Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Let me add my welcome. This is an ad hoc group. We don't represent any organization or institution, but it's just a body of men and women who believed that there was a serious topic to be tackled at a particularly timely moment.
[00:00:16] And so we're delighted all of you considered it worth coming this time, too. And it's my task to get the ball rolling for this series of six.
[00:00:25] In many ways, the world is awash now with talk of the death of Marxism and so on.
[00:00:31] But ideologically and intellectually, the death of Marxism has been signaled for several decades now.
[00:00:39] Thinkers in the west, like Sidney Hook, thinkers originally in the east, like Lezhek Kolakovsky, have pointed out the internal contradictions of Marxism and its inability to be a. A comprehensive ideology in the modern world. And we're all aware of this. You can go back, say, to the time of Khrushchev to get some of the first glimpses of this publicly.
[00:01:03] There was a famous time when Nikita Khrushchev was speaking in East Berlin and he said, how many of you are socialists?
[00:01:10] There was thunderous applause in this great congress.
[00:01:14] And he turned, of course, 20 years before war, we'd seen this last week, he said, I don't believe any of you.
[00:01:21] He said, in East Berlin, you're socialists, and they're not even that today in West Berlin, you're capitalists.
[00:01:27] He said, you're all hypocritical Communists. And you remind me of the time in the revolution when we sent round a questionnaire to factories and one question was, do you believe in God?
[00:01:41] And in one factory, everyone except one said, no.
[00:01:46] And one man wrote, in at home, yes, but in the factory, no.
[00:01:51] And Khrushchev said, I don't know which is better or worse, the consistent dishonesty of most of them or the honest inconsistency of the 1.
[00:02:01] And it was a very revealing sort of glimpse even back then, in the fact that the ideology of Marxism had already lost its compelling grip. And you can see it all around today. There's a current quip among the Poles, which I was told by one Polish friend this summer, he said, in Poland, they're now saying, what's the difference between a Communist member and a member of Solidarity? The answer is the Communist is one who's read the complete works of Marx and Lenin, and the member of Solidarity is one who's read the complete works of Marx and Lenin and understood them.
[00:02:38] And you could go on with that. Now, I begin there, because the challenge that Marxism faced, which it's now failed, is both an encouragement and a challenge to us.
[00:02:52] It's an encouragement because when we tackle this question of the Christian mind today, we are not the only ones who are having a hard time, to put it mildly.
[00:03:02] The fact is, though, but under the conditions of modernity in the modernized world, no comprehensive faith, religious or ideological, has flourished.
[00:03:16] In other words, we can say Marxism is dead, but we've got to represent the fact honestly to ourselves that the Christian faith as a comprehensive faith under the conditions of modernity hasn't done much better at that level.
[00:03:34] And that's both the encouragement. We're not alone, but it's also the tremendous challenge.
[00:03:40] Let me just explain to you why this series got going.
[00:03:44] The immediate context was a meeting in mid August at Cedar Point Farm on the Eastern Shore with a whole number of people brought together by Drew Trotter and the people down at Charlottesville, by the C.S. lewis center here and by the American Studies Program and so on.
[00:04:02] And the common bond between them was all those who are interested in the Christian Study center movement, if you like to call it that, and those who are interested in the integration of faith with the whole of life.
[00:04:12] But as we were talking, what became quite clear is that since 1963, when Harry Blamire's call was like a clarion call getting people to think in these areas, there have been small but significant advances. But looked at overall, the picture is extremely discouraging.
[00:04:34] And in many ways those who set out to pursue this have faltered and many have grown extremely discouraged.
[00:04:42] And as you look around the entire English speaking world, that picture is true.
[00:04:46] The London Institute, always upstream and often ignored and resisted.
[00:04:52] Regent College, no longer fulfilling the vision which its founders in many ways set out.
[00:04:58] New College Berkeley has never really fulfilled the potential and the hopes of those who founded it and is deeply struggling in many ways today.
[00:05:08] And one could go around the world to see that the resistance in the church is profound to this vision. Maybe it hasn't been articulated well, but here we are all those years later, since 1963, and really this is still a tiny minority movement. The resistance is as great as ever, and yet the timeliness is maybe more important than ever.
[00:05:32] And it was actually Jenny who suggested in the middle of that discussion that we have a series this fall and we just tackle the the mind of Christ here in Washington.
[00:05:42] Are we really pursuing it as we ought, Biblically speaking? And do we even agree on what this means? And in many parts of the world, the confusion over what it means is what stops people from going anywhere. That was the immediate idea.
[00:05:58] So this series is exploratory.
[00:06:00] It's not that we've worked out a perfect set of pieces we want to give. Not at all. Six of us are going to have a go at this, and I'm just introducing it tonight. Art may differ from me next week. He's thoroughly welcome to. You may differ from all of us, but we want to pray, think, wrestle together and raise that question. What does it mean to develop the mind of Christ? Are we really pursuing this as we ought here in Washington? And if not, what should we do about it? So it's exploratory and we hope it's participatory too. It's not certain people putting it on for others, not at all.
[00:06:34] There'll be sort of kickoff talks each time as we look at various areas. But we'd really encourage you, not only here in the evenings to the ones you can come, but at home and at work, to really wrestle and think and discuss with others so that the end after prayer and thought, we can really come to some conclusions as to where things are and what ought to be done. That's the immediate context. It grew out of this meeting in August.
