Christianity and the Mind

Believers must regain the use of the mind for God’s glory:

Some cynics might think that my title offers an oxymoron. ‘What, do Christians actually think?’ Yes, I get that: too often believers do not use their minds. And some might even relish that sad reality. Too many of them think that Romans 12:2 says this: “Be transformed by the removing of your mind.” But it in fact says this: “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

The biblical Christian should never be in that camp. The importance of the mind, of thinking, of truth, of reason, and of the intellect is stressed throughout Scripture, and is found in the pages of church history. And Jesus told us what the greatest commandment is: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34; and Luke 10:25-8 – all drawing from Deuteronomy 6:4-9).

The truth is, one of the things I most often say to Christians (or at least want to say to them) is this: ‘You really need to start using the mind that God gave you instead of letting it go to waste.’ So many believers need to begin to think, and to think carefully, for God’s glory.

Here are 30 quotes by 17 Christian authors (out of so many) stressing the importance of loving God with our minds and with the totality of our being:

Harry Blamires

“There is no longer a Christian mind.”

“My thesis amounts to this. Except over a very narrow field of thinking, 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; there is no shared field of discourse in which we can move at ease as thinking Christians by trodden ways and past established landmarks.”

William F. Buckley

“The purpose of an open mind is to close it, on particular subjects. If you never do – you’ve simply abdicated the responsibility to think.”

G. K. Chesterton

“[Beware] a hardening of the heart with a sympathetic softening of the head.”

“The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid.”

William Lane Craig

“Evangelicals have been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. The average Christian does not realize that there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and in the professional journals and scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked from all sides as irrational or outmoded, and millions of students, our future generation of leaders, have absorbed this viewpoint. This is a war which we cannot afford to lose.”

“It’s not just Christian scholars and pastors who need to be intellectually engaged with the issues. Christian laymen, too, need to be intellectually engaged. Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. They know little of the riches of deep understanding of Christian truth, of the confidence inspired by the discovery that one’s faith is logical and fits the facts of experience, of the stability brought to one’s life by the conviction that one’s faith is objectively true.”

Jonathan Edwards

“All truth is given by revelation, either general or special, and it must be received by reason. Reason is the God-given means for discovering the truth that God discloses, whether in his world or his Word. While God wants to reach the heart with truth, he does not bypass the mind.”

Os Guinness

“A leading problem in Western evangelicalism [is] anti-intellectualism. Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind.”

“Intellectualism is not the answer to anti-intellectualism. Our passion is not for academic respectability, but for faithfulness to the commands of Jesus”.

“Privacy is harder than ever when everyone is invited to be linked in, connected and transparent to others, but it matters. Reading books is time consuming, but it matters. Reflection is easily drowned out when life is fired at us point-blank, but it matters. Independent thinking is hard when the social media reinforces group-think, but it matters. Thinking for ourselves is difficult when it is so much easier to download an expert opinion, but it is essential to the freedom of our own agency, so it matters. Conversations with an iron-sharpens-iron quality are rarer when minds seek carbon-copy approval from others in their own bubble, but they matter. History is more crucial than ever when the relentless modern focus is on the present and the future, but it matters. The courage to hold unfashionable convictions is more difficult when social media mobs give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down like a Roman Emperor, but it matters.”

C. S. Lewis

“God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of being a Christian, I warn you: you are embarking on something that is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. But fortunately, it works the other way round. Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book [The Pilgrim’s Progress] that has astonished the whole world.”

“And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgment; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform.  The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”

“Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

“In view of the nature of this kingdom, we must learn to think in a new way. This is the great problem of the Christian life, and this is, indeed, the theme of all the New Testament epistles. All these epistles have one great object, and that is to teach us how to think in a Christian manner. The fact that you are born again does not mean that you automatically think as a Christian. If it did, there would have been no problems in the churches at Rome or Corinth or anywhere else; indeed, you would never have needed a New Testament epistle.”

“The great trouble in the Christian life is ever that we must re-learn how to think. The old way of thinking is of no value here; we are in an entirely new realm. So that is why the Apostle says, at the end of 1 Corinthians 2, ‘We have the mind of Christ’ (v 16). We need this mind, and we must learn to cultivate and to develop it and to let it govern our thinking on all these various problems and difficulties.”

J. Gresham Machen

“The church is perishing today through the lack of thinking, not through an excess of it.”

Charles Malik

“The problem is not only to win souls but to save minds. If you win the whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover you have not won the world. Indeed it may turn out that you have actually lost the world.”

“The greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough.”

J. P. Moreland

“The role of intellectual development is primary in evangelical Christianity, but you might not know that from a cursory look at the church today. In spite of this, if we are to have Christ formed in us (Galatians 4:19), we must realize the work of God in our minds and pay attention to what a Christlike mind might look like. As our Savior has said, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’ (Matthew 22:37). To do this, we cannot neglect the soulful development of a Christian mind.”

John Piper

“I don’t want to overstate the case. It’s not about going to school or getting degrees or having prestige. It’s not about the superiority of intellectuals. It’s about using the means God has given us to know him, love him, and serve people. Thinking is one of those means. I would like to encourage you to think, but not to be too impressed with yourself when you do.”

“Thinking is indispensable on the path to passion for God. Thinking is not an end in itself. Nothing but God himself is finally an end in itself. Thinking is not the goal of life. Thinking, like nonthinking, can be the ground for boasting. Thinking, without prayer, without the Holy Spirit, without obedience, without love, will puff up and destroy (1 Cor. 8:1). But thinking under the mighty hand of God, thinking soaked in prayer, thinking carried by the Holy Spirit, thinking tethered to the Bible, thinking in pursuit of more reasons to praise and proclaim the glories of God, thinking in the service of love—such thinking is indispensable in a life of fullest praise to God.”

“Warfield taught at Princeton Seminary for thirty-four years until his death in 1921. He reacted with dismay toward those who saw opposition between prayer for divine illumination and rigorous thinking about God’s written Word. In 1911 he gave an address to students with this exhortation: ‘Sometimes we hear it said that ten minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books. “What!” is the appropriate response, ‘than ten hours over your books, on your knees?’”

Fulton Sheen

“The hardest thing to find in the world today is an argument. Because so few are thinking, naturally there are found but few to argue. Prejudice there is in abundance and sentiment too, for these things are born of enthusiasms without the pain of labour. Thinking, on the contrary, is a difficult task; it is the hardest work a man can do – that is perhaps why so few indulge in it.”

R. C. Sproul

We “live in the most anti-intellectual period in the history of Western Civilization”.

“For the soul of a person to be inflamed with passion for the living God, that person’s mind must first be informed about the character and will of God. There can be nothing in the heart that is not first in the mind. Though it is possible to have theology in the head without its piercing the soul, it cannot pierce the soul without first being grasped by the mind.”

“The Word of God can be in the mind without being in the heart; but it cannot be in the heart without first being in the mind.”

John Stott

“Knowledge is indispensable to Christian life and service. If we do not use the mind that God has given us, we condemn ourselves to spiritual superficiality and cut ourselves off from many of the riches of God’s grace.”

Dallas Willard

“To serve God well we must think straight. Crooked thinking, intentional or not, always favours evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, it always costs lives.”

Ravi Zacharias

“The danger of a simplistic faith is simplistic answers.”

[1987 words]