The Mission of Developing a Transformed and Renewed Mind

The Mission is to Develop a Transformed and Renewed Mind.

How do we love God with all our minds?

In Moreland’s book Love God with All Your Mind, He contends that what hinders spiritual growth is "the empty self." According to Moreland, the empty self is constituted by its own set of values, motives, and habits of thought, feeling, and behavior that perverts and eliminates the life of the mind and makes maturation in the way of Christ extremely difficult.

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We must fight the battle against the empty self.

In modern American culture, what psychologists call the empty self has emerged enormously.

The empty self is constituted by a set of values, motives,and habits of thought, feeling, and behavior that distort and eliminate the life of the mind, making becoming a mature Christian extremely difficult. There are several empty selves that inhibit our spiritual growth.

1. The empty self is helplessly individualistic.

A healthy form of individualism is a good thing. Unfortunately, we have all known people who fail to draw appropriate boundaries.

Scripture does remind us that we all have a moral obligation to consider others more significant than ourselves. (Philippians 2:3-4)

People who do not healthily separate the individual from others do not think and feel for themselves. They are easily manipulated and are far more concerned about what other people think of them.

A person with a healthy individualism learns to avoid these problems by mutually depending on and relating to members of the body of Christ.

According to Moreland, these kinds of individuals produce strong selves who have the power to practice self-denial to enrich the broader group (for example, family, church) of which they are apart.

2. The empty self is infantile.

The infantile person is filled with infantile cravings that constantly seek to be filled up.

What happens when we have delayed doctrinal adolescence in the church? In the Epistle of Hebrews, we read somewhat shocking words:

The writer reminds his readers that they are not doing what they should. They are not growing a doctrinal mind as they should. They should grow deeper in understanding and applying the truth with wisdom and discernment.

According to Erik Raymond, Pastor of Redeemer Fellowship in Boston and Gospel Coalition contributor:

“Instead of serving up gospel meals each week, establishing a culture where Christians (men in particular) are expected to put in the work to grow and facilitate ministry to utilize gospel growth – pastors are burping spiritual babies and continuing to feed them pears and soft crackers.”

Why do pastors do this? We hear some version of the following:

Doctrine is difficult for people to understand - Unbelievers do not have the ability to understand deep theology, and we want to win them to Jesus - I must work within my context.

Our job is to execute the game plan from all-wise God.

Returning to the Bible, we see little opportunity to be creative with the game plan. (1 Tim. 4:16)

3. The empty self is narcissistic.

Narcissism is an excessive and exclusive sense of self-inflation in which the individual is preoccupied with self-interest and personal fulfillment. Narcissists manipulate relationships with others, including God, to validate their self-esteem and ego.

For the Christian narcissist, God becomes another tool in his bag of tricks, like his car, workout, fitness center, and so on.

The church is the perfect place for the narcissist since we all tend to hide behind spiritual masks.

Pride is why people do not feel they need a savior or forgiveness. Pride tells them they are “good” people or have a “good” heart. Pride also blinds people to their responsibility and accountability for sin.

Narcissism masks sin while the gospel reveals the truth that leads to remorse for sin.

Narcissist traits can be dangerous because, at their worst, they can lead a person to destroy others to satisfy their desires. (2 Timothy 3:2-8)

All people are narcissists until they either learn how to cover it up and get along in the world or until they recognize their flesh and repent.

The believer is empowered to begin loving others as they love themselves. (Mark 12:31) A new kind of apologist must remove the mask and embrace the truth.

4. The empty self is passive.

The couch potato is the role model for the empty self, and without question, modern Americans are becoming increasingly passive in their approach to life.

The passive self lets others do our living and thinking for us.

The pastor studies the Bible for us, the news media does our political thinking for us, and we let our favorite sports team exercise, struggle, and win for us.

What is the primary contributing factor to the passive self?

Studies indicate that television is the number one culprit of the passive self. Elementary school children watch an average of twenty-five hours of television per week, and high schoolers spend six times as many hours watching television as they invest in doing homework.

Passive people do not have lives of their own, so they live vicariously through the lives of others.

The very idea of a Christian celebrity is an oxymoron. However, for the spiritually passive individual, it is a support system.

Empty Selves Are a Danger to Society and the Church

A society filled with empty selves is a morally bankrupt, intellectually shallow society.

The empty self is the enemy of the Christian mind and its cultivation.

Think about what a whole church filled with empty selves would look like.

Casting Out the Empty Self

1. Choose to be different.

We must admit the times we have allowed culture to squeeze us into its mold. We must stand against culture (including inappropriate tendencies in the evangelical subculture), resist the empty self, and acknowledge the intellectual anemia that goes along with it.