[00:06:59] Let me just add to that, though my own, and this is very brief, my own personal context of this. As many of you know, it's my conviction that maybe the clearest key into understanding the nation today is not in talk of the so called declinists like Paul Kennedy and all that he was writing about last year, nor in terms of the so called endists like Fukuyama and his articles this month and all the talk of the end of Marxism and the end of history.
[00:07:31] I believe the deepest clue into understanding where America is is to see it along with those who see that since the early 60s, as yet uncompleted, we are living through a crisis of cultural authority.
[00:07:46] In other words, whether it's civic beliefs and values and traditions, or religious beliefs and values and traditions, beliefs no longer shape and restrain lives privately, publicly, as they once did. And this is affecting things from the very practical level, like the family crisis, right up to very profound things like the deficit, like national identity and so on.
[00:08:11] Now I also believe that as this crisis is developing and it's not yet reached its climax, in many ways the culture has changed so radically and politics is fundamentally able to change comparatively so little.
[00:08:28] The deep social remedies are not easy to find and we're at a place where ultimately we know we need reformation and revival.
[00:08:40] But rather than just fatalistically sit back along with all the individual callings we have in the world of politics or law or whatever it is we represent.
[00:08:50] I believe that thing we can do as we pray daily to the Lord for Reformation revival.
[00:08:57] The simple, practical thing the Church needs is a recovery of some of the forgotten first things.
[00:09:07] And if you take three or four of the fundamental basic biblical first things which are missing, whose absence is making the Church so anemic and weak, one of them is this one.
[00:09:22] Unless we really are understanding with the mind of Christ, integrating faith with the whole of life, there's no way we can hope to have integrity as Christians or effectiveness in society.
[00:09:35] So I believe this topic is tremendously important as one of the three or four basic forgotten first things that's absolutely essential.
[00:09:45] Now, let me introduce my understanding of this, and I stress that my task tonight is very much to give an overview. So this is introductory. It's rather more programmatic and generalized. In subsequent evenings, we're going to look at much closer detail at various things, and I'll outline the series as we finish.
[00:10:03] But in the introduction, let me begin first by defining what I understand, and I know a few of us do, by, by this notion of developing the mind of Christ or thinking Christianly, defining it.
[00:10:16] Let me just invite you in a few seconds just to meditate on some of the truths you know well.
[00:10:24] He whom we worship is the truth.
[00:10:29] He whom we worship as Lord and God.
[00:10:32] We say, as Psalm 27 says, the Lord is my light.
[00:10:38] He whom we worship, when we see the Son of God, is the one who is the Word, whose the one who is described as the light, the One through whom all things that come to be are shaped.
[00:10:52] We know because of that that to fear him is to begin to have wisdom and knowledge.
[00:10:59] We know that because of that he has given us our first commandment to love him with all our hearts, souls, strength and minds.
[00:11:12] We know that because of that living in a world which doesn't love him, that we're to be not conformed, but transformed by the renewing of our minds.
[00:11:22] So much so that we can say Paul says the audacious words, we have the mind of Christ.
[00:11:30] Just as we can say we are the body of Christ, so we can say we have the mind of Christ. Now put those together in a thousand other biblical verses you know well and meditate on that.
[00:11:42] And you'll understand what I mean when I say that thinking Christianly, in the sense that Harry Blamire has defined it and I'm using it tonight, is thinking Christianly is not thinking by Christians because it's perfectly possible to be a Christian and think in sub Christian ways and anti Christian ways.
[00:12:04] Our Lord gives us the example Himself. He turns sharply to his disciples and says, you think as men think, not as God thinks. They were his. They were his disciples. They would die for him, but they didn't think like Him.
[00:12:17] Thinking Christian is not thinking by Christians.
[00:12:22] Secondly, thinking Christianly is not thinking about Christian topics.
[00:12:27] We can think of things like prayer and Bible study and fellowship and church and all sorts of good things which are profoundly important Christian topics, but the greater part of life is outside them.
[00:12:39] And if we restrict thinking Christianity to them, we're not exercising the lordship of Christ over the whole of life.
[00:12:48] Thirdly, thinking Christianly is not taking a Christian line even where that's desirable. And it's a good deal less desirable most places than most people seem to think, even where it's desirable in the few limited places. You can't have a Christian line without a Christian mind.
[00:13:07] So we're back to what does it mean? Well, as Blamires defines it and as I'm using the word, thinking Christianly is thinking by Christians, yes, by Christians, but about anything and everything in a consistently Christian way. In the sense that our thoughts, from our assumptions to our conclusions and our actions are shaped by God's truth actively through His Word and His Spirit.
[00:13:37] Now, undoubtedly one of the questions we've got to raise, is there a better term?
[00:13:42] I know some of you don't like that phrase thinking Christianly.
[00:13:46] And certainly one of the keys to see Reformation will be to have a term that is deeply accurate biblically and has no negative connotations at all.
[00:13:56] You probably know some of the other phrases used.
[00:13:59] These are all possible ones. Christ centered thinking, biblical thinking, developing a Christian mind, integrating faith with the whole of life, thinking under the lordship of Christ, lifelong learning under Christ, developing decisive Christian thinking, and so on and so on. And we should discuss that and see what we believe today is Biblically the most faithful and the one that's the most positive and has the least negative connotations. And I still use for want of a better one. And I think most of those are very difficult to use in simple sentences because so many of them involve circumlocutions. I still use thinking Christianly, but I'm open to this group hammering that and coming up as we pray and discuss with something better over the weeks. And that's a very key thing because the terms we use have an awful lot to do with the persuasion we're able to have.
