Today the average non-Christian is liable to believe that Christianity is a religion of the heart and not of the mind and that to be a thinking person is to be a non-Christian. Such an idea, prevalent as it is, actually is the farthest thing from the truth. Christians have allowed this false dichotomy between mind and heart to exist. We have even fostered it. One hears, quite freqently in many varieties, such nonsense as "I don't want doctrine, I just want Jesus." Well, you can't have Jesus without doctrine. Knowing Jesus means, by definition, knowing things about Him. We cannot separate the mind and the heart. Trying to do so, is something like me saying that I can love my wife without knowing her or anything about her. Love is always a product of knowledge.
Even lust is impossible without the mind. Here we might be tempted to think that we could lust simply by seeing something or someone we want. But without first having some idea developed in our minds of what we want, of what we consider attractive, there would be no lusting. All we need to do to prove this is to recognize that the idea of "beauty" is different. It is in the "eye of the beholder." It has even changed over the generations. What previous generations considered to be beautiful is oftentimes quite different from what our generation considers to be so. Even lust requires the mind.
It is Christianity that has propagated the intellect and the use of education within the world. In America, this was done by the usual targets of a repressive belief system, the Puritans. As Richard Hofstadter, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, has said:
"The Puritan clergy founded the tradition of New England intellectualism; and this tradition, exported wherever New Englanders settled in large numbers, was responsible for the remarkably large portion of the country's dynamic intellectual life throughout the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth."
And as Moses Coit Tyler has added:
"In its inception [Puritan] New England was not an agricultural community, nor a manufacturing community, nor a trading community: it was a thinking community; an arena and mart for ideas."
Why has Evangelical Christianity, then, given over the mind to science or some other such field? Why have we thrown the mind out of our worship services and Sunday school classes? Why have we orchestrated the church to "feel" rather than to "think"?
1 comment:
This is unrelated (although maybe not completely) to your post. But, I was thinking about the Old Testament sacrifices. Can any of us imagine taking an innocent lamb which is not our pet, but is a completely barnyard animal, and slitting its throat for a sacrifice. I know that sounds gruesome, but it is what happened in the Old Testemant. Now, think of your pets...dog, cat, horse, etc...much less your own child. This helps to put the sacrifice of God's only Son in perspective. While we cannot comprehend the gravity of it completely, it may help to think of the Ultimate sacrifice in these terms. Comments.
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