(T)he term “thinking Christianly” has two parts that require serious attention. Thus we must first ask what we mean by “thinking.” For as Dorothy L. Sayers laments in her celebrated essay, The Lost Tools of Learning.
Is not the great defect of our education today … that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.
In my experience no single point of cultural differences between America and England is greater than this one: in English schooling we were given the tools of learning and were taught to think.
My focus here, however, is not on “thinking” but “thinking Christianly.” Because of the deep confusion over what is meant, some negative statements must precede the positive. First, thinking Christianly is not thinking by Christians. As a moment’s thought will show, it is perfectly possible to be a Christian and yet to think in a sub- Christian or even an anti-Christian way. Jesus said bluntly to his disciple Peter, “Away with you, Satan. You think as men think, not as God thinks.”
Second, thinking Christianly is not simply thinking about Christian topics. Such topics as prayer, Bible study, and the spiritual disciplines all fall within the bounds of recognizable Christian themes. Thus they are surely candidates to be part of the Christian mind. But the trouble with that approach is that it leaves out the greater part of life. The nineteenth-century maxim applies not only to theology but to life as a whole: “If Jesus Christ is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all.”
Third, thinking Christianly should not be confused with adopting a “Christian line” on every issue. Even where a “Christian line” is desirable at all — and that is a good deal rarer than many Christians think — developing a Christian line is impossible without first developing a Christian mind.
Expressed positively, thinking Christianly is thinking by Christians about anything and everything in a consistently Christian way— in a manner that is shaped, directed, and restrained by the truth of God’s Word and God’s Spirit.
As I use it, the phrase “thinking Christianly” is not as important as the idea it expresses. For thirty years many of us have followed Harry Blamires and found that “thinking Christianly” best captures the substance and spirit of what it means for the follower of Christ to grow in the mind of Christ. But others have used different phrases to express the same point-for example, “Christ-centered thinking,” “biblical thinking,” “developing a Christian mind,” “thinking under the lordship of Christ … lifelong learning under Christ developing a Christian world and life view,” and so on.! What matters is not the term but the substance and spirit of the truth. Is it not absurd to affirm that Jesus Christ is Lord of all, the Alpha and the Omega, our creator, redeemer, and judge, the source, guide, and goal of all there is, and yet not be decisive over our minds and thinking? Evangelicals who rightly glory in all the new things in the gospel-a new birth, a new people, new powers, and a new age-must reinsert the vital, missing component of “new minds.” Nowhere are the lordship of Christ and the power of the gospel more needed at the beginning and more glorious at the end.
Expressed differently by Ambassador Charles Malik, in all our thinking “the critic in the final analysis is Jesus Christ himself.” Thus from the Christian point of view’ has no solid foundation unless the word Christian here means Jesus Christ himself. So from the very start I have put aside all such questionable phraseology as “from the Christian point of view,” “in terms of Christian principles,” “applying Christian principles or values” “from the standpoint of Christian culture,” etc.
The only question that finally counts is, What does Jesus think? Aside from that standard, all our thinking is “an exercise in fuzziness, in wobbly human effort, in subjectivist rationalism, in futility.
What matters above all-whatever term we use-is that the idea and practice be kept simple, practical, and biblical. When all is said and done, the point is to love and obey God by loving him with our minds. For the Christian mind is a combination of intellectual light and spiritual ardor that, in Dorothy L. Sayers’s term, is simply the “mind in love” with God.
From, “Let My People Think: Restoring the Christian Mind,” by Os Guinness
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