[00:14:51] But you can See, clearly defining it this way.
[00:14:54] The primary concern is not scholarship, it's discipleship.
[00:15:00] The primary concern is not hankering after some golden age of the past, say the Puritan era, where worship and learning were one.
[00:15:09] The concern is the godly community today having the mind of Christ here and now.
[00:15:15] The primary concern is not being able to mix with the elite and the professionals or whatever.
[00:15:21] The primary concern is with an everyday faith that is obedient and faithful in thinking as in every other part of life.
[00:15:30] Now let me quickly add to that definition caution, because here we are in 1989, 26 years after Blamire's.
[00:15:44] In 1976, 13 years after, halfway to where we are now, there was a famous series of articles on evangelicalism asking would they, in the so called year of the Evangelical, as through the Jimmy Carter presidency and so on, they emerge from the closet into the culture. Would they fulfill the potential that the historic moment and their own tradition and their numbers might have allowed you to expect?
[00:16:10] And to a man, they all said the same thing as Blamires in 63, they wouldn't, because evangelicals in particular and Christians in general, didn't think we with any decisively, distinctively Christian way.
[00:16:24] So as we come 13 years after that, 26 years after Blamires, and I can remember when Blamires first wrote I'd just come to Christ, we are not naives, we are wiser and more realistic. This is the second or third time round and so far we have failed.
[00:16:43] Let's be blunt.
[00:16:44] In other words, thinking Christianly is an idea whose time has come and gone for many people.
[00:16:52] So 13 years ago, 26 years ago, it was in vogue for a while and discovered with enthusiasm and seen almost as the miracle solution that if we started to think Christian in this way, all would be well.
[00:17:05] But we're really very little further down the line 26 years later. And today we have to be far more realistic.
[00:17:12] First, for instance, we have to recognize that this whole notion is what some describe as a sunset value, in the sense the sun is most colorful and most flamboyant just as it sets.
[00:17:26] So often things come into the public eye just as they're almost impossible.
[00:17:31] That's so with thinking Christians, as I said, starting with Marxism, there is no comprehensive faith which is flourishing comprehensively in the modern world.
[00:17:42] Let's be clear, we're really up against something extraordinarily strong.
[00:17:47] Not only that, though, we need to be cautious because much of the understanding of thinking Christianly has been defined by others.
[00:17:55] So the Whole talk of a worldview and so on has been balanced by some Christians to be a world and life view.
[00:18:04] But that's still a one dimensional concept compared to the biblical understanding which is tied in with emotions and with spirituality and a hundred things. And often people have talked of Christian worldviews in ways which have only been defined by others and so have been sort of bloodless and arid and dry and not deeply biblical.
[00:18:23] The third reason to be realistic today is that we know the deep rooted resistance if what we're onto is important and is biblical. We have an enormous double fronted campaign.
[00:18:37] We are taking on the most appalling odds out in the thinking world of unbelief, and we are taking on the most appalling odds in the unthinking world of belief.
[00:18:49] And as people like Charles Malik have said, I'm not sure which is worse.
[00:18:55] So many Christians today have a blind spot at this point which is extremely obdurate and I think, and many of us think has profound spiritual dimensions that people do not want to face.
[00:19:10] So we're dealing with something that we need reformation on and we need revival on.
[00:19:15] A quick six pack of seminars is not going to do the trick.
[00:19:19] So I would follow the definition with a caution.
[00:19:22] We should be wiser this time round. We are really up against it and we are at a time, culturally speaking, in the words of Churchill, when hours now count.
[00:19:36] Thirdly, though, in defining it, just a few remarks about some of the biblical foundations I have in mind because clearly what we do has got to be biblical and theological or it will be nothing.
[00:19:48] But again, I just invite you to think for a moment. I'm always staggered by the people who resist this theologically because to me it's incredible. We can say we worshipped the Lord and God of all, the One who is the Alpha and the Omega, the One who's the source of life, who's the goal of all life, and the guide from the source to the goal, and so on. The One who creates by the first word and judges with his last word and who redeems us in between times.
[00:20:18] Think of that God. And think it would be absurd to worship him and not have every thought, our understanding under Him.
[00:20:28] In other words, very simply, it is basic to our Christian call, it is basic to God's commands, it is basic to God's consecration to him. It is basic to every change we see in the New Testament.
[00:20:40] New birth, yes, evangelicals love that. New people, new orders of creation. The liberals tend to love that. But you move on down. And one of the list of all the great things that are new in the New Testament is new minds.
[00:20:53] But often that's the one ignored.
[00:20:55] Let me just say four simple things biblically that to me underline this and get across some of the central points we need to fight for. And these will be expanded on in much greater depth in future weeks.
[00:21:07] First, biblically understood God's sense. In other words, wisdom from God's perspective. God sense is genuinely good sense.
[00:21:19] Many Christians are incurably suspicious of thinking and of the essential wholesomeness of having minds.
[00:21:28] And again, this is extraordinary. We're called to love God with our minds.
[00:21:33] Repentance is returning to truth.
[00:21:36] Repentance is returning to our right minds.
[00:21:40] The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Faith is obedience to truth.
