Bibliotheca Sacra 143 (Jan. 1986) 3-13.
Copyright © 1986 by
Thinking
like a Christian
Part 1:
The Starting
Point
D. Bruce Lockerbie
The Egocentric
Predicament
The title of this series, "Thinking like a
Christian," denotes
both
a topic and its context; it also points to what ought to be the
consequences
of a Christian education. In the modern era, "think-
ing" has been equated with the human state of
existence by both
philosopher
and medical ethicist. Rene Descartes declared,
"Cogito,
ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). In elevating sheer
"thinking"
to the acme of all argument for existence, Descartes and
his
followers diminish all qualitative measures of human experi-
ence. Why "I think"? Why not "I love,
I serve, I give"? Cartesian
rationalism
gives fuel to the so-called Enlightenment, empiricism,
the
scientific method, the primacy of logic, the objectivity of rea-
son,
the preeminence of mechanical and managerial efficiency. By
extension,
Descartes' maxim results in mechanistic reductionism.
Thus
in hospitals today where patients are being sustained by life-
prolonging
technology, decisions to pull the plug and terminate
artificial
means of support will be made on the basis of whether the
patient
is "brain-dead"—no longer capable of transmitting brain-
wave
evidence of life.
According to William Temple, late Archbishop of
Canterbury,
the
moment of Descartes' Cogito, ergo sum may have been "the
most
disastrous moment in the history of
scientism.1
For as Jacques Maritain points out in The Dream of
Descartes, the French
mathematician was not interested in what
3
4
Bibliotheca Sacra -
January-March 1986
he
thinks, why he thinks, or the moral obligation on the thinker.
The
goal of Cartesian reasoning is not really to know, says Mari-
tain, but "to subjugate the object." Thus
"rationalism is the death
of
spirituality" because, Maritain notes, Descartes' aphorism leads
straight
to self-worship: "Here is man, then, the center of the
world.
"2 Baillie agrees in speaking of "the egocentric
predicament"
brought
about by the exaltation of rationalism.3
Today people have learned to express Descartes'
slogan with an
emphasis
on the first-person pronouns: "I think, therefore I
am."
People
have accustomed themselves to think primarily of self:
"What's
good for me? What's in it for me? What have I got to gain or
lose?"
But such egoism, the doctrine of enlightened self-interest,
quickly
declines into egotism, the heresy of the imperial self. And
from
there it plummets to the cult of solipsism, a theory proclaim-
ing the omniscient self, the repository of all
truth.
Contemporary manifestations of this delusion are
evident
everywhere.
"Whatever you think is true, is true," Sally Jessy
Raphael
advises her nationwide radio audience. A bumpersticker
reads,
"Question authority." A Valley Girl chomps on her bub-
blegum and emits her wisdom: "I'm comfortable
with that." A TV
psychotherapist
counters a question about deity, saying, "The
supernatural
is interesting, but so far there's no scientific evidence
that
the supernatural exists. It's healthier to count on what's real."
Rationalism, egotism, solipsism—these represent
"the ego-
centric
predicament." One dare not consider "thinking" in a vac-
uum but only in a moral context, within the
parameters of a moral
position,
determined by an awareness of and submission to moral
responsibility.
For in the end, how a person thinks affects what he
thinks,
which in turn affects what he does.
By the words "how we think," this
writer does not mean to
discuss
a variety of cognitive theories—electrical impulses on the
cortex,
left side of the brain versus right side, Bloom's taxonomy of
knowing,
and other concepts. Instead, "how we think" speaks of
the
system of values that informs one's thinking, the vantage from
which
his thinking obtains its perspective, the platform on which
a
person stands; in short, "how we think" derives from one's
Weltanschauung, his world and life
view
From the Cross and empty tomb a Christian can
see cause for
hope,
even in the face of cruelty, despair, and death. This is not a
feckless
hope, a sort of silly optimism; it is hope tried out in the fires
of
adversity and hostility. It is, in every sense of the word, hope-
against-hope,
except that, in this case, a Christian's hope stems
The Starting Point 5
from
the fact of the Resurrection: because Jesus Christ lives,
believers
too shall live. This fact of faith determines "how we think"
about
everything. It is the ultimate hope, for it points to the
ultimate
Good, of which the ancient philosophers spoke and for
which
all mankind searches.
Plato's Line
In The
Republic, Plato offered a visual aid to describe various
ways
of thinking, as a person ascends toward knowledge of the
Good.
A vertical line is cut in two unequal parts. The bottom
represents
the visible world of appearances; the top, the intelligible
world.
