Taken from J. P. Moreland’s excellent book, Love Your God With All Your Mind
Chapter One–“How We Lost the Christian Mind and Why We Must Recover It”
During the middle 1800s, three awakenings broke out in the United States: the Second Great Awakening (1800-1820), the revivals of Charles Finney (1824-1837), and the Layman’s Prayer Revival (1856-1858). Much good came from these movements. But their overall effect was to overemphasize immediate personal conversion to Christ instead of a studied period of reflection and conviction; emotional, simple, popular preaching instead of intellectually careful and doctrinally precise sermons; and personal feelings and relationship to Christ instead of a deep grasp of the nature of Christian teaching and ideas…
Anti-intellectualism’s Impact on the Church
1. A misunderstanding of faith’s relationship to reason.
…biblically, faith is a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true.
2. The separation of the secular and the sacred.
3. Weakened world missions.
4. Anti-intellectualism has spawned an irrelevant gospel.
Today, we share the gospel primarily as a means of addressing felt needs…He [Paul] based his preaching on the fact that the gospel is true and reasonable to believe. He reasoned with and tried to persuade people intelligently to accept Christ…The only response to the Pauline evangelistic approach is either to accept Christ or deny the truth of the gospel.
5. A loss of boldness in confronting the idea structures in our culture with effective Christian witness.
The church is safe from vicious persecution at the hands of the secularist, as educated people have finished with stake-burning circuses and torture racks. No martyr’s blood is shed in the secular west. So long as the church knows her place and remains quietly at peace on her modern reservation. Let the babies pray and sing and read their Bibles, continuing steadfastly in their intellectual retardation; the church’s extinction will not come by sword or pillory, but by the quiet death of irrelevance. But let the church step off the reservation, let her penetrate once more the culture of the day and the…face of secularism will change from a benign smile to a savage snarl.–R. C. Sproul et al.
If we are going to be wise, spiritual people prepared to meet the crises of our age, we must be a studying, learning community that values the life of the mind.
Chapter Two–”Sketching a Biblical Portrait of the Life of the Mind”
…Unfortunately, sincerity is not enough for powerful Christian ministry. We must also have an accurate biblical understanding of what we are to be about…
…God is certainly not a cultural elitist. He does not love intellectuals more than anyone else. But it needs to be said in the same breath that ignorance is not a Christian virtue. If those virtues mirror the perfection of God’s own character…
“Ought not a Minister to have, First, a good understanding, a clear apprehension, a sound judgment, and a capacity of reasoning with some closeness?”–John Wesley
…faith is relying on what you have reason to believe is true and trustworthy…
…[Billy] Graham was asked what he would do differently if given the chance. He replied, “I would have studied more. I would have gotten my Ph. D. in anthropology.”
“Don’t neglect your critical faculties. Remember that God is a rational God, who has made us in His own image. God invites and expects us to explore His double revelation, in nature and Scripture, with the minds He has given us, and to go on in the development of a Christian mind to apply His marvelous revealed truth to every aspect of the modern and post-modern world.”–John Stott
Chapter Three–”The Mind’s Role in Spiritual Transformation”
If a culture reaches the point where Christian claims are not even part of its plausibility structure, fewer and fewer people will be able to entertain the possibility that they might be true. Whatever stragglers do come to the faith in such a context would do so on the basis of felt needs alone, and the genuineness of such conversions would be questionable to say the least. This is why apologetics is so crucial to evangelism. It seeks to create a plausibility structure in a person’s mind, “favorable conditions” as Machen puts it, so the gospel can be entertained by a person. To plant a seed in someone’s mind in pre-evangelism is to present a person with an idea that will work on his or her plausibility structure to create a space in which Christianity can be entertained seriously. If this is important to evangelism, it is strategically crucial that local churches think about how they can address those aspects of the modern worldview that place Christianity outside the plausibility structures of so many.
…Many people become bored with the Bible precisely because their overall intellectual growth is stagnant. They cannot get new insights from Scripture because they bring the same old categories to Bible study and look to validate their old habits of thought.