[00:21:45] Obedience is bringing thoughts captive to Christ, and so on. Now, if you see that that is a direct contradiction to two things that many Christians glory in, that's a direct contradiction. First, to a false view of fallenness, absolutely right. That the human mind through sin is dark and deceitful, as Paul says, it holds the truth in unrighteousness.
[00:22:11] And really you can see that Marx's view of ideology as ideas serving interests, or Freud's view of rationalizing, giving reasons other than our real reasons and so on, while Sartre's view of bad faith, they're really just footnotes on the extraordinary realism of the biblical view of sin and the mind, which is dark and is deceitful.
[00:22:32] But taken out of context, that becomes a double slander.
[00:22:36] That's a slander on God's creation.
[00:22:39] He didn't make us like that in the first place.
[00:22:42] And it's a slander on his recreation, including the redeeming of minds.
[00:22:49] So, for instance, you meet thousands of Christians who quote 1 Corinthians 1, the doctrine of the cross is sheer folly.
[00:22:56] And they misinterpret that unwittingly or otherwise, taking that to be objectively, absolutely true, that the cross is literally folly, whereas in fact it's ironically relatively true. It is folly to those on the road to ruin, but to those on the road to salvation, it's the wisdom of God. It depends where you come from. And seen rightly, it's far from folly. It's the reverse of folly. It's wisdom.
[00:23:24] And to insist that it is literally folly, and to see the whole of human thinking in that way is not to be more spiritual and it's to be less.
[00:23:31] But secondly, the biblical sense that God sends his good sense is directly against another false view, the false view that's around today of childishness, definitely. We see in Scripture a certain ideal of being simple and of being childlike to our father, Luke 11, for instance.
[00:23:53] But on the other hand, you never see, but not to think is childlikeness. It's described in the New Testament as childish and stupid and being like simpletons.
[00:24:06] And you can see, for instance, clearly again and again in Ephesians the link between being God's children but not being simpletons when it comes to thinking.
[00:24:18] In fact, we should be grown up in our thinking and not simpletons. And many Christians misuse childishness the same way they misuse fallenness. To have a view of God's wisdom, which is an insult.
[00:24:32] But we need to back that up quickly by saying a second thing. God's sense is good sense, yes, but God's sense in a fallen world is nonsense too, to those who don't believe.
[00:24:45] In other words, we know that as we break with the world in our thinking as well as our lifestyle, we will have to bear with the folly of the world that no more likes our thinking that follows Christ any more than our lifestyles that follow Christ.
[00:25:00] Pascal says men are so necessarily mad because of sin that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness to them.
[00:25:09] GK Chesterton says the man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be fool.
[00:25:16] And undoubtedly that's a biblical idea too, that God sense is nonsense to the world. So our Lord was mad to his generation, he was possessed to his critics. David was a fool to his own wife.
[00:25:30] Paul was mad to Festus and to the early church. This is a point of pride that if they followed the mind of Christ and became foolish to the world, they were in. Peter Damien, the early Christian's famous phrase, they were the impossible people.
[00:25:46] They didn't fit in. They were fundamentally ornery and contradictory. They were, in the early church's words, perfect fools. But as the early church stressed, that meant you counted the cost, but you didn't confuse the two.
[00:26:01] Because there's a difference between a folly which grows from the relativity of unbelief and is born of their sin, and a folly which comes from rationalizing our stupidity which is born of our sin. In other words, there's a good many Christians who say, you know, we're fools for Christ when just simply they're idiots by any standards.
[00:26:26] And we need to make a very careful difference between those we understand that God's sense is nonsense.
[00:26:33] WH Auden, as he started to approach faith and came towards conversion, put down as a little prayer once, oh, teach me to outgrow my madness.
[00:26:44] And he was exactly right. When Nebuchadnezzar repented, he came to his right mind. When the prodigal came to his senses in the pigsty, that's the word used, he came to his senses and his right mind. And repentance is the return to truth. But seen from the other perspective, we're then mad to the world.
[00:27:03] The third thing I'd say biblically is that thinking Christianly is not automatic.
[00:27:08] Be not conformed, but transformed by the renewing of our minds. Always the two possibilities.
[00:27:14] 2 Corinthians 10, where Paul speaks about bringing every thought captive to Christ. Again you get the sense of the existential, the moment by moment, the choice, as with all faith and obedience, it can always keep go one of two ways at any particular moment.
[00:27:31] So we can see in Scripture that not to think for ourselves is to think for someone else.
[00:27:37] We never escape thinking.
[00:27:39] Not to think Christianly is to think unchristianly.
[00:27:44] And the Scriptures are so strong on this. This is why Jesus says, you think as men think, not as God thinks.
[00:27:51] And it's perfectly possible, in other words, that we may be thinking as Americans or English or French, not as God thinks.
[00:27:57] We may be thinking as 20th century people think, or 16th or 15th century people think, not as God thinks. We may be thinking. Let's get more local. As neoconservatives think, or progressives or whatever you like think, and not as God thinks.
[00:28:12] We may be thinking as Washingtonians think, or don't think, or Los Angelenos or whatever, not as God thinks.
[00:28:22] We may be thinking as think tank people think, or lawyers or politicians or artists think, and not as God thinks. In other words, we've got to take that radically seriously in the world, but not of it. We have old assumptions left over. We have new ones that are filtering into our minds every day.
[00:28:40] Only through obedience and faith and bringing thoughts captive to Christ do we really develop the mind of Christ. And it is not automatic.
[00:28:50] The last foundational point.
[00:28:52] Thinking Christianly is not what it's often thought to be.