Again each of these two sections is cut in the same manner,
separating
the material from the ideal. Lowest on Plato's line are
mere
images or shadows; above them are the material objects they
reflect.
This is the world of appearances, physical and moral,
inhabited
by those whose grasp of reality is limited to the material
order
of things. The intelligible world exists in similarly related
stages.
Below are opinions and hypotheses, such as may be used in
solving
a geometry problem; above, the abstract ideals (which Plato
called
"Forms") to which the geometric figure one draws can be only
an
approximation. These ideals or forms may be perceived only by
intuition
or enlightened reason.
Taking these four divisions on his line, Plato
related them to
what
he called "four faculties in the soul," arranged in an ascend-
ing order of perception. At the bottom is conjecture,
what Francis
Cornford calls "the wholly unenlightened
state of mind.”4 Next
comes
faith, or "common-sense belief." In this context Plato was
not
commenting on religious faith; rather, he equated this level of
perception
with trust in the visible assurance of things—perhaps
in
the same way a general has faith because of the number of tanks
he
sees ready for combat, or an investor has faith because he knows
the
strength of his diversified stock portfolio. But such faith is
nonetheless
inferior to the next level, understanding, suggesting
deductive
thinking or logical analysis. In fact Plato served up a gag
line
for Socrates to deliver: "One who holds a true belief or faith
without
understanding is just like a blind man who happens to
take
the right road." Highest on the
line comes knowledge, or
intuitive
reason.
But above and beyond the apex of the line lies the
Good,
that impersonal source of truth, virtue, justice, beauty, and
goodness.
For as Plato would have Socrates say, "The Good has a
place
of honor higher yet. "
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Bibliotheca Sacra -
January-March 1986
Plato's
line is a representation of today's methods for perceiving
and
valuing reality. At the bottom of today's mass culture are those
poor
souls endlessly chasing after the phantoms and illusions of
materialism:
followers, fans, spectators, imitators. Unconsciously
searching
for the realities called philosophical truth, political
power,
and social freedom, the masses clutch at shadows and
images:
teenagers adoring a reprehensible singer, union members
reelecting
a corrupt official, indolent sophisticates clogging their
nostrils
with cocaine.
At the next level are today's materialists.
Western civilization
has
always worshiped material things. Trinkets, toys, baubles,
luxuries,
yes; but above all these, gadgets and whizbangs and
better
mousetraps called "labor-saving devices." Modern society
believes
and puts faith in them. Henry Ford's assembly line at
the
miracle of mass production began.
So much for the visible realm. At the level of
opinions and
hypotheses
are the ideologues and perpetrators of half-truths
under
the guise of "information." Most if not all broadcast jour-
nalists, news commentators, investigative
reporters, editorial
spokesmen,
and other more or less surreptitious shapers of public
opinion
rise no higher than this stage. They are to truth what
rumor
is to fact. The polls they conduct contain the same sort of
disclaimer
now required for automobile advertising: “Your mileage
may
vary.”
Not to be excluded from this same group are too
many of the
evangelical
broadcasters whose programming similarly thrives on
sensation,
personality, and the reduction of complex issues to the
simplest
formula. This writer has appeared on some of these pro-
grams,
once sandwiched between a converted hooker and a faith
healer
who can make cancerous tumors disappear; another time,
preceded
by a Cuban revolutionary and followed by a recipe for
granola.
If citizens whose only source of news may be "You give us
22
minutes and we'll give you the world" are ignorant of cause or
consequence,
then Christians whose diet of spiritual nourishment
depends
largely on religious broadcasting remain in a state of
arrested
development and stunted growth. They are deprived of an
authentic
Christian education.
At the top of Plato's line stand those few
individuals committed
to
the moral principles existing as intimations of the Good—
justice,
virtue, truth, beauty, goodness. Their ascent to the level of
intuitive
reason, said Plato, nominates them to serve the state as
The Starting Point 7
poet,
priest, and philosopher. They have chosen to live the life of the
mind,
but since no one—not Plato nor Socrates nor Solon the
lawgiver
nor Pericles the patriot nor Sophocles the poet—can
live
perpetually
in rarified transcendental illumination, this ephemeral
insight
keeps slipping out of reach, leaving frustration. For as Plato
wrote,
"No one is satisfied with the appearance of goodness—the
reality
is what they seek." So Plato offered a parable, perhaps
foreshadowing
the Incarnation, telling of "the child of the Good,
whom
the Good begat in his own likeness, to be in the visible world
…what
the Good is in the intelligible world."
