(12) Wholeness

The Christian mind has a quality of wholeness that can best be understood against the background of the dualism that is prevalent in both Protestant and Catholic thinking today. It can hardly be denied that most Western Christians live divided lives. Spiritual life is one area, including worship, witness, devotions, theology, and ethics. Business, education, politics, etc. make up another whole segment where the guidelines, apart from a rhetorical profession of Christ’s lordship over all things, are really found in the scientific method, rationalism, the democratic way of life, and confidence in technology and capitalistic economics. Theology and physics are separated by an airtight door. Faith is the way to know God; reason to know this world. Facts are objective; values are subjective; and they are separated by an unbridgeable chasm. Private life is Christian; public life is secular. The consequence, as Os Guinness has pointed out in a recent lecture series, is that Christianity is rapidly becoming a folk religion, interesting and enjoyable in its traditionalism but utterly inconsequential in the public life of the society.
Against this dichotomy the Christian mind protests with all the authority of the Word of the living God. Life does not come apart into two pieces. Life is whole, and meant to be lived with the integrity which roots every thought, word, and action in Jesus Christ, in whom "all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17). All human knowledge, like all other human activity, is rooted in some faith or other. There is no such thing as integrating faith and learning. They have never been and can never be separated. But the faith by which we learn may be an apostate or idolatrous faith. When we live our lives by multiple faiths, one for the spiritual life and another or others for the rest of life, we put ourselves in the position of pre-captivity Israel. The Israelites in that time worshipped Jehovah and worshipped the idols all at the same time and didn’t even feel the strain. (cf. Jeremiah 44:15-19). Their consequent deportation at the hands of Babylonians is a fate that ought to concern modern Christians much more than it seems to. Indeed, it is a fate that has already overtaken us to a very large degree, not geographically but certainly culturally.
The Christian mind has a view of life and the world that is life encompassing, world wide, and personally holistic. It insists that Christ, the living Word of God, has made, upholds, and redeems all things. (Colossians 1:20) This not only means that no subject in the school’s curriculum, from mathematics to modern art, from physics to theology, may be properly considered unless it is explained in terms of its relation to Him; it also means that He has established the laws which govern the operation of all human institutions – marriage, family, church, state, school, business, unions, research, institutes, media, etc. – and that it is the solemn, happy business of Christians to spend their lives declaring and demonstrating Christ’s lordship in these areas. There can be no such thing for the Christian mind as a separation of life into sacred and secular. Nor can the body be downgraded and the soul up-graded in a pseudo Christian imitation of the Greek concept of man as a "rational soul in an animal body." Life is whole, and it all belongs to Christ.
It is here that our failure as God’s people comes most painfully to consciousness. As Blamires says, "There is no longer a Christian mind . . . there is no shared field of discourse in which we can move at ease as thinking Christians by trodden ways and past established landmarks." (see footnote 1) We have not done our homework, and we are in danger of the judgement upon the unwise steward who did not give his Lord’s household their portion of food in due season." (Luke 12:41-48). There are wide areas in modern life where we have not worked out the meaning of Christ’s claim to universal lordship (Matt. 28:18). Indeed, we have lived as though He did not have any authority in those areas. In this sense we have failed to "abide in Him," and are in danger of being "ashamed before Him at His coming." (I John 2:28). Perhaps this is what He meant when He asked, " . . . when the Son of man cometh, shall he find the faith on earth?" (Luke 18:8) It is difficult to conceive of a more pressing mandate for the church today than the recovery of a Christian mind. Even evangelism cannot supersede this, for evangelism performed without the development of a truly Christian mind may very easily be the kind of evangelism that our Lord condemned so fearfully in the Pharisees. "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he is become so, ye make him twofold more a son of hell than yourselves." (Matt. 23:15)

(13) Anti-Idolatrous

A final characteristic of the Christian mind is that it is anti idolatrous. It listens with understanding to the cry of Deuteronomy 6:4, "Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah . . ." and interprets it to mean that there is no other god in whom we may place confidence in any area of our lives. It would agree, for instance, with Goudzwaard when he says:

"This Industrial revolution, which started a century and a half ago in the West and still has not come to a complete end, can be regarded in part as an unmistakable expression of living faith, i.e. "the faith that things would get better and better through the advance of modern technology within the framework of a growing free market production." (see footnote 2)

It detects the fallacy of a political viewpoint that says democracy is a way of life that includes even religion. It recognizes the religious significance of a statement like the following from an article dealing with the water problem in the southwestern United States:

"But the truth is, we would eventually have come up against this problem, even if the river ran an average of 20 million acre-feet, due to the nature of our religion – which we of course denied as being "religion" at all, and thereby never examined for flaws of faith. But our faith in technology, science, and rationalized economy has a profane and tragic flaw: we have assumed an infinity of supply, capable of fulfilling an infinity of demand, if we can come up with the technology of production." (see footnote 3)

Idolatry, unrecognized but widespread, is probably the most pressing problem facing the church today. The Christian mind is against idolatry to the very core.
This brings us back to where we started. If the Christian mind is, first of all, a gift of God and so inseparable form a living, personal knowledge of and communion with God, then it would, of necessity, be opposed to idolatry. Both give shape to the Christian mind.
Here, then are some characteristics of the Christian mind as seen in the person who is developing one. Another equally important side of the Christian mind is its content. What are some of the important ways in which a Christian mind looks at the world and at life? We turn to that topic now.
First, the Bible is quite specific about the way in which God creates. It says He does so by His Word. It also speaks of His arm and His fingers, etc., in relation to the creation, but the predominant figure is that of His Word. God spoke the whole of reality into existence. Genesis 1 contains a veritable litany of "and God said’s."
John 1:1-3 ascribes the making of all things to the Word of God, here personified in Jesus Christ. Colossians 1:15-16 repeats the refrain, and Hebrews 1:1-2 does so well. God does not need raw materials, tools or technologies. He simply speaks and His thought materializes out of nothing. (cf. Hebrews 11:3)
Second, the Bible makes clear that creation is upheld in the same way. Hebrews 1:3 uses the very words, "upholding all things by the word of his power," and Colossians 1:17 says that "in him all things hold together." This means that creation is a exceedingly contemporary doctrine. We are confronted with it at every turn on every day. When we let the idea simmer on the back burner of our minds, the most delicious aroma arises from it, i.e. we begin to realize that the whole world is literally booby-trapped with the presence of God. As Paul said to the Athenians in Acts 17:27-28, " . . . he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live and move and have our being . . ." As someone has expressed it, for God to put an end to the world, He would not have to do something, but to stop doing something!
This concept has implications for the way we seek to counter the modern ideology of evolution. To do so at the level of natural science is quite appropriate and necessary, but not at the expense of insisting that our fundamental difference from the evolutionists is at the level of faith. To be consistent, the must believe that matter is eternal or that it occurred by chance. That is a religious position; they have no possible way to prove it. Our disagreement with them; though validly pursued at the level of scientific investigation, should be pressed primarily at the level of the presuppositions from which they begin.

Editor: Al Greene

Alta Vista College

Footnotes:

1. Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind. New York, Seabury Press, 1963, pp. 3 & 4.
2. Bob Goudzwaard, Aid for the Overdeveloped West. Toronto, Wedge Publishing Foundation, 1975, p. 3.
3. George Sibley, "The Desert Empire," Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 255, October 1977, p 64.