[00:28:57] In other words, if it needs constant critique, we've got to fight through all the stereotypes that are around us.
[00:29:03] Some simple points here. First, thinking Christianly in the Scriptures is never purely intellectual. It involves the whole personality.
[00:29:12] Yes, God addresses the understanding, but the emotions and the spirit and the physical and so on. It's the whole person, but addressed through the understanding.
[00:29:24] I very rarely use the word intellectual because through the enlightenment in the 19th century. It is something that's the disembodied mind and a people whose whole world center around the disembodied mind. That isn't a biblical idea, scripturally speaking. Thinking, for example, involves sweat.
[00:29:44] One of my favorite small verses you might easily trip over is Daniel 10:1, where it just says, in passing, the Lord says something to Daniel and says, although this word was true, it cost him much toil to understand it.
[00:29:59] Now, when did most congregations sweat over last Sunday's sermon? Cost them much toil to understand it. Or they read an article or listened to a politician or whatever and sweated over understanding that before the Lord. We don't do that today.
[00:30:14] The second thing, thinking Christianly, and this blows another stereotype, thinking Christianly in the Scriptures is never purely individual. It always involves the whole community.
[00:30:26] We think of thinking Christian as sort of Rodin's Penseur, the lonely thinker, wrapped there, heroically isolated as a genius. But that's the romantic movement, the lonely hero. That's not biblical.
[00:30:41] Look in Scripture, what do we see? We see principles like corrigibility. We need each other to correct each other. Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens the wits of another. Wisdom is found in counsel, and so on and so on. And you see the practice of that in the New Testament. Paul says in Galatians, I opposed him to his face, Peter, because he was clearly in the wrong, says Paul with considerable humility.
[00:31:08] But clearly that's the biblical approach. Collegiality, corrigibility. We need each other because none of us have it all, right?
[00:31:17] And again, that's the part of the purpose of this six weeks together.
[00:31:22] A third, thinking Christianly in the Scriptures is never purely human.
[00:31:27] It involves the whole understanding of reality.
[00:31:31] In other words, there's an unseen as well as a seen.
[00:31:34] There's a spiritual as well as a mental.
[00:31:37] We need to think Christianly, knowing what it is to begin with, the fear of the Lord and rely on the Word to trust the Holy Spirit.
[00:31:46] Whether it's the thought world that's so incredibly tough, we're up against in terms of blindness or opposition, or we're absolutely stuck and we need enlightenment or whatever.
[00:31:56] And of course, there's always the evil one, John Stott, who's a great friend, who's also a Cambridge man, I should say, he always says when he comes to Oxford, and he's not joking about this, he never preaches or lectures in Oxford without a deep sense of darkness.
[00:32:18] And it's true, Oxford's been very, very hostile to the Gospel. All the great men of God in Oxford thrown out, burned at the stake, ostracized like C.S. lewis, thrown out like John Wycliffe, etc. Cambridge welcomed them. Oxford never has.
[00:32:35] And when you go into Oxford, you have to take on the weapons of the Holy Spirit.
[00:32:40] But isn't that so? Just thinking on Capitol Hill or anywhere, that's a real concentration of power.
[00:32:47] And yet many Christians today don't have that part and supremely worship.
[00:32:52] How many of you thinking at the end of your thinking are just reduced to the wonder of it all.
[00:32:58] That's what Aquinas was, the end of his life. He was called the dumb ox because he just didn't want to write or speak.
[00:33:05] He just adored.
[00:33:07] That's Bernard of Clairvaux.
[00:33:10] The end of his thinking. He was just filled with a sense of the love of Christ.
[00:33:14] That's Pascal. If any of you read that magnificent memorial that he left, and if you know the life of Pascal after he died, his sister was sort of preparing him for burial and saw this little bump in his shirt and she felt it. There was clearly something sewn into his doublet and she undid it, found this little parchment years earlier.
[00:33:40] And this night, from about nine, I think, in the evening till midnight, he'd had this intense experience of God, which he begins with the words fire, fire, fire. Not the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And you see all the way through the writings of Pascal, this is what moved him.
[00:33:58] This is true Christian intellectual stuff that begins with worship and ends with worship and all the way through resists the evil one and knows what it is to walk with the Holy Spirit. Don't anyone ever tell me that scholarship is dry, biblically speaking. If we're thinking Christianly now, that was a long session. Let me move on rather more fast than the others.
[00:34:21] All that under defining it. Let me move on to the second point, diagnosing it.
[00:34:26] What's the state of the Christian mind today?
[00:34:31] I'll do this quickly. We don't really need to label this.
[00:34:34] Let me use humanism just to show you what I mean by the question. And I'll use British humanism here.
[00:34:41] Anyone who knows Britain. The British Humanist association had an incredible impact on Britain, particularly in the 1960s.
[00:34:49] But the remarkable thing was that they were always a tiny, tiny group. No one ever thought of talking about secular humanists as a great massive group, not at all. There were only 3,250 of them at most. There's a good deal less today.
[00:35:03] How on earth did they affect Britain as strongly as they did for the period? They did.
[00:35:08] Well, they had two things.
[00:35:10] Philosophically, they had a framework and practically they had a network.
[00:35:16] And those two things brought together proved immensely influential.
[00:35:22] First, the coherent framework. Take a book like Julian Huxley's, the Humanist Frame.
