It is because he has created us in his image to rule this world, that we are able to discern the rationality of the creation. Our rationality is directly related to this creation and our place in it. …Therefore it should be of no surprise to Christians to read of the importance of the Christian mind. God's words are addressed to our minds. God is at work transforming us by the renewal of our minds. The Apostle's Prayer for Christians in the beginning of his epistles was frequently for knowledge and understanding whereby they may grow. Our mind matters to God and should matter to us. The title of John Stott's book is right Your Mind Matters. 

 

 

ADDRESSING THE PROPOSITIONAL AND PERSONAL DISTINCTION

As both Kant and Descartes affirmed, rationality does play its part in determining truth. We do not affirm that two logically inconsistent things can both be true at the same time. We cannot affirm that it is raining and not raining at the same time. We cannot affirm that a characteristic of an object is both entirely black and entirely white at the same time. It is logically inconsistent. "In philosophy, but not in business or sexual activity, a proposition is whatever can be asserted, denied, contended, maintained, supposed, implied, or presupposed. In other words, it is that which is expressed by a typical indicative sentence."956 And yet, we must of necessity concede with Dahms, that logic itself may not be as reliable as we should hope. There are areas where logic cannot reach. Logic is not valueless, it just is not always applicable. "Unless and until all three components of the understanding have played their full and proper part, one's grasp of truth will be distorted in one way or another… the unity between the rational and the empirical is by way of aesthetic appreciation not because the universal is logical,"957 as sometimes it is not. E J Carnell (2007) speaks of three sorts of truth; ontological truth; truth as propositional correspondence to reality; and truth as personal rectitude. He also conludes that there are three methods of knowing: knowledge by acquaintance; knowledge by inference; and knowledge by moral self-acceptance.958 These forms of knowledge are propositional in the sense that they represent "true truth." Of course, this form of knowledge adheres to a correspondence theory of truth. It also may align with a coherence theory of truth, where the actual reality of the world may not be accessible, but that a proposition may be regarded as true because it coheres with other truths that correspond to reality. Truth is Propositional in its nature.

THERE IS A PERSONAL NATURE TO TRUTH.

We can affirm with Kierkegaard that there is a subjectivity about truth.  Truth demands our whole commitment. Yet, we must affirm that there is a reality outside of us that we may or may not know in the whole, yet we may know in part, and we may know that part that we know with certitude as factually as true. One plus one equals two in whatever world we may be in, and whatever language we may express it. But I may not know the depth of one world plus one world equalling two worlds.

This personal aspect of truth takes in many aspects; it takes in the sense of traditional and community affirmed knowledge. It may include the power games of Foucault. It may include the relational aspect of the communication of knowledge and truth, through parental and familiar wisdom, often expressed in story or proverb. It may take in the communication of true knowledge through empathetic connectivity communicated through relational, loving teachers telling their stories. Overall, this aspect of truth and knowledge can best be understood through an epistemology developed through empathetic connectivity or love. Life is relational. And hence Truth may be approached as Personal.

 

 

Owen, H.P. (1967). Theism. in Edwards. P. (ed.) The encyclopedia of philosophy New York: Macmillan. pp. 97–98. "Universally, all humans know, not only that one, active personal Spirit is (1). eternal; (2). wise; and (3). powerful; but also (4). that he is righteous. Being moral, God inscribed those objective moral norms, not only in the Ten Commandments and in the nine repeated in the NT (the Sabbath command is not repeated)., but also on every human heart (Rom 2:14–15). Morality is not relative to communities any more than to individuals. There is an objective difference between good and evil. Evangelicals sense their dependence on the one eternal, moral Creator of everything who is personal, distinct from the world, and active in it."  

The term "truth" had currency in Greek philosophy, Roman thought, and the Hebrew Bible including its many uses in the Old Testament Greek Septuagint (lxx).961 In Greek philosophy, one of the senses of 'alethia' involved an accurate perspective on reality.962 Romans similarly spoke of veritas as a factual representation of events.963 In the Hebrew Scriptures, "truth" ('emeth,' 'emunah') primarily conveyed the notion of God's faithfulness.964 This faithfulness had been revealed throughout the history of Israel and, according to John, found supreme expression in the life, ministry, and substitutionary death of Jesus (John 1:14; 14:6).965 In John's Gospel, where the importance of "truth" is underscored by 48 instances of the aleth-word group in comparison with a combined total of 10 in the Synoptics, the notion of 'truth' is inextricably related to God, and to Jesus' relationship with God, and the possibility of personal and individual relationship with God.Hence the concept of 'truth' and knowledge conveyed more than propositionally true statements, there is also a relational aspect that spoke of faithfulness and rectitude to the nature of God himself.

