The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think? by Harry Blamires

Author:Harry Blamires [Blamires, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Spirituality, General, Christian Theology, Religion, Christian Life
ISBN: 9781573833233
Google: -RoRf2c68l0C
Amazon: 1573833231
Goodreads: 12858
Publisher: Regent College Publishing
Published: 1963-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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ITS CONCEPTION OF TRUTH

THE CONCEPTION of truth proper to the Christian mind is determined by the supernatural orientation of the Christian mind. When we Christians speak of "the great truths" of the Christian Faith, we mean especially those doctrines describing the meeting of the temporal and the eternal, doctrines testifying to a reality beyond our finite order, which has impinged upon that order and still impinges upon it; the doctrines of the Divine Creation, the Incarnation, the Redemption, the work of the Holy Spirit. To start with this illustration of how in practice we Christians use the word truth when we are thinking and speaking christianly is to indicate the full breadth of the chasm separating the Christian from the secular mind. For the Christian, truth is supernaturally grounded: it is not manufactured within nature. The violence of the collision between the secular mind and the Christian mind in this respect is often underestimated. One may say without exaggeration that failure to distinguish clearly between the Christian conception of truth and the conception of truth popularly cherished in the secular mind has been one of the most unfortunate neglects of our age. This failure has done more than anything else to sap the Church's intellectual morale. It has produced woolly sentimentality and evasion in the thinking of Christians themselves, destroying clarity and authority. It has conversely nourished in the secular world the conviction that the Church has nothing to say to this generation deeper or more startling than the conventional platitudes of welfare ethics.

Briefly one may sum up the clash between the Christian mind and the secular mind thus. Secularism asserts the opinionated self as the only judge of truth. Christianity imposes the given divine revelation as the final touchstone of truth.

The marks of truth as christianly conceived, then, are: that it is supernaturally grounded, not developed within nature; that it is objective and not subjective; that it is a revelation and not a construction; that it is discovered by inquiry and not elected by a majority vote; that it is authoritative and not a matter of personal choice.

Ours is an age in which "conclusions" are arrived at by distributing questionnaires to a cross-section of the population or by holding a microphone before the lips of casually selected passers-by in the street. In many spheres of activity, quality is measured by mass-preference. The Top Ten or The Week's Best-Sellers indicate what is worth having in the way of new records or books. Listener Research gives marks to radio and T.V. shows on the basis of maximum audience-ratings. This deference to mass-preference of an admittedly capricious and non-rational nature is a phenomenon of the age. Educated people in general are wryly amused at this kind of thing: perhaps they ought to be more seriously concerned at the cumulative effect on the popular mind of the surrender of standards to the whims of the biggest crowd making the loudest noise. And perhaps they ought to be even more anxiously concerned about the status conferred nowadays on the opinions of the uneducated and the ill-informed.

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