Book Review - "Love Your God With All Your Mind"

I just completed this wonderful book, and it inspired me to actually work on this blog. I imagine that it will take me a while to get to the quality of postings that I feel are needed, but I'm going to make an earnest effort at it.

So, let me tell you a bit about this book. First, I had to read it for my philosophy class, and I will be writing a more detailed review of the book for the class. The class has been extremely good for me, though tough. I've become convinced more than ever before of how important it is that we Christians think through our lives and the decisions we make in order to more closely live our whole lives as Christians and not just a part that we label "spiritual."

The author, J. P. Moreland, seeks to address the serious issue of the weak intellectual state of the Christian community. He points out in the first part of the book that Christians have been surrendering the marketplace of ideas to non-Christians for the past 100 years...so much so that Christians have a hard time even being taken seriously by the world. This is because of several bad experiences (like the humiliation of Christians in the Scopes Monkey Trial) and the rise of some scientific theories (like evolution) that seemed to make Christian ideas about the way the world is irrelevant. I think anyone who looks at their own church can see how this has impacted us all. There is a lot of suspicion of learning and education among evangelicals, which is exactly opposite of what should be. In addition, there are far too few Christians in the many fields of academia who are making an impact on their fields for Christ. Rather, many Christians who go into fields like art, science, and psychology end up compartmentalizing their lives such that their faith is kept separate from their vocation. This not only goes against a Biblical view of how our lives should be, it doesn't make sense. No wonder Christians are not taken seriously in the press or on college campuses - we say we believe certain things in church and deny those same things in our academic pursuit...not because science or any field actually proves our beliefs to be false but because we have allowed the world to force us into its mold.

Moreland then goes on to show how important it is to develop a Christian mind - important for its role in our own spiritual transformation from baby-Christians to mature believers and for the way it will affect those around us.

Naturally, Moreland then gives many good ways that each of us can begin to develop our minds for Christ...literally as worship for Christ. Is this not the sort of thing meant by Paul, when he said that we should renew our minds for our transformation in Romans 12:2?

Probably the most important part of this book for me was Moreland's teaching on the way a Christian mind is necessary for a proper doctrine of vocation...that is, for a Christian to properly be Christ-like in his/her vocation, which is also an act of worship. The truth of this is so important that it cannot be overstated!

In addition to all of this, Moreland gives several suggestions of how a church can help its members to develop their minds. Some of these suggestions are really challenging, especially given the current state of most churches, and I'm not going to say right off that each is the best way to go - only that they deserve some good thought. Among his suggestions are: no senior pastors (he thinks that the senior pastor model of leadership is not Biblical and tends to a codependent relationship between a needy pastor and needy people, so he thinks the church should be led by a group of co-equal elders who share responsibilities for preaching and leadership development), decentralized ministry (the elders should be equipping the church members for ministry and not doing the lion's share themselves), a distinction between forms and functions (seeing the difference between what the Bible says a church should be doing and how any given church chooses to go about it, especially seeing that a church has the responsibility to examine its forms often and make changes where necessary in order to better do the functions), sermons should be shared (no one teacher should preach more than half of a year's sermons, since no one person can be prepared to do a good job that many times, a greater use of supplemental material for sermons like study notes and suggested readings, and an occasional intent to teach higher ideas even if some people in the congregation cannot keep up with the level of teaching), a greater utilization of the church library (through printing book reviews in the bulletins from time to time, suggesting certain books to be read, and bringing the library out to the people, so to speak), separating the "enfolding" aspect of Sunday Schools from the Bible study aspect (so that we do not neglect either aim and we can develop groups of Christians whose vocations are similar in order to impact that vocation for Christ), and holding up both the individual church's growing members and Christian intellectuals from all over (even from Christian history) as examples and heros.

The final thing Moreland does in this book, which might be one of the most important, is provide 33 pages of other resources for the Christian thinker. These are subdivided by subject/vocation so that someone can look up resources (books, organizations, periodicals, etc.) that will shed light on their own areas of interest.

I think we have an obligation as Christians to search for the truth and dispel falsehood. We cannot do that without sharp minds. Therefore, we must develop our minds for the cause of Christ.