 

 

Boa, K. and Bowman, R. (2001). Faith has its reasons: An integrative approach to defending Christianity. Milton Keyes: Paternoster Press. Human reasoning and ethical judgments presuppose a God who is supremely rational and good and who made human beings in his image. The fact that people in their natural state do not recognize this image is proof that it has been darkened by sin. If people are to have our rational and moral faculties restored, they need a divine work of regeneration that will refashion their worldview. Reformed apologists do not expect non-Christians to be converted as a direct result of this argument. Only regeneration, a work of the Holy Spirit, can convert a person. Indeed, only regeneration can enable a person to acknowledge the truth that the apologist is presenting.  In short, from a Reformed perspective, humanity is epistemologically challenged and needs the supporting work of the Spirit of God to restore its understanding of the sensus divinitas that is already resident within them. This may be enhanced as people are reminded of that sensus divinitas. In similar manner, from this Reformed perspective, morality is reawakened when people tell their moral stories, reminding others of the importance of those moral values that are vital to their coherent understanding of the world, humanity and themselves.

Reformed apologists, recognising that the Scriptures are self-attesting (autopistia),  trust that the mere use of the Word of God has in itself authority to echo with the sensusdivinitas to bring a conviction of the truthfulness of the Word of God.

Westminster Confession of Faith "The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself). the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God. We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church to an high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture. And the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God)., the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God: yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by  and with the Word in our hearts." 

 

In a similar way, the self-attesting nature of the general revelation in the created world has the power to engage the sensus divinitas of students to allow them to engage with the being and nature of God. Exposing students to the beauty of creation can provide that awe-inspired moment that allows students to perceive their place (providing meaning and purpose) in a larger scheme of the universe, without necessarily inductively or deductively teaching about that God.

In both classical and evidentialist apologetics, the apologetic argument first establishes the existence of God and his revelation in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, and culminates in the inspiration of the Bible. Reformed apologists (specifically presuppositionalists) turn the argument around: the Bible should be believed as the starting point for all knowledge. Contemporary Reformed apologists agree with their classical and evidentialist counterparts that postmodernism is an unacceptable and irrational approach to knowledge. Unfortunately, as Reformed apologists see things, traditional apologists tend to assume a modernist philosophy as the stance from which to refute postmodernism. Thus classical apologists treat postmodernism as the abandonment of the belief in absolute truth (whatever one happens to think that it is!), for the belief in the relativity of all beliefs. Evidentialists criticize postmodernism on the grounds that it flies in the face of the facts, as if facts had meaning apart from the philosophical framework in which they are viewed. Reformed apologists suggest that postmodernism should be viewed as simply the current form of unbelieving philosophy, with the pendulum having swung from an unbelieving rationalism (modernism) to an unbelieving irrationalism (postmodernism).

Boa and Bowman, (2001). Faith has its reasons.

Frame, an apologist within the Reformed movement and an heir to the presuppositional apologetic method, has no objection to the presentation of evidences in Christian apologetics; what he objects to is the adoption (implicit or otherwise) of the assumption that evidences or reasons are neutral. He does not object to appeals to extrabiblical data in apologetics, but refuses to assign them independent authority to which Scripture must measure up. Frame, recognising the necessity of regeneration for conversion of the worldview and the mind, assigns the highest place to this, though not negating the useful propositional truths that are found within classical and evidentialist apologetic camps.  

In a similar way, engagement of the moral faculty within students can occur by the articulation of the moral narrative, as the words and concepts resonate within the framework of the student's moral conscience which already exists. This faculty is always in need of strengthening and support in the confusing and relativising world where multicultural religious values clash with hard secularism. Charles Taylor replies. in Philosophy in an age of pluralism. Tully, J. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 220.

Taylor denies relativism or arbitrariness of moral frameworks or the equality of all moral frameworks, in favour of a critical realism that reflectively critiques the value of competing moral frameworks. "Realism involves ranking (some) schemes and ranking them in terms of their ability to cope with, allow us to know, describe, come to understand reality. Some schemes are better or worse than others ...Moral realism requires one be able to identify certain moral changes as gains or losses, yet it can be sensitive to the complexities of life and of moral choice." p.24.  Taylor recognizes a narrative and communal texture to the pursuit of the good in moral self-constitution. Humans interpret their lives in narrative and communal terms as they pursue moral goods; these goods give vision and mission to life. This important narrative articulation helps the self to find a unity amidst the complexity of moral experience and amidst a plurality of goods vying for one's attention. Taylor, C. (1989). p.36. "There is a sense in which one cannot be a self on one's own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors: in one way in relation to those conversation partners who are essential to my achieving self-definition; in another in relation to those who are now crucial to my continuing grasp of language of self-understanding ... a self exists only within ...'webs of interlocution.'"  