Chapter Four–”Harassing the Hobgoblins of the Christian Mind”
Seven Traits of the Empty Self
- The empty self is inordinately individualistic
- The empty self is infantile
- The empty self is narcissistic
- The empty self is passive
- The empty self is sensate
- The empty self is hurried and busy
…And if someone is overly individualistic, infantile, and narcissistic, what will that person read, if he or she reads at all? Such a person will read Christian self-help books that are filled with self-serving content, many slogans, simplistic moralizing, a lot of stories and pictures, and inadequate diagnosis of issues that place no demand on the reader. Books about Christian celebrities will be selected to allow the reader to live vicariously through the celebrity. What will not be read are books that equip people to engage in “destroying speculations, raised up against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5, NASB), develop a well-reasoned, theological understanding of the Christian religion, and fill their role in the broader kingdom of God for the common good and the cause of Christ. Eventually a church without readers or with readers with the tastes just listed will become a marginalized, easily led group of Christians impotent to stand against the powerful forces of secularism that threaten to bury Christian ideas under a veneer of soulless pluralism and misguided scientism. In such a context, the church will be tempted to measure her success largely in terms of numbers–numbers achieved by cultural accommodation to empty selves. In this way, as Os Guinness has reminded us, the church will become her own grave digger; her means of short-term “success†will turn out to be the very thing that marginalizes her in the long run.
Chapter Five–”Clearing the Cobwebs from My Mental Attic”
…To develop a Christian mind skillfully, you must want to be a certain sort of person badly enough that you are willing to pay the price of ordering your lifestyle appropriately. Of course, some Christians are called to a vocation of being a Christian intellect in one way or another–a Christian philosopher or New Testament scholar, for example. This requires a more intense, focused ordering of one’s life than is needed for those without this calling. But every believer, regardless of vocational calling, needs to cultivate a Christian mind.
Chapter Six–”Evangelism and the Christian Mind”
No movement, political, religious, or otherwise, can survive with dignity or flourish in a culture if it allows the following to arise:
- A culture where its viewpoint is considered irrational by a significant number of people and is not adequately represented among the intellectual leaders who shape the plausibility structure of that culture.
- A culture in which the movement itself enlists other to join, not primarily in terms of the importance of the ideas and the truth that defines that movement, but in terms of the satisfaction of felt needs for those who sign up.
- An atmosphere wherein the movement does not mobilize a growing number of its soldiers to be articulate advocates and defenders of its ideology who can engage in debate in the public square.
Chapter Seven–”Apologetic Reasoning and the Christian Mind”
Here is a list of some of the philosophical presuppositions of science:
- the existence of a theory independent, external world
- the orderly nature of the external world
- the knowability of the external world
- the existence of truth
- the laws of logic
- the reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve as truth gatherers and as a source of justified beliefs in our intellectual environment
- the adequacy of language to describe the world
- the existence of values used in science (for example, “test theories fairly and report test results honestly”)
- the uniformity of nature and induction
- the existence of numbers and mathematical truth
Chapter Eight–”Worship, Fellowship, and the Christian Mind”
…Worship is not under the control of human beings, nor is the form it takes up to their whims. Rather, worship is a response to a God who initiates toward His people, gives them life, and shows Himself active on their behalf…
…but one thing about New Testament fellowship is crucial for our understanding. It does not refer to people getting together simply to enjoy one another, though, of course, there is nothing wrong with that! Rather, very much like Aristotle’s third type of friendship, New Testament fellowship is a means for developing commitment to and advancing the spread of the kingdom of God and the gospel of Christ…
Frankly, too much of what passes for fellowship today is trite conversation that has no clear goal for its purpose. And when we do meet to study something, all to often we gather to study things that are based in self-help and narcissism and not in trying to be better equipped to spread the gospel of Christ!
Chapter Nine–”Vocation and an Integrated Christian Worldview”
“One may justly say that our Public School tradition has actively encouraged an attitude to life which makes a strong distinction between the theoretical and the practical, and which gives to ideas and ideals the status of leisure-time interests not to be taken too seriously and on no account to be related to practical affairs.”–Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind
“The general vocation of all Christians–indeed of all men and women–is the same. We are called to live as children of God, obeying His will in all things. But obedience to God’s will must inevitably take many different forms. The wife’s mode of obedience is not the same as the nun’s; the farmer’s is not the same as the priest’s. By ’special vocation,’ therefore, we designate God’s call to a man to serve him in a particular sphere of activity.”–Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind
Chapter Ten–”Recapturing the Intellectual Life in the Church”
…First, why is our impact not proportionate to our numbers?…Second, why are ministers no longer viewed as the intellectual and cultural leaders in their communities that they once were?…Third, how is it possible for a person to be an active member of an evangelical church for twenty or thirty years and still know next to nothing about the history and theology of the Christian religion, the methods and tools required for serious Bible study, and the skills and information necessary to preach and defend Christianity in a post-Christian, neopagan culture?