Get into discussions with people with whom you differ.

Spend time with people who do not simply reinforce your ways of looking at things.

2 Advantages of choosing to be different.

1) We can learn from our Critics.

Such exposure can make us realize how serious the war of ideas is and how inadequately prepared we are to engage in the discussion.

2. Change your routine.

Spend a week recording your daily routine—record when your energy is at its lowest point and when it is at its highest. Many times, when we get home from work, our energy is at its lowest point, so we go into passive mode and mindlessly watch TV.

What about exercise? It is a proven fact that regular exercise helps boost our mental and intellectual processes. The important thing is for us to get out of our passive ruts, especially those that make us lazy. Replace old habits with new ones, and create energy to read, reflect, and be more proactive.

3. Develop patience and endurance

A life of intellectual cultivation takes work.

The mind is like a muscle and must continually be stretched beyond itself. I often read books that are a little over my head to develop my intellectual strength.

The intellectual life is both a means to and a result of a life of discipline, self-control, and endurance.

4. Set some intellectual goals.

It is essential to set some study goals every year. I suggest teaming up with someone in your church with similar study interests and committing to a mutual accountability reading program.

Check with your pastor or someone who you know is routinely stretching their intellectual mind and find out what they are reading. Consider subscribing to Christian publications like Christianity Today or Table Talk Magazine.

Two Thieves of the Christian Mind

The empty self, in general, is the enemy of the Christian mind, but two specific thieves rob people of the fruitfulness that is part of a mature Christian mind.

Thief #1: inferiority and pride

Intellectual embarrassment is one of the worst forms of humiliation. No one wants to feel stupid or uninformed.

Most adults, in my experience, have a deep sense of insecurity about their mental abilities. This causes individuals to put up the barrier of defensiveness, leading to a false sense of pride to protect one from embarrassment.

According to Moreland, this may seem threatening at first; however, over time, it will produce a church filled with people who are more secure in what they believe and why.[8]This is the pathway to faithful discipleship in the church.

Another form of inferiority comes from the simple fact that we are evangelicals.

For some time now, culture has told us that conservative Christians are intellectually inferior, suggesting that the Christian faith is irrational and ridiculous. This is precisely why we should know and celebrate our present and past Christian thinkers. We need to know who they are and the courageous witness they have given for the church to follow.

Thief #2: Keeping a Sense of Control.

There is a genuine fear of losing control if we encourage people to let the mind of reason lead them to faith in Christ.

Should we tell people to set their minds aside totally and accept Christianity without using their intelligence?

It can be risky to encourage people to develop a mind that allows reason to help them discern what they believe and why.

We must commit to truth and the right reason.

Roger Trigg notes: “Any commitment, it seems, depends on two distinct elements. It presupposes certain beliefs [to be true] and involves a personal dedication to its implied action.”

What happens when we abandon a commitment to truth and reason?

If our foundational Christianity is not based on what is true and reasonable, then we are in danger of treating faith as a self-serving and pragmatic kind of faith.

Note: The problem happens when we are more concerned with the practical application of scripture without having a good reason that we have correctly interpreted it. Pragmatism has roots in Darwinism and secular humanism. It is inherently relativistic, rejecting the notion of absolute right and wrong, good, and evil, truth and error. Pragmatism ultimately defines truth as that which is useful, meaningful, helpful. Ideas that don't seem workable or relevant are rejected as false.

Life is a struggle: When struggles come, and they will, we all want to know if there is something tangible on which we base our lives. What does God believe about the things that matter the most? Is there any purpose to life, and if so, what is it?

Are values objective and real, or arbitrary and made up?

Is there life after death? Can I count on God, and are there any authentic, effective ways to get close to Him?

When we ask questions like these, we do not merely want answers that help us because we believe them. We want to take comfort in our answers because they are true.

A life that is well lived is based on truth, not placebos.

How do we Form Proper Habits of the Mind?

1. Reimagining virtues and the good life.

Forming habits of the mind must become a lifestyle.

Learning to develop a Christian mind means that we must be present in the world in which we live.

How a person spends time learning will affect what that person sees, hears, thinks, and behaves.

According to Moreland: “You must want to be a certain person badly enough that you are willing to pay the price of ordering your lifestyle appropriately.”

A virtue is a skill or habit that creates a disposition to act, feel, or think a certain way. (it becomes ingrained into my personality and becomes a part of my very nature)

Virtue #1: Seeking Honesty and Wisdom

The mature Christian mind must be committed to seeking the truth, even if that truth is not what one wants to hear.

