By the Way by Derek Vreeland

Author:Derek Vreeland [Vreeland, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality
ISBN: 9781513805863
Amazon: 151380586X
Goodreads: 42683728
Publisher: Herald Press
Published: 2019-06-18T06:00:00+00:00

THINKING CLEARLY AND CHRISTIANLY

I have found a way to live fully aware of the world of the spirit without leaving my mind behind. Sadly, many devout followers of Christ continue to buy into this false assumption that the life of the mind and the life of the spirit are somehow in conflict with each other. An alarming number of present-day followers of Christ resist, ignore, or simply don’t understand the connectedness between the mind and spirit. They would rather feel their way through the faith and leave the thinking to somebody else. N. T. Wright observes, “Part of the problem in contemporary Christianity, I believe, is that talk about freedom of the Spirit, about the grace which sweeps us off our feet and heals and transforms our lives, has been taken over surreptitiously by a kind of low-grade romanticism, colluding with an anti-intellectual streak in our culture, generating the assumption that the more spiritual you are, the less you need to think.”1 Christians formed by a culture that would rather feel something spiritual than think about something conceptual have continued to resist the life of the mind. We are integrated beings; our heart and head are connected. Following Jesus in the way of the mind seeks to form a bridge between the mind and the spirit, the head and the heart, so that we grow in loving God with all our hearts and all our minds.

We need hearts ablaze with a desire for God and we need good thinking to guide the way. Wright continues, “Thinking clearly and Christianly is thus both a key element within the total rehumanizing process (you won’t be fully human if you leave your thinking and reasoning behind) and a vital part of the motor which drives the rest of that process.”2 In awakening to the value of the Christian mind, we discover that all followers of Jesus are philosophers of a certain kind. Sadly there are not many philosophers among us. We don’t find many people interested in anything philosophical because of the growing anti-intellectual sentiment around us. This vibe combined with the cultural pressure from bite-size pieces of information delivered rapid-fire via digital media has conditioned our minds in such a way that we struggle to think deeply or sustain the mental effort necessary to work through complex issues in our minds. My concern is not so much with the culture-wide absence of philosophical conversations, but how a lack of thinking has grown among Christians and kept so many followers of Christ underdeveloped.

It seems like many who call themselves evangelicals living in twenty-first-century America typically find little or no interest in philosophy, theology, or engaging the intellect. Mark Noll made this observation over twenty years ago when he declared, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”3 While I see some signs of life in some pockets of evangelicalism (or post-evangelicalism), I continue to see far too many Christians languish in spiritual immaturity because they don’t value their ability to think in relation to their faith.

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