Christians will naturally interpret such a
parable to point to
Jesus
of Nazareth, but they must guard against twisting Plato to
suit
their theology. Devout Hindus, reading the same passage, will
find
support for one or another of their avatars. Nor does it follow
that
philosophers and theologians since the Incarnation will nec-
essarily identify the Good exclusively with Jesus
Christ. The liberal
and
modernist heresies have long since made their positions clear.
For example more than 150 years ago an apostate
Unitarian
minister
made Platonic idealism his gospel. In 1832 Ralph Waldo
Emerson
was considering demitting his ordination. He disap-
proved
of the Unitarian custom of celebrating the Lord's Supper on
stipulated
Sundays. Emerson's journal records that crisis. On
June
2, 1832, he wrote, "I have sometimes thought that, in order to
be
a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry….Were
not
a Socratic paganism better than an effete, superannuated
Christianity?"5
And on October 1, four weeks before he resigned
his
pastorate, Emerson wrote,
Instead of making Christianity a vehicle of
truth, you make truth
only a horse for Christianity.... You must be
humble because Christ
says, "Be humble." "But why must
I obey Christ?" "Because God sent
him." But how do I know God sent him?
Because your own heart
teaches the same things he taught. Why then
shall I not go to my own
heart at first?6
In Emerson, an orthodox Christian today may
still see the
corrosive
defects of heterodox denial and liberalist dismissal of
biblical
integrity. Thinking with "my own heart" becomes the final
authority;
thereby religious guesswork yields to solipsism. Thus
for
Emerson as well as for many other neo-Platonic idealists in
pulpits
and seminary classrooms, "understanding" rises above
"faith,"
and "reason" above all, since "reason" is the intuitive
moment,
a moment in which a new set of absolutes may be
glimpsed
by transcendent illumination.
8
Bibliotheca Sacra -
January-March 1986
Of course this new set of absolutes can be
located only within
oneself.
Here is the dogma of idealism, whether presented as
rationalism,
secular ethics, liberal theology, heterodoxy, or cult. At
root,
"the egocentric predicament" causes rebellion in the human
consciousness
against any revelation of truth from a. source out-
side
oneself. This rebellion permits an idealism whose branches
deny
authority, deny historical example, deny accountability. Even
within
the Christian community are advocates of "the right of
private
judgment" rejecting traditional hermeneutical consensus.
Also
within Christianity are proponents of "the word of knowl-
edge,"
whose idiosyncratic behavior derives its warrant from an
equally
unique hotline to heaven, over which God gives them
special
instructions withheld from other believers.
The Fear of the Lord
To return to a faith less subjective, one needs
to find a different
starting
point, the right starting point. A world-class woman run-
ner entered a 10-kilometer race in
race,
she drove from
she
thought—given over the phone. She got lost, stopped at a gas
station,
and asked for help. She knew only that the race started in a
shopping
mall's parking lot. The attendant also knew of such a race
scheduled
just up the road. When she arrived, she was relieved to
see
in the parking lot a modest number of runners preparing to
compete,
but not as many as she had anticipated. She hurried to
the
registration table, announced herself, and was surprised at the
race
officials' excitement at having so renowned an athlete show up
for
their event. No, they had no record of her entry, but if she would
hurry
and put on this number, she could be in line just before the
gun
would go off. She ran and won easily—four minutes ahead of
the
first man! Only after the race did she learn that the race she had
run
was not the race she had earlier entered. That race was being
held
several miles farther up the road in another town. She had
gone
to the wrong starting line, run the wrong course, and won a
cheap
prize.
To begin thinking like a Christian, one must
find the authen-
tic
starting point. That point can be none other than a recognition
of
the immutable God, Creator and Judge, before whom all nature
and
human nature must be accountable. The pronouncement of
this
responsibility before God is found in the pages of Holy Writ.
There
are inscribed the words whose weight Christians have
The Starting Point 9
already
borne in their untutored hearts. "The fear of the Lord is the
beginning
of wisdom" (Ps. 111:10); "the fear of the Lord is the
beginning
of knowledge" (Prov. 1:7). Wisdom and knowledge,
not
reason
and intuition, are the goal of all cognition, all learning, all
thinking.
And the beginning point is an obligatory reverential awe
before
God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.
To recognize wisdom, to respect knowledge, one
first needs
recognition
of and respect for the Source of wisdom and knowl-
edge.
This means reverence for God, awe before the Lord of the
universe,
worshipful humility before the Judge of all the earth and
heavens.