[00:35:28] They claimed that the entire range of human life and all modern problems could be understood and answered within the humanist frame, the humanist perspective, the humanist worldview. And they outlined it in books like that, coherently, cogently, persuasively to many, and it was powerful. So from their assumptions to their conclusions and their policy recommendations, the humanist frame just surrounded the whole of life. And they thought it through under it. But that wasn't the end of it.
[00:35:57] They had an active network.
[00:36:00] In other words, you see why they had such impact. You could see many of the parliamentary bills could be traced back to their addresses.
[00:36:06] But whether it was Parliament or the BBC or the universities, they were all tied in with them. Magnificent network of magazines and discussion groups and debating societies and so on.
[00:36:17] And that network was extremely powerful, out of all proportion to their tiny numbers and all credit to them. In an open, democratic society, there were millions and millions more Christians, but they did nothing.
[00:36:30] Or you could think of an American example, say, the power of the neoconservative movement or the Conservative movement in general. In the 80s, Irving Kristol's astute understanding that the universities were liberal and were beyond capture in the short term. So through foundations, through the think tanks, they did an end run around the liberal universities and fueled, intellectually speaking, the Conservative revolution. And you have the same phenomenon now, by the same token, let's ask the question, what's the state of the Christian mind?
[00:37:03] Do we have a coherent framework?
[00:37:05] Do we have a powerful network of thinking and ideas that's just flowing constantly, so that public policy proposals and initiatives are just sparking off in all directions, as they did in the early 19th century. For example, Wilberforce, at the height of his prime of his life, had not only his two great master visions, the abolition of slavery and the reformation of manners. That was his big too. He was a member, believe it or not, of 69 different Christian initiatives, ranging from abolition to the Bible Society. He founded the first Bible society in the world. 69 different things he was involved in at once because there was such a powerful network of Christians involved, from ideas to public policy, things right across early Victorian Britain. Now, where are we today? And I don't just mean the United States, I mean the English speaking world at large or the Evangelical community worldwide. I don't say all this to depress us, but just so that we can feel the weight of it. But ask ourselves the question Is our weakness because of the genuine folly of Christ or because we're not doing what we should be doing?
[00:38:20] Let me just throw out some areas you should be looking at.
[00:38:23] First, what is the general cultural attitude towards faith?
[00:38:28] You can go back to the time of the Framers and find people like Tom Paine and their skepticism, and they were comparatively few and far between in those days.
[00:38:36] But you can find many respectable voices saying similar things today. For instance, here's Time magazine.
[00:38:43] Religious faith is actively antagonistic to intellectual life and to attempts to create ordered, peaceful societies.
[00:38:51] Faith is belief without reason, fundamentally religious. Sorry, religions oppose rational processes.
[00:39:01] Now that isn't some member of the Humanist Society having a go in humanist papers. That's the senior editor, Time writing just a year or two ago. What, 84? 84. He's now the editor of U.S. news World Report.
[00:39:17] Or take a second area.
[00:39:19] Look more closely at all those commenting on the church in general or evangelicalism in particular.
[00:39:28] Here's one that shook me back in 76. I can barely read this pencil writing. So let me quote this. It's a key quote. At the time, as I said, when the Carter president started to happen, a lot of scholars looked at evangelicals and said, would they make an impact? And to a man they said no. And most of them said the reason why evangelicals weren't thinking Christianly. Here's one of them. I can read it.
[00:39:52] Nor is there much likelihood that the leaders of evangelical opinion will develop any significant new visions of American public life and policy.
[00:40:00] The brute fact remains that this country, which has produced more Protestant believers than any other country in the world, has also produced fewer powerful Protestant thinkers than any other country in the world.
[00:40:14] The evangelical leaders are not equipped intellectually to think through the complex social issues of the day and offer genuinely new and promising solutions.
[00:40:25] Without a genuinely critical position resting on decisive Christian foundations and directed by coherent biblical vision that can deal with modern science and technology and the realities of economics and foreign cultures, it is highly likely the evangelical voice in public today will once again confuse the Christian faith with the American fag and end up producing nothing.
[00:40:52] 76.
[00:40:54] And most people would say that as a comment in the last 13 years, that was remarkably accurate.
[00:41:01] Or take a third area. Just look at the universities.
[00:41:04] As Charles Malick said, here we have in the universities one of the greatest creations of Western civilization. The universities, immensely powerful, distinctively Western and Decisively Christian.
[00:41:19] Take the first three. Bologna, the Sorbonne, Oxford, and so on, right down to Harvard and many others.
[00:41:26] And yet today there's not a major university in the world where the Christian faith hasn't been almost totally routed.
[00:41:34] Malik speaks of what he calls a twofold miracle. We need one of evangelizing the great universities and two of intellectualizing the great evangelical movement.
[00:41:45] Many of us in the room know the poignancy of that. I used to sit daily in the library at the Bodleian in Oxford under the motto which I love. It's from Psalm 27, the Lord is my light, Dominus illuminatio mea. But one was made to feel like a sort of French resistance fighter looking around the Nazi occupation in the sense there was nothing left of people who followed the Lord as my light. Bob and others who were up at Harvard for Christ and his church surrounding the word Veritas. But today we know where they are.
[00:42:17] If you think as late as 100 years ago, only the University of Chicago was founded, quote in its charter, to be loyal to Jesus Christ and his church, employing none but Christians in any department of instruction, a school quote, not only evangelical, but evangelistic, seeking to bring every student to Jesus Christ as Lord.
