The loss of the Christian mind
I’ve just finished reading a book called “Love Your God With All Your Mind“, by J.P. Moreland 1997. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 1.
Not long ago, the newspaper featured a leading politician’s statement about the Christian political right in which he charged that the Christian right was populated by dumb, uninformed people who are easily led by rhetoric. While I would dispute the complete accuracy of this charge, nevertheless, we Christians must ask ourselves why, if there is not a grain of truth in it, someone would think to make this accusation of us in the first place. Judged by the Scriptures, church history and common sense, it is clear that something has gone desperately wrong with our modern understanding of the value of reason and intellectual development for individual discipleship and corporate church life. … We are staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, and we can no longer afford to act like it’s loaded with blanks.
In the first chapter Moreland lays out an outline of how the emergence of anti-intellectualism in the 1800′s and the subsequent Evangelical withdrawal from participation in the broader intellectual culture informs the disproportionate relevance of the church compared to the size of her community. He outlines anti-intellectualism’s impact on the Church along the following dimensions:
- a misunderstanding of faith’s relationship to reason
- the separation of the secular and the sacred
- weakened world missions
- the spawning of an irrelevant gospel
- loss of boldness in confronting the idea structures in our culture with effective Christian witness
Chapter two lays out a biblical sketch of the value of reason and confronts sources of biblical resistance to the intellectual life. The rest of the book is divided into 3 parts, How to Develop a Mature Christian Mind, What a Mature Christian Mind Looks Like, and finally Guaranteeing a Future for the Christian Mind. This book serves as a wake-up call for regaining some balance in the formula of Matthew 22:37 and why it matters that we do.
Another reviewer touches on Moreland’s discussion of “Empty-Self Syndrome” here.