Paralleling such reverence for God must run a realization
of
one's own dependent state. Wonder of wonders, no human is in
charge
of the universe! No mortal is the center of the cosmos! No
human
being controls the weather or the metamorphosis of the
gypsy
moth caterpillar or the miracle of human love and its fulfill-
ment in the birth of a child. Someone Else is
responsible, the
sovereign
Lord who deigns to invite people to join with others in
calling
Him "our Father." The formula is clearly stated: God's sov-
ereignty means mankind's dependency. That
dependency also
means
the beginning of wisdom, knowledge, order, and truth—the
beginning
of a genuine Christian education.
But so too must the contrary formula become
clear: Disregard
for
a minimal or nonexistent God produces autonomy in the
human
spirit, which leads to folly, ignorance, chaos, and falsity.
Remember
that the psalmist also declared, "The fool has said in his
heart,
‘There is no God’" (Ps. 14:1). Atheism is the religion of
autonomous
man, whose folly is the perversion of wisdom.
"The fear of the Lord" means initial
acknowledgment of God.
To
begin thinking like a Christian, a person must come in faith,
believing
first "that God exists and that he rewards those who
earnestly
seek him" (Heb. 11:6, niv). That reward will be con-
firmation that the Scriptures are true; that what
the Bible says
about
God's faithfulness can be relied on as trustworthy; that what
the
Bible tells of Jesus Christ can be believed to the eternal good of
one's
soul.
But if an individual is to begin thinking like a
Christian, he
must
know what the Bible teaches. This simple, logical, common-
sense
fact has been the glory of Dallas Theological Seminary and its
curriculum.
Sadly, too many seminaries—not to mention the ros-
ter of most evangelical colleges—have eliminated
all but the most
minimal
diploma requirements in biblical studies. And those
10
Bibliotheca Sacra -
January-March 1986
institutions
then presume to "integrate faith and learning"? But
they
cannot integrate out of ignorance!
Christians need, instead, to immerse and steep
themselves in the
Word
of God, as the Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent states:
Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy
Scriptures to be written for
our learning; Grant that we may in such wise
hear them, read, mark,
learn, and inwardly digest them, that by
patience and comfort of thy
holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast,
the blessed hope of
everlasting life which thou hast given us in our
Saviour Jesus
Christ. Amen.7
"Hear
. . . read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest." Surely such a
pattern
for learning must lead to thinking and living out the truths
one
has learned.
The Claims of Christ
Furthermore thinking like a Christian means,
implicitly,
thinking
like Jesus Christ. But before one can think like Christ, he
must
first think of and about Christ. What claims are made for
Jesus
of
whether
life exists on other spheres or whether the Dallas Cowboys
will
ever again win the Super Bowl. The single most important
question
echoes and reechoes from the time it was first asked:
"Who
do you say that I am?" (Matt. 16:15); its corollary is this:
"What
do you think about the Christ?" (22:42). Thinking about
Christ—reckoning
with His identity as "the Son of the living God"
(
was
succinctly accurate in entitling his book Christianity Is
Christ.8 A person cannot be Christian in his thinking
and living
apart
from acknowledging and then submitting to the lordship of
Jesus
Christ.
Thereafter, thinking like a Christian must mean
what Paul
called
for in 2 Corinthians: nothing short of all-out war against the
sophistry
of Satan. "We demolish arguments," wrote the apostle,
"and
every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of
God,
and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to
Christ"
(10:5, niv).
Why must Paul be so bold, so aggressive, in his
use of lan-
guage? Because he wrote at a time and to a people
well acquainted
with
the rhetoric of "the Big Lie." Five hundred years before Paul of
The Starting Point 11
troubled
by idolatry and cynical polytheism, that city had divested
itself
of genuine belief in its gods. Under the influence of the
Sophists,
particularly Protagoras, the young men of
been
introduced not only to a new way of arguing but also to a new
set
of propositions. Knox writes that the Sophists' teaching
tended inevitably towards the substitution of
man for god as the true
center of the universe, the true measure of
reality; this is what
Protagoras meant by his famous
phrase, "Man is the measure of all
things." The rationalistic scientific mind,
seeking an explanation of
reality in human terms and assuming that such an
explanation is
possible and attainable, rejects the concept of
God as irrelevant.9
Far from being a religious people in the
theistic sense of the
term,
the Greeks had become a political people. Pallas Athena was
no
longer the goddess of wisdom but the patron economic focus for
the
city of
tionship to
erotic
love, whose city was
had
fallen prey to the Big Lie, the folly that says, "There is no God,"
except
for power, wealth, and sensual pleasure.
