Discovering the Christian Mind

Reason and Belief in Christian Confession

Douglas Vickers

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781610974042
  9781498260497
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630875749
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The relation between Christianity and the claims of reason has been at times sharp and conflicting and at times symbiotic. Noted scholars in the church and in the secular academy have asked what Christianity has to do with culture and what the Christian mind has to say, or should be saying, by way of critique in the marketplace of ideas. In Discovering the Christian Mind, Douglas Vickers argues insightfully that prior to the question of what the Christian mind should be doing or saying is that of what the Christian mind is. Vickers shows that the true identity of the Christian mind derives from the Holy Spirit's conveyance to the soul of the grace of regeneration. The conclusion that regeneration is prior to knowing, and that those know truly who know God truly, challenges thought and opinion.

1

Is There a Christian Mind?

A half-century ago the noted British scholar and social critic, Harry Blamires, began his important The Christian Mind with the provocative claim that “There is no longer a Christian mind.”1 If by that it is meant, as Blamires argued at length, that the Christian in the contemporary cultural crisis has ceased to think christianly and to bring the claims of Christian truth and criteria to the marketplace of ideas, there is undoubted insight in the conclusion. But the question that heads this chapter warrants renewed consideration.

Can we say that there is, in fact, a Christian mind? If our question is answered in the negative, we have effectively surrendered all possibility of meaning, not only in the Christian life and on the level of cultural criticism, but on all levels of awareness and consciousness that our essays in epistemology encounter. If, on the other hand, we answer our question in the affirmative we are challenged to state what is to be understood as the Christian mind, why and the grounds on which it exists, and what legitimacy and scope and competence attach to it. For the confessing Christian, who knows that he is a Christian and holds to the presuppositions and potentialities of understanding informed by Christian realities, the reason for an affirmative answer lies on the surface of the Christian text. His claims to epistemological competence are warranted by the fact that in Christ “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3).

We shall return to the challenge of our question. But to give all possible credence to Blamires’s lament, when he says that there is no Christian mind it is true that the implication he draws on the levels he addresses undoubtedly holds. That is to say, “There is no shared field of discourse in which we can move at ease as thinking Christians by trodden ways and past established landmarks.”2 Christian critique has substantially departed the public square. “There is no public pool of discourse fed by christianly committed thought on the world we live in.”3 “There [is] no vigorous Christian mind helping to determine the character of contemporary culture.”4 Blamires is concerned to establish a difference between “thinking christianly” and “thinking secularly.”5 But as he sees it, both forms of thinking can be addressed to all of the affairs of life, “about the most sacred things,” and “about the most mundane things.” “Thinking christianly” does not have to do only with “thinking about Christian matters.”6

Our objective in what follows will be only tangentially and not primarily concerned with the manner in which the Christian can and should bring a Christian mind to bear on the evaluation of social, cultural, and political issues. A prior question and problem arises in the assessment of genuine Christianity in the contemporary age. Postmodernist, or to use Blamires’s phrase, post-Christian, thought has extended its tentacles in many directions and in numerous academic disciplines, in philosophy, sociology, economics, law, for example. And it has invaded the theology of the church and distracted the pew from what the pulpit should be saying if a clearer adherence to old paths and old interpretive guideposts had been retained. In setting the stage for his extended critique Blamires summarizes his thesis by observing that “Except over a very narrow field of thinking, chiefly touching questions of strictly personal conduct, we Christians in the modern world accept, for the purposes of mental activity, a frame of reference constructed by the secular mind and a set of criteria reflecting secular evaluations.”7

But the claims and conclusions that follow from those propositions disturb by their purported comprehensiveness. For consider the proposition that lies beneath their formulation. Though “there is no longer a Christian mind, there is still,” it is claimed, “a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality.”8 At that point the fallacy lurks that vitiated much of the claim of twentieth-century social criticism. That was the claim that the Christian ethic and Christian practice were supportable without the Christian doctrine. When Blamires laments that “the significance of doctrinal teaching [has been] depreciated,”9 the proper ground and the reason for the diminution of Christian practice has been acknowledged. For without the Christian doctrine there can be no real meaning in Christian ethics, conduct, or life. There is no point at all in essaying to construct a viable and sustainable Christian behavior without the clear understanding of the Christian doctrine that must necessarily sustain it.