The more we are dedicated to living out what we already know, the better we will be at learning more.

Virtue #2: Contains Faith (trust) and Hope

An anxious, depressed, and distracted person is not beneficial to healthy intellectual growth.

A confident mind is free to follow the truth wherever it leads.

(Christians should be some of the most confident people in the world)

Philippians 4:6-7 “Do not be anxious about anything….”

Virtue #3: Involves humility with open-mindedness.

John Scott once said, “Pride is our greatest enemy, and humility is our Greatest Friend.”

We must be willing to seek truth in a spirit of humility, admitting our finite state, and learning from our critics.

The hardest thing in apologetics is intellectual humility, having the open-mindedness to find common ground with our critics without creating a skeptical mind.

What do you do when your view is criticized and ridiculed?

1) Assume that your critic brings at least some good points to the table and identifies them.

2) Try to state on paper how you would argue against the view in an intellectual, not emotionally charged way.

The Importance of Sound Logic and Reason

Why Logic is Essential to Effective Apologetics?

Critical thinking is a desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order, and hatred for every kind of imposture. —Francis Bacon, philosopher

We must never forget that our God is a God of truth, reason, and logic.

Arguments are either deductive or inductive.

In a deductive argument, the conclusion must be true if the premises are true. In an inductive argument, the premises do not guarantee but merely provide support or ground for the truth of the conclusion.

INDUCTIVE: Induction involves piecing together little facts that we already know to try to construct a larger picture of reality that we don’t already know. It’s like beginning with a few puzzle pieces and imagining how the rest of the puzzle might look.

DEDUCTIVE: looks at a known big picture of reality and draws smaller conclusions from it. It’s like starting with a puzzle already put together so we can look at little pieces, knowing where they fit within the bigger picture.

*A sound argument is a deductive argument with a true premise, leading to a proper conclusion.

Deduction and the Bible:

Fortunately, someone knows how all the puzzle pieces fit together because He has created the puzzle and has given us the puzzle box, His word, that has given us the big picture of how it all fits together.

A BRIEF UNDERSTANDING OF LOGIC

Syllogism: a form of deductive argument where the conclusion follows from the truth of two (or more) premises. A deductive argument moves from the general to the specific and opposes inductive arguments that move from the specific to the general.

Here is the Science argument used most often against Christianity: “I do not believe in God because I can’t see him” can be written into a formal syllogism such as:

P1: I must see something to believe in it.

P2: I don’t see God.

Conclusion: Therefore, I don’t believe in God.

Once I ask enough questions to give me for not believing in God, then I can form the above syllogism. “I don’t believe in God because I cannot see Him is an incomplete syllogism. Identifying the logical problems in an argument makes it difficult to fill in the missing pieces. This takes time and practice, but eventually, you can identify the unstated assumptions. Other premises could be drawn, such as the following:

P1: It is not rational to believe in something that cannot be scientifically proven.

P2: I am a rational person.

Conclusion 1: I will not believe in something that cannot be scientifically proven.

P4: There is no way to prove God scientifically.

Conclusion 2: I will not believe in God.

Ways We Might Respond

First, we can challenge the unbeliever regarding

P1: “Why do you believe it is not rational to believe in something that cannot be scientifically proven? What about things that all rational people believe in, such as the laws of logic and human memory? What about the limitations of science, such as arriving at wrong conclusions or its inability to explain some things that happen in the natural world?”

Second, we can applaud the unbeliever's desire to be rational

P2 We can point out that Christianity is deeply concerned about being reasonable and basing its beliefs on historical events.

Third, because of the problems with

P1 we can show them that Conclusion 1 already believes things that cannot be scientifically proven.

Fourth P4 is not a problem since we have already established that we can know certain things without proving them scientifically.

Fifth, now that we have challenged the premises that make up this argument, we can challenge the unbeliever to reconsider their rejection of God.

Evangelism and Apologetics

Apologetics is the primary means through which the Christian mind expresses itself in the task of evangelism.

Apologetics is a ministry designed to help unbelievers overcome intellectual obstacles to conversion and believers remove doubts that hinder spiritual growth.

A life of study and intellectual growth enhances one’s effectiveness in personal evangelism in several significant ways.

1) A well-developed mind can see the connection between what someone is saying and other issues of which someone may be unaware.

2) If people see the connections, they can ask a well-placed question that naturally leads to discussing broader worldview issues, including God and our relationship with Him.

3) The pressure is off a person because they now have the intellectual categories necessary to make natural connections between Christianity and a host of other topics.