For such an opponent there can be no other
weapon than the
dynamite
of the gospel, capable of razing the specious arguments
and
theories of Satan. Mere refutation and rebuttal have no weight;
pretty
speeches prove unconvincing. Paul himself had delivered
one
of the most perfectly formed examples of classical rhetoric
extant,
his speech to the Areopagites in Acts 17. Yet its
results were
mixed
at best: sneering rejection, polite dismissal, but only a few
believers.
Years later, in writing to the church at
ready
for a different approach. He urged the Corinthians to go on
the
offensive against every alien notion, forcibly subjecting it to the
lordship
of Jesus Christ.
C. S. Lewis, when engaged in serious discussion
with dis-
believing
colleagues at
jolly
and avuncular spinner of Narnia tales. He would whirl
on his
antagonists,
bellowing, "I challenge that!" Then with the remark-
able
gift for analysis given to him by God, Lewis would proceed to
destroy
their feeble objections to Christian faith. Few Christians
today,
however, possess either the courage or intellect to emulate
Lewis.
Too often what results is a smart aleck's retort or a quipster's
snide
jab, a little below the belt.
If people today are to begin thinking like
Christians, pride
must
yield to humility as they acquire the mind of Christ. Paul
described
that frame of mind in writing to the Philippians: "Your
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Bibliotheca Sacra -
January-March 1986
attitude
should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in
very
nature God, did not consider equality with God something to
be
grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a
servant,
being made in human likeness. And being found in
appearance
as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to
death—even
death on a cross!" (Phil. 2:5-8, niv).
Thinking like a Christian means adopting the
humility of a
servant.
Christian thinking has no place for arrogance, no room
for
self-importance. All need to hear again the words of Comenius,
the
Moravian pastor credited with being the father of modern
education:
"God does not call us to heaven asking us smart ques-
tions. It is more profitable to know things humbly
than to know
them
proudly.”10 Or we need to hear this statement by the Chris-
tian humanist Nicholas of Cusa:
"We then, believers in Christ, are
led
in learned ignorance to the mountain that is Christ." 11
The United Negro College Fund has a slogan: ‘A
mind is a
terrible
thing to waste." This writer would adopt that slogan to
state
that a Christian's mind is too precious to waste on its own
flattery
and preening. Instead Christians are needed who are will-
ing to think with the mind of Christ, which means—as
Paul again
informed
the Philippians—to ponder and become absorbed in
thought
by only those things which are true, noble, right, pure,
lovely,
admirable, excellent, or praiseworthy. "Let your mind dwell
on
these things," commanded the apostle (Phil. 4:8).
Believers need not fear for the adequacy of
their resources, if
they
dare to begin thinking like Christians. After all, they are
assured
that in Christ "are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge"
(Col. 2:3). They are also promised access to God's secret
wisdom,
"the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed
and
made known through the prophetic writings by the command
of
the eternal God" (Rom.
Coming full circle, thinking like a Christian
begins with believ-
ers acknowledging God's sovereignty and ends with
their being
welcomed
to share in the very riches of divine wisdom revealed in
Jesus
Christ. Likewise the purpose of this quest becomes centered
on
the Person of Christ. This writer's favorite quotation from
Desiderius Erasmus expresses that purpose: “All
studies, philoso-
phy, rhetoric are followed for this one object,
that we may know
Christ
and honor him. This is the end of all learning and
eloquence.”12
For those who wish to begin thinking like a
Christian, the
The Starting Point 13
starting
point and the goal of Christian thinking are one and the
same.
Editor's Note
This
is the first in a series of four articles delivered by the author as the W H.
Notes
1
William Temple, Nature, Man and God
(London: Macmillan and Co., 1964),
p.
57.
2
Jacques Maritain, The Dream of
Descartes, trans. Mabelle L. Andison
(New
3
John Baillie, Our Knowledge of God
(
1939),
p. 152.
4
Plato, Republic, trans. Francis
M. Cornford (
1955),
p. 222.
5
Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson,
ed. Stephen E. Whicher (
Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1957), p. 9.
6
Ibid., pp. 10-11.
7
The Book of Common Prayer (New
York: Church Pension Fund, 1945), p. 92.
8
W H. Griffith Thomas, Christianity Is
Christ (1909; reprint,
Keats
Publishing Co., 1981).
9
Bernard M. W Knox, Oedipus at
1957),
p. 161.
10
John Amos Comenius,
cited by John Edward Sadler, J. A. Comenius
and the
Concept
of Universal Education (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), p. 51.
11
Nicholas of Cusa,
Of Learned Ignorance, trans. Germain Heron (
CT:
12
William Harrison Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and
Method
of Education,
quoting Erasmus, Ciceronianus (
lege,