Blamires’s essay of mid-twentieth-century vintage, lamenting the cultural downgrade and the absence from its context of a clear Christian critique, has not, of course, stood alone. It is not our task or intention to trace the trail of relevant literature. Blamires himself returned to the critique with continued vigilance in his Recovering the Christian Mind and The Post Christian Mind.10 Mark Noll echoed Blamires when he concluded that “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”11 But to bring the story up to date, Carl Trueman, with accustomed incisive and engaging insight, has commented on aspects of the issues in his Minority Report.12 And Alister McGrath has recently presented a major collection of essays in his The Passionate Intellect.13 McGrath presents his work as “an intellectual defense of the place of theology in the Christian life, and as a plea for the Christian church to take the life of the mind seriously, especially in the light of contemporary public debates.”14 He “emphasises its [Christian theology] capacity for robust intellectual and cultural engagement.”15 McGrath sets out to lay “the ground for a theologically informed engagement with culture” and then, against that, to provide “a platform for cultural engagement.”16

In the course of his analysis McGrath offers an argument regarding the relation between theology and apologetics to which we shall return. He discusses what he refers to as “the reasonableness of faith” and “the rational force of Christianity.”17 “It remains of vital importance,” he observes, “to assert and affirm the reasonableness of faith, without limiting faith to what reason can prove with certainty.”18 But again, consistent with the preoccupation with socio-cultural analysis, McGrath concludes that “Theological analysis is only one aspect of good apologetics; it requires supplementation by analysis of cultural criteria of acceptability and attractiveness.”19 Provocative thought-forms are contained also in John Piper’s Think, notably in his confronting “The Challenge of Relativism” and that of “Anti-intellectualism.”20

Creation, fall, and the human faculties

But let us return to the beginning. It is in no sense a mere banality to observe that if there is a Christian person there is a Christian mind. But to reflect adequately on the status and capacity of the Christian mind it is necessary to consider in at least a minimal fashion some anterior questions. First, what is to be said of the nature and status of personhood as man came from the hands of his Creator, and what faculties of soul characterized him as a result? We shall refer in that connection to the Adamic mind. Then in the light of our first parent’s endowments of soul, the question arises of the effect on the soulish faculties of the fall and the entailment of sin that impacted the capacities of mind. The post-Adamic mind in operation, with its preoccupations and competence, is observable in the long history of thought and is noted briefly in what follows. Then against the claims and competence of the post-Adamic mind it will be possible to address directly the nature and status of the Christian mind, with its potential for a critique, not only or principally of contemporary culture, but of the realities and progress of the Christian life.

What is it, to ask our questions from a different vantage point, that constitutes a person a Christian person if a difference, any difference at all, exists between the Christian and the non-Christian individual? And what is it, as a result, that constitutes the differences in the way the Christian and the non-Christian think? The question implies another. What, then, is the meaning of Christianity and thereby the life-constructs and behavior norms that commitment to Christianity implies? We are asking not only what is involved on the level of being that makes an individual a Christian, but what engagement of the faculties of soul occurs in an individual’s progress to Christian status and identity? Perhaps we are asking the wrong question when we ask whether a Christian mind exists. That it does is readily established. Perhaps the more meaningful and potentially more productive inquiry is that of what the Christian mind is, rather than what the Christian mind should do and how it should think, or how it should engage cultural debate.

Creation and the Adamic mind

Reflect, for a moment, on personal identity and on the character and scope of what that individual identity involves, as our first parent stood in pristine relation to his Creator. He was created, we are told, in the image of God. “Let us make man in our image,” the triune God said, “after our likeness: and let them have dominion . . . So God created man . . . male and female . . . and God blessed them and said . . . Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion . . .” (Gen 1:26–28). If entry to the meaning of being and human personhood is made at that point, the issue of immediate relevance, a question of pressing significance for the meaning of the Christian mind, becomes that of what, precisely, is to be construed as the image of God. We may submit an attempt at definition in the following terms:

Man, created soul and body, male and female, is the image of God in that he is an immortal, rational, spiritual, moral, and speaking person, capable of reflective self-awareness and purposive action, characterized in his created condition by knowledge and by con­stitutive holiness and righteousness, and endowed with the capac­ity for the reception of divine revelation, social relations and communication, and communion with God his Creator.

In that claim it is being said that man is what he is because he is, on the levels of being and knowledge, the analogue of God. When we say that man is the analogue of God we are saying that he is like God in every respect in which a created, finite, temporal being ...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Is There a Christian Mind?
• Chapter 2: The Status of the Christian Mind
• Chapter 3: What Does the Christian Know?
• Chapter 4: The Paradox of Knowing God
• Chapter 5: The Regenerate Mind
• Chap[ter 6: The Life of the Christian Mind
• Chapter 7: A Christian Apologetic
• Chapter 8: Postscript
• Appendix
• Bibliography