Your Mind Matters

I reread this little gem by John Stott this week. Only 85 pages long, it was purchased for a philosophy class when I was in college. I remembered nothing, but it’s now one of several books lately that provide nourishing food for my thought life and my faith — which are, the book reminds us, deeply interconnected.

The title makes Stott’s thesis clear: the mind is central to Christian faith. Your Mind Matters traces the various ways faith relies on rational activity to establish a firm doctrinal footing, participate in various sacraments, persuade, and enact our trust in God.

There are insights large and small scattered in these pages. It makes a good companion to Total Truth, because it distills the basics of a Christian worldview in a much less dense form. Rather than summarizing, I’ll list a few of the points that resonated with me in this reading:

• Nature. This book was first published in 1972. But now, in an age when science is routinely posited as the sole avenue of “truth,” Stott reminds us that our ability to conduct scientific investigation at all grows from the correspondence between our minds and the natural world we study. He writes, “This correspondence is rationality. Man is able to comprehend the processes of nature. They are not mysterious. They are logically explicable in terms of cause and effect. Christians believe this common rationality between man’s mind and observable phenomena is due to the Creator who has expressed his mind in both.”
• Doctrine. Christianity doesn’t consist of the performance of ritual, but makes a rational appeal centered on teaching that claims to be truth. Quoting James Orr: “A religion divorced from earnest and lofty thought has always, down the whole history of the church, tended to become weak, jejune and unwholesome; while the intellect, deprived of its rights within religion, has sought its satisfaction without, and developed into godless rationalism.”
• Faith: I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’ve been rereading Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Spiritual Depression. Since then I’ve come across references to him in both the Romans study guide used in our small group, and now in Stott, who quotes Lloyd-Jones’ comments on Matthew 6: “Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph,is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him… We must spend more time in studying our Lord’s lessons in observation and deduction. The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical…Christian faith is essentially thinking.”
• Right ends. Christian knowledge results in positive fruits like worship, faith, holiness and love. It is not “empty intellectualism.”
• Paul’s patience. Stott describes the Apostle Paul’s method of teaching, particularly in Ephesus. I was struck by how long Paul spent there, presenting arguments all week long. He spent 3 months in the synagogue. Then he moved on to the “hall of Tyrannus,” a secular lecture hall, for two years. For two years he presented arguments, appealing to audiences who came through Ephesus from all over Asia. Says Stott, “If we may assume that he worked a six-day week, his daily five-hour lecturing for a period of two years amounts to some 3,120 hours of Gospel argument.” I’ve never really known or thought about the long faithfulness, patience, and rhetorical skill needed to be able to maintain this kind of schedule. It all shows great respect for people’s minds and implies a grave critique of our short attention spans today. The idea of “converting” great masses of people in a single sermon seems awfully cavalier.

Today there are several steps we must get through before we can even debate the truth or falsehood of the Christian faith. For many, the idea of religion is buried so deeply in the realm of postmodern, subjective, private notions that it must be excavated and brought into the daylight of public, rational claims first. The deep concern about anti-intellectualism in Christianity that prompted Stott to write this book turns out to have been well-founded, and Your Mind Matters stands as a concise, concentrated formulation of why we must not lose sight of the importance of our intellects in the practice and defense of our faith.