[00:42:42] That was the University of Chicago in 1890, less than 100 years ago. As I say, we've been largely routed today. And the measure of our defeat is the fact that most Christians don't even pray or think that could be reversed or look at our nations.
[00:42:59] I want to pick up later in the series, well down the line why we are where we are today.
[00:43:04] But you could look back at that and explain it very clearly as to where things have gone astray. Or we could look at our local communities.
[00:43:13] I was up yesterday in the Harvard area.
[00:43:15] Clearly their challenge is to live with the arrogance of the mind, same as on Oxford. That's not the Washington problem.
[00:43:23] We go to Los Angeles. The problem is not intellectual like arrogance. It's a culture obsessed with image, obsessed with experience, with essential, not with the intellectual. That's not Washington's problem here.
[00:43:37] You remember Kissinger said that most people in Washington live off the capital of the day they arrived.
[00:43:43] Why?
[00:43:44] Well, partly the pragmatism. This is a political town, hardball, real politics, etc. Is not a thinking town. Secondly, the pressures so busy, who can think? But thirdly, we must say for us, pietism, There is a deeply rooted, spiritually grounded anti intellectualism in this town, that it's one of the most profound forms of disobedience in Christian history.
[00:44:08] And it hasn't been identified, let alone rooted out.
[00:44:13] Thank God for the exceptions.
[00:44:15] We've got some related to the magnificent exceptions in the Hill who do think.
[00:44:21] But by and large, we've got to say, one looks around England today or America today lose sight. Wilberforce A but I'm afraid, are light years from the Wilberforce generation.
[00:44:34] Or lastly, just look at the evidence of Christian circles themselves.
[00:44:39] At our churches at the average level, or our student fellowships, don't we see things like these first polarizations.
[00:44:46] Those who want to think one corner, those who want social justice or the charismatic movement or you name it, in another corner. And it's always the thinking ones or the suspect ones by themselves or the tragic phenomena, what's called counter conversions.
[00:45:01] With an unthinking faith, you have a steady seepage of dropouts. That's marked evangelicalism for 200 years.
[00:45:09] I was invited to see the Last Temptation when Universal put on a preview here. And I prayed and eventually went. What hit me immediately was there you had the dropouts of three great Western traditions.
[00:45:20] The novelist Cousin Zakis, orthodox filmmaker, Scorsese Catholic, and the scriptwriter Paul Schrader, Calvin College.
[00:45:32] And it's just so typical of men quarrying in the ruins of their former faith. And you meet them all the time. And a faith as unthinking as ours can only produce people who want to think and drop out from it.
[00:45:45] Or a third popular thing, insecurities.
[00:45:49] Someone has said many fundamentalists today speak as if they're standing on the rock of Ages and act as if they're clinging to the last piece of driftwood.
[00:45:59] Why the conspiracy theories? There is a profound cultural anxiety.
[00:46:04] Christians don't have confidence in the truth, confidence in the sovereignty of God, and move out unfazed by anything we face calmly rather than with the pain, paranoia and all the alarmism that characterizes Christian activism today or another one compartmentalism.
[00:46:22] People who think Christianly in one area but not other areas. People who think deeply in business or politics or academia but don't relate their faith to these things, and so on. And one could go on. Where are we? Take the state of the Christian mind today. I think we're at a place where the church really needs to repent profoundly that we've denied the lordship of Christ at this point.
[00:46:45] On to a third important one, distorting it.
[00:46:49] Aren't there great dangers in this approach? Quick answer is yes.
[00:46:54] But aren't there in every single area of Christian calling? In other words, I guarantee if you got 100 people and taught them Christian freedom, you'd have a fair number of antinomians by the end of the teaching.
[00:47:05] If you taught them a Christian view of law, you'd have a fair number of legalists by the end of the teaching. However balanced the teaching is, any truth out of context with imbalance becomes a distortion. And this one, certainly that's true today.
[00:47:20] The devil's maxim is almost if you can't deny it, distort it. And that certainly happened with this one. Now, this means we've got to teach things realistically, knowing mistakes have been made in the past, dreadful mistakes, and teach them humbly, knowing that we are prone to make all those mistakes again today if we're not careful.
[00:47:40] Now, the problem is that many of today's misgivings are centered around yesterday's mistakes.
[00:47:48] In other words, the errors of the past become the excuses of today. People look at their mistakes and say, well, I can't do that. It's clearly wrong because of this. But they don't look at the real thing.
[00:47:58] So we have to identify what has gone wrong. Now, we haven't got much time. Let me just fasten on one.
[00:48:04] You've got to identify a whole number on one out of about six I have down here.
[00:48:10] And that is this simple mistake that you might call particularism.
[00:48:17] The idea that to think Christianly means we can arrive at a correct answer to everything and have one Christian solution when we all have the mind of Christ. And that's entirely wrong because it forgets two simple things that are biblical. One, the diversity of the body.
[00:48:35] God doesn't mean us all to think the same things and have the same conclusions on most areas.
[00:48:41] And secondly, the fallibility of the body because we're sinners. Diversity is not just a matter of richness and strength, which it still is after the fall. It's a matter of sinfulness.
[00:48:53] We're so pigheaded in our sinfulness, we never have the full final truth, and we should never say that we do.
[00:49:00] Now, there's two types of forms of this kind of particularism.
[00:49:04] One type appeals to thinkers, and that's the desire to achieve an absolute consensus in theory and build great systems of the mind. But that is not exactly the Washington temptation.
