When the Pharisees challenged Jesus on the meaning of the Law, Jesus answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37).
Jesus drew these words from the Law itself. Interestingly, He summarized the content of the Law by expounding upon Moses’ intent. Moses had written, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Note that final phrase: We are to love the Lord “with all [our] might.” Yet Jesus chose to say that we are to love the Lord “with all [our] mind.” That’s not a typo. That’s not a contradiction. That’s what Moses meant. We are to love the Lord with our entire being. That must include our mind.
Why the change? What does that have to do with us today?
In the nearly 1,500 years between Moses and Jesus, the world had taken a giant intellectual leap forward. Various world powers had come and gone and been long forgotten, but the Greeks changed the way the world thought about the world. Jesus’ contemporaries were bombarded by secular thinking and challenges to the faith of their fathers.
Peter Beck
In the nearly 2,000 years since then, those changes and challenges have only accelerated. All along, Christians have struggled with how to reconcile their faith with what the world calls knowledge. How can we love the Lord with our minds when we are constantly being told that the spiritual world has nothing to do with the physical world? That our beliefs must align with an ever-changing body of knowledge that grows ever more resistant to the gospel?
Answers to those questions have varied over the years. Tertullian, the theologian who gave us the term “Trinity,” famously quipped, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” What does reason have to do with faith? In Tertullian’s mind, the answer was nothing, when it came to the prevailing philosophies of his day. Augustine argued for a different response. He contended, “I believe in order that I may understand.” Faith makes reason possible. Isaac Newton operated on the principle that a rational God created an orderly universe that can be understood. Kierkegaard, however, reasoned some things simply cannot be understood and must simply be accepted as true with a leap of faith.
Today, many Christians have taken Kierkegaard’s thought one step further and erected an impermeable wall of separation between faith and reason. Others go further and reject all things intellectual or scientific as being diametrically opposed to Christianity, all the while taking their prescriptions and surfing away on the Internet. We have so compartmentalized faith that it has become little more than a naïve system of hope to sustain us amidst the harsh realities of the world, and we have rendered God as little more than a cosmic Santa Claus whose existence motivates us to be good for goodness sake.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Christians shouldn’t be afraid of new knowledge. We shouldn’t be intimidated by new theories. We can say, with Jonah, that we “fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (Jonah 1:9). He made it all, and reason is the quest to understand the creation and, through it, the Creator. Moreover, we serve a Savior who not only knows the truth, He is the Truth (John 14:6). Thus, as Christians, our faith gives us a reason not only to believe in the supernatural but also a way to understand the natural. The sanctified use of our minds bolsters the faith of our hearts.
How do we do this? How do we avoid the radical swings of the intellectual pendulum of the last 2,000 years? Here are a few thoughts to guide you through the often precarious intersection of faith and reason:
• Realize that reason is a gift of God to be used for His glory. Embrace it and the advances it discovers when they do not contradict the direct revelation of God. Challenge them when they do. Ironically, to do that, you must use your mind.
• Resist the tyranny of the present. Remember, new isn’t always better. The most recent isn’t always best. Ultimately, all ideas must pass the test of time. Many ideas won’t. Don’t sell out your faith for a fancy that may yet pass.
• Reengage the culture. For centuries, Christian thinkers led the way in the sciences and philosophy as they served the God of their faith with their minds. In the last century, many surrendered those fields to those with no faith and then reacted with stunned indignation when those unbelieving minds failed to find God in their explorations. It’s time to show the world that Christians are not mindless drones who’ve surrendered their intellect to a dead faith; instead, they are a vast legion of great thinkers committed to understanding the world in which they live out that faith.
• Recognize that faith and reason are not mutually exclusive. Together they make sense of the world in which we live. For example, science seeks to describe the “what” and the “how” of our universe. Faith helps us understand the “why.” Modern Christians are strangely myopic.
We act as though ours is the first generation to struggle with the meeting of the minds and faith. History proves that is not the case. We can’t see the forest for the intellectual trees. The Bible proves that should not be the case. Consider the words of the apostle Paul the next time you come to a crossroads and assume you must choose right or left, faith or reason. Christians are to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). The life of the mind is not the enemy of the soul but an instrument of faith.
— Peter Beck is associate professor of Christian studies at Charleston Southern University and pastor of Doorway Baptist Church in North Charleston.