THE MARKS OF A CHRISTIAN MIND
Part XII
(24) Values Are Rooted In Christ
Christians frequently seem to hold that the only really distinctive thing about a
Christian approach to life is that it follows a distinctive value system. So the state of
the art of education, economics, or politics is a neutral body of knowledge and skills
discovered by the use of natural reason. The Christian simply superimposes upon this
special Christian ethic. While a Christian value system is indeed different, it will have
been apparent to isolate the Christian mind in the area of ethics. Such an attempt
involves a fatal effort to synthesize Christian and non-Christian thought. Biblical norms
run through every aspect of experience. They cannot be isolated in the ethical aspect. So
we need to look briefly at a Christian view of ethics as part of the content of a
Christian mind.
By way of background for a Christian view, there are today’s academic world two
principal views as to the nature and source of value in human experience: the objectivist
and the subjectivist. (It should be noted, parenthetically, that behaviorists like B.F.
Skinner reject the idea of values altogether in order to be consistent with their view of
man as nothing more than a social animal to be conditioned. That this view is
self-defeating appears from the observation that Skinner’s "Walden Two,"
while explicitly rejecting any concept of values, is implicitly laden with value-based
appeals for the superiority of this particular utopian vision!)
Objectivists hold that values exist, but they are strictly affective or emotional. There
is no way to derive them from the objective "facts" of the empirical sciences
and strict logic. Facts are what "is"; values are what "ought" to be.
There is no way to get from an "is" to an "ought." This perspective
splits human experience in a drastic way which witnesses by its very difficulty to the
inadequacy of the view. A good illustration is found in a statement by G.E. Moore, the
father of linguistic analysis, the most popular philosophy in England and North American
in the twentieth century. After a lifetime of studying what is "good," Moore
concluded, " I am absolutely certain that good does not exist and yet it most
certainly is." As a scientist, he could not discover good. As a man, he knew
intuitively, as all men do, that good exists. His powerlessness to reconcile the two views
is a modern instance of God’s judgement on men at the Tower of Babel. God will not
let men put their world together if they will not listen to His Word.
Subjectivists, on the other hand, hold that man is the creator of value. The modern vogue
is to regard the value as the consensus of the majority of people in any given locality or
nation. Values are democratically fashioned and they are subject to change, like the bus
schedule, without notice. What is good today may not be good tomorrow. Only time can
disclose what values will be like in the next period of history.
The first approach to value creates an unbridgeable gap between facts and values. The
second leads into the wasteland of "values clarification" where we wander
without hope of ever discovering hard, unchangeable values since by definition one value
is as good as another and the majority (or the powerful – as in media values) rules.
The Christian view of values does not suffer from either of the above complications, it
insists that value is built into the creation. We do not make values nor even, in their
most basic form, discover them. God has revealed them to us in and by His Word. They are
rooted in Jesus Christ in whom "dwells all the fullness of godhood bodily." They
are not malleable and relative, but gloriously stable and unchanging like the magnetic
field which makes the compass such a useful discovery.
Value is not confined to the ethical aspect of experience, though it has its home there.
Every aspect of human experience, from the numerical to the confessional, has an ethical
component. Hence the impossibility of supposing that the only difference in a Christian
view of education or economics is that Christians have a distinctive set of moral
"do’s" and "don’ts."
In the final analysis, value consists in what is pleasing to God. What is right is right
because it meets His standards. It does not please Him because it is right, for then there
would be some "rightness" above God to which He is subject. No, God alone sets
the standards of "rightness" and calls men to live by them for their
immeasurable comfort and blessing.
Our highest good, then, lies in hearing God say, "Well done, thou good and faithful
servant." Lewis says that when this happens to us, we become "a real ingredient
in the divine happiness, to be delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father
in a son." (see footnote 1). This is what we long for most deeply, though often
without recognizing the object of our longing. This is the ultimate meaning of true value.
Since every aspect of human experience is the created, upheld and redeemed by Jesus
Christ, the living Word of God, it is clear that God has built principles into each one.
At the level of mathematics, physics, biology, and feeling, we are not called upon to
maintain but only to observe the law of Lord for these aspects of life. Gravity,
digestion, respiration, physical life, and feeling continue without depending upon our
cooperation, though we may injure ourselves by failing to observe the Lord’s laws
here. But when we move into areas like language, social relations, beauty, economics,
legality ethics, and confession, we find ourselves in another situation. Here we have more
freedom and, with it, more responsibility. Here we must seek to understand God’s
normative will for our lives and live that out. One may be anti-social, or miserly, or
cruel, or idolatrous and live a long life. But all these are anti-normative ways of living
and Scripture promises that ultimately we must face the judgement of God for the deeds
done in the body. Breaking the law of gravity brings more immediate consequence than
violating the norm of love to one’s neighbor, but the consequences are as certain in
the latter instance as in the former.
While the norms for each area of human experience are given in a general way in the
Scripture (cf Matt 22:37-40) they are not given in specific "scientific" terms
for each one. That is left for us to work out in the light of Scripture. This effort is
part of our response to God’s mandate to "have dominion" over this world.
Value, then, in Christian perspective, is related to our discovery of Biblical norms in
each area of life and to our incarnation of those norms in our daily activities.
(25) Thy Kingdom Come
Schumacher points out in "Small Is Beautiful" that ideas are intensely
powerful. He lists six seed concepts, planted in the last century, which have now grown up
and become firmly fixed in the mind of the Western world. They are evolution, competition,
the class struggle, the subconscious mind, relativism, and positivism. (see footnote 2).
These are thoroughly non-Christian, yet the Christian community is, at least in many
instances, quite caught up in them.
The amazing power of the early church to resist and finally overcome the fiercest efforts
of Rome to obliterate it, testify to the remarkable power of the Christian mind in the
early centuries. The Christian mind was then an incarnation of a Biblical world and life
view. In politics, economics, and other aspects of ordinary daily life, as well as the
cultic practices of its worship services, the power of God’s Spirit working through a
suffering people was greater than the iron strength of Rome. The early Christians brought
every thought into captivity to the obedience of Jesus Christ and the consequence was
world shaking.
Today we are faced with a catastrophic lack of a Christian mind. As Blamires puts it,
"There is no longer a Christian mind . . . Except over a very narrow field of
thinking, chiefly, touching questions of strictly personal conduct, we Christians in the
modern world accept, for the purpose of mental activity, a frame of reference constructed
by the secular mind and a set of criteria reflecting secular evaluations. There is no
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." (footnote 3).
One of the first priorities of every truly Christian congregation ought to be the
development of a genuine Christian mind among its members. If this were to happen, there
is simply no telling what the impact might be on the whole fabric of modern culture –
its education, its politics, its economic policies, and its social and international
attitudes and relationships.
We may not dictate an awakening among God’s people. The wind of the Holy Spirit
"blows where it will." But we cannot constantly pray for His kingdom to come and
not seriously, diligently, and persistently seek to develop afresh a really Christian
mind. Who knows what amazing things the spirit of God might do in our midst if we set our
hearts in this direction. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in
heaven."
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
Footnotes:
- Lewis, C.S., The Weight of Glory, Eerdmans, 1965, p. 10.
- Schumacher, E.F., Small Is Beautiful, Harper, New York, 1973, p. 81.
- Blamires, Harry, The Christian Mind, Ann Arbor, MI, Servant Publications, 1978,
p. 3-4.
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