The Gospel & the Mind

Homer Xray by SOCIALisBETTER

• Homer: Hey Flanders! Heading for church? Well, I thought I could save you a little time.
• Ned Flanders: Ooh, found a new short cut?
• Homer: Rather, I was working on a flax tax proposal and I accidentally proved there’s no God.
• Ned Flanders [looking at the proof]: Would you see about tha… Oh-oh, well, maybe he made a mista… No, it’s airtight. [Taking a lighter from his pocket, burns the proof] Can’t let this little doozy get out.
From ‘HOMЯ’, The Simpsons, Season 12

“It’s easy being a fundamentalist, too. Mostly you don’t have to think at all … The rational atheist has science at his disposal, and the thing about good science is that it can be proved … For Christian apologists it is essential that Jesus rose again … If a sceptic demands proof, then in the end the faithful have little choice but to hide behind the door marked ‘mystery’”,
John Humphreys, BBC presenter of the Today Programme and Mastermind (agnostic) [1]

“The elephant [religion] is crashing about in the room, trampling people to death, and politely ignoring it is no longer an option.”
A. C. Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, among other distinguished academic appointments (atheist) [2]

If you’re anything like me, you had two strong reactions to how Ned Flanders responded to Homer Simpson’s accidental proof: laughter and unease. I find Homer Simpson hilarious and I think there’s something of Ned Flanders in most of us. But from where does the unease arise? The second and third quotations above illustrate how the notion of the Christian mind has increasingly been coming under attack.

An inconvenient question lurks in the shadows of these attacks: ‘Doesn’t Christian faith automatically relegate you to an intellectual slum?’ [3] We are all affected: whether you are a sales manager or a teacher, a nurse or a refuse collector, an academic or an administrator, you use your mind regularly. Yet many songs, films and TV shows (sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously) broadcast to all of us the kind of doubts implicit in the above inconvenient question.

This impacts different Christians in different ways. Perhaps you live in two worlds, privatising the use of your mind and keeping distinctively Christian thought processes out of your professional life. Perhaps, if you are a church leader, your equipping of Christians in education, academia and other workplaces is limited just to fostering disciplines of integrity, prayer and witness. Perhaps, for others, before really feeling able to engage with the Bible or praise God, you feel the need to leave your brain at the door. After all, why not do the Ned Flanders thing? If a question that comes up in Scripture, or a potential proof against God raised by a friend, is too difficult to address, just burn it, yes?

No. I am passionate about the Christian mind. It is my deep conviction that, as Christians, we simply must play a significant role in our nation’s intellectual life, be it academia, wider education, politics, business, the arts or elsewhere. As Christians, there are excellent historical, theological, philosophical and other reasons to say that the mind - in all its rational, moral, psychological fullness - is authentically our territory.

In my seminar at the Everything Conference, we will cover:
• The power and reality of the contemporary challenge to the Christian mind, including where the atheists and agnostics have a point.
• How the gospel story provides a rich basis for a mindful Christian worldview.
• How to develop a curious, fully alive, always learning mindset and apply it in practice, in the whole of your life.

I look forward to meeting some of you!

Footnotes
1. In God We Doubt, Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, pp, 3 and 14.
2. ‘Where are we in history?’, p. 14, an essay in To Set Prometheus Free, Oberon Books, 2009.
3. Dallas Willard, Personal Religion, Public Reality?, Hodder & Stoughton, 2009, p. 3.

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