[00:49:17] The other temptation is the false demand for an absolute consensus in practice that if we think Christianly, it means this, and we'll have a Christian line on this one Christian way on that, and so on.
[00:49:29] Now, what's wrong with it? Well, the idea is false.
[00:49:32] The body of Christ is not uniform, it's pluriform.
[00:49:36] There should be variety, diversity, richness, freedom.
[00:49:41] And except in those areas where God has spoken absolutely about himself and about a few other areas, there should be magnificent diversity in the body of Christ. So there is no one Christian art or aesthetics or politics or whatever. There's all sorts.
[00:49:57] Secondly, the kingdom of God is not final here and now. It's provisional.
[00:50:02] Short of heaven. It's not here fully yet.
[00:50:07] So the not yet is written over the best we produce. And everything short of heaven will be the last answer and needs to be critiqued and relativized.
[00:50:17] The third reason is that the present age is passing away and so will our best answers because they're relative to our age. They're sinful, short sighted, hundred years time people will think, how could those people in Washington in 1989 ever think that Christians could think like that? But we did it honestly and we're short sighted and we're sinful and it was the best we could do. But we'd be stupid to think that this is the one true Christian way.
[00:50:43] Worse than that, the application is disastrous.
[00:50:46] Not just the idea is wrong, it leads to legalism.
[00:50:51] We can say legitimately this public policy is not Christian, but we can never say this policy alone is.
[00:51:01] We can say this lifestyle is not Christian, but we can never say this lifestyle alone is. Because some are definitely not Christian and biblical, but many are biblical.
[00:51:12] And so to say there's only one way. As you see in the liberal church at times, and as you see in the conservative church, I would say the report cards. It's a fundamentally flawed theological vision which has gripped much of the Christian right and some of the hard left in the church and being thoroughly wrong. That's what I mean by the sin of particularism.
[00:51:36] So we need to think Christianly and break from these sort of things. But let me skip the rest and just bring it to a conclusion.
[00:51:44] How do we develop this?
[00:51:46] Well, that's going to be the subject of the succeeding week, so I'm not going to say much about that. Now.
[00:51:51] Let me just say here are the subjects we're tackling.
[00:51:55] In two weeks time, we're going to pick up the question of the relationship of knowing and feeling and doing.
[00:52:02] Very key one, two weeks after that, the whole question of thinking in relation to character and conscience and community.
[00:52:13] And then two weeks after that, November 17, pick up the question of what's gone wrong. How did we get into this mess here in the United States today?
[00:52:22] Two weeks after that, December 1st, pick up the question of what are the knowledge structures we face today the think tanks, the universities, the gatekeepers, and so on. And someone who's a real expert in that is going to pick that one up. And the last one, we're going to look at wisdom and practical decision making. I've talked at a very introductory, highly general, somewhat abstract level tonight. The last one will be very practical, getting from a biblical view of wisdom to actually making decisions today, knowing that they've been shaped by Christ.
[00:52:54] Now, as we go out from here, I would suggest two things.
[00:52:58] First, keep in mind the immense importance of being biblical, simple and practical.
[00:53:05] Unless we make this biblical, anyone who hears of this is going to be scared out of their wits.
[00:53:09] It's got to be in the context of the first commandment, loving the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, strengths and minds. Then it can be related to people. This is not a meeting for eggheads. This is not the watering hole for the alienated thinkers in town whose churches didn't give them enough, whatever, not at all. We are people who are concerned for this because of the first commandment, which we cannot escape.
[00:53:34] So make it biblical. Secondly, keep it simple.
[00:53:38] I may not have done tonight, but as we go out, and as I go out, you go out, we've got to keep it simple in terms of what it means. And thirdly, keep it practical in terms of the actual lives, the actual professions. People are moving. Having said that, I believe we not only need to make it concrete like that, but we also here need to think ambitiously.
[00:53:59] I think we're at the stage where some people in this room, those of you involved in the Christian Coalition and so on. We need to think really ambitiously.
[00:54:10] We need to really explore the spiritual dimensions of this. We need to explore the theological dimensions of this. But we need to start making a biblical critique of the entire intellectual contours of where America is today. All that we're up against in our fields, in our areas, in our professions, and do that in a tough way, and then go on from that to make an equal critique of the institutions we're in.
[00:54:33] Because many of us are in institutions or professions that are highly important, but we're not there, having critiqued them and understood their place in American life and where they pull us away from the gospel and so on, always asking where they're wrong and also asking where they should be better. And we can dream of things that have never yet been, as we think, under the lordship of Christ.
[00:54:54] So I think we've got to move from the immensely concrete and dare to to the visionary right up to the fact it is not inconceivable that this generation could pray and work to the three generational job of winning back major universities around the world for Christ.
[00:55:12] So let's move from the concrete to the visionary under the Lord, but always with that sense. And here I quote Abraham Kaika, the great old Dutch Christian who at one stage in his life was the Prime Minister of Holland, pastor, editor of a newspaper, and the president of university all at once.
[00:55:30] He was quite a man when he founded the Free University.
[00:55:36] The high point of his speech was when he said this.
[00:55:39] There is not an inch in any sphere of life of which Christ, the sovereign Lord of all life, does not say mine.
[00:55:50] And that's got to be what characterizes us. We are gripped with the lordship of Christ and includes what to many of us is the toughest of all areas today. Thinking.