 

 

Andrew Greenwell notes:

"Part of the providential arrangement of God, that is, part of the eternal law, that governs the entire cosmos is that man's rational nature should be inscribed with this natural law. The natural law is as much ourselves as we are, and in violating it, we are violating our fundamental nature, we are violating who we are, what we are made for, and who we are to be. Though in doing so we commit great injustice to God and to his beneficence and providence, and this aspect of sin should not be downplayed, it remains nevertheless equally important to stress that the natural law is the law that is intimately part of our being, so that it acting against it, we are betraying ourselves."297

In De Trinitate Book IV, St. Augustine speaks of the inner testimony in the soul of man the sinner that witnesses of God's existence, and that witnesses of the law of God that should govern his behaviour. There is a sense in man, as if he has lost something, a state of blessedness and friendship with God, that he now no longer has.

"And where do they see these rules? For they do not see them in their own [moral] nature; since no doubt these things are to be seen by the mind, and their minds are confessedly changeable, but these rules are seen as unchangeable by him who can see them at all; nor yet in the character of their own mind, since these rules are rules of righteousness, and their minds are confessedly unrighteous. Where indeed are these rules written, wherein even the unrighteous recognizes what is righteous, wherein he discerns that he ought to have what he himself has not? Where, then, are they written, unless in the book of that Light which is called Truth? Whence every righteous law is copied and transferred (not by migrating to it, but by being as it were impressed upon it) to the heart of the man that works righteousness; as the impression from a ring passes into the wax, yet does not leave the ring." Augustine, (n.d.). De Trinitate Book IV 14.15.21.  

The Natural Law, therefore, is independent of a man's mind, even of a man's moral state or nature. This law has a source outside of human; the Creator.

Etienne Gilson (1967) summarises:

"Consequently, all the detailed commands of our moral conscience, all the changing acts of legislation governing peoples spring from one and the same law. It is constantly being adapted to meet various changing needs. But in itself it never changes. Everything lawful in the individual and in the city is derived from it. It is truly the law of laws. The fundamental demand the eternal law imposes on the universe in general and upon man in particular is that everything be perfectly ordered. Now in all places and at all times order would have the lower subject to the higher." Augustine, (n.d.). De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber, II, 11, 24.   "There is no doubt that, generally speaking, everything created by God is good. From rational creatures to the lowliest of bodies, there is nothing man cannot use lawfully. His difficulty consists in distinguishing between things, all of which are good, but not equally good: he has to weigh them, estimate their proper value, subordinate external goods to the body, the body to the soul of man and then, within the soul, make the senses subject to reason and reason to God."

Gilson further elaborates:

"Divine illumination not only prescribes rules of action for us by making our conscience submit to the natural law; it also gives us the means of putting these rules into practice. In Augustinism therefore, we should speak of an illumination of the virtues which matches the illumination of the sciences: just as our truth is only a participation in Truth and our beatitude a sharing in Beatitude, so every man becomes virtuous only by making his soul conform to the immutable rules and lights of the Virtues dwelling eternally within the Truth and Wisdom common to all men. The four cardinal virtues, prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice, have no other source but this; and inversely, the common root of all vices is the movement of the will as it turns away from these realities intelligible and common to everyone and turns towards bodies in order to appropriate them."

 

If the logical, ethical, and aesthetic norms deserve absolute validity; if truth, goodness, and beauty are goods worth more than all the treasures of this world, then they cannot thank the human—for whom the law was made—for their origins. There is only a choice to be made between the two: the norms of true and false, of good and evil, of beautiful and ugly emerged slowly in history by evolution, but they are not absolute, and while they are true and good today, tomorrow they may be untrue and evil; or, they have absolute and immutable being, but then they are not products of history—they merit a transcendent and metaphysical character, and because they cannot float in the sky, they have their reality in God's wisdom and will. (108)Bavinck

 

ADDRESSING THE MORAL AND COGNITIVE DISTINCTION

 

Universities are divided. The humanities faculties and the science faculties often regard the other as lesser. The humanities faculties sometimes feel that the science faculties are turning out robotic students whose only interests are in empirical forms of thinking. "Hollow men without a soul" as CS Lewis termed them. The science faculties often feel that the humanities faculties are only interested in contradictions (yes the University dropouts of a former generation now run the Universities).

The Christian mind must bring together these sometimes contradictory ways of thinking under the governing hand of God. All true knowledge is somehow related to the knowledge of God, (as "all truth is God's truth"),  and therefore all truth has an ethical dimension to it.

Even the study of microbes should lead us to worship the Creator who designed not only the Universe but also the microverse. The Christian mind must see God in everything.