What does it mean to love the Lord your God with all your mind?
by Jeannie Grahm, George Fox professor
How does exercising our minds relate to loving God? Can thinking qualify as a worshipful activity? Don't we mess up our devotional piety by thinking too much, theologizing too much? Rather than regarding thinking as antagonistic toward faith, I believe that the medieval theologian Anselm's famous phrase—“faith seeking understanding”—provides an attractive way to relate the two. With that concept as backdrop, I would like to offer three thoughts that I have found useful.
Thought #1: Don't be taken captive. In Colossians 2:8-9 the Apostle Paul urges Christians “not to be taken captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.” The apostle is not advocating a retreat into anti-intellectualism but rather cautions believers not to be blindsided by counterfeits. It calls us to the task of sharpening our critical thinking skills and refining our analytic abilities, ferreting out truth as we encounter it and uncovering inadequacies where perceived. If God is truly the Lord of all creation, then all genuine truth is God's truth. That being so, we need not be afraid to pursue truth in any discipline and acknowledge it wherever we find it, from whatever sources. No less a spiritual luminary than John Calvin suggested that to reject non-Christian authors' flashes of true insight is to insult the Spirit of Christ, who is none other than the Spirit of Truth.
Thought #2: Take captive every thought obedient to Christ. II Cor. 10:5 sounds forth this corresponding positive challenge. Isn't a Christian college the very place where we should sense not only permission but obligation to tackle controversial questions and issues of all stripes head-on in classroom interactions, measuring the relative truths we discover with the Truth in Christ? A faith which takes every thought captive to Christ is not the end of inquiry but its true beginning—an open invitation to probe ever more deeply with a God-illumined mind in the quest to understand that which faith both embraces and expresses outwardly in concrete actions. A call to “be transformed by the renewing of our mind” (Rom. 12:2) is not a call to reject our minds but to reorient them.
Thought #3: Be captivated by mystery. Loving God with the mind means being ever-fascinated with the intricate beauty of God's endlessly creative handiwork in nature and in persons. It means discerning between theological puzzles that hold promise of yielding solutions and true mysteries for which further probing only enhances the richness of the ineffable. Along with striving to explore life's complexities and unraveling intellectual quandaries, some questions have plagued thinking Christians for centuries, defying easy answers. At that point loving God with the mind means coexisting with untied loose ends, living confidently in the face of unresolved questions. It means knowing that the One who accompanies us every step of our pilgrim's trek is Lord of the mysteries, even while they elude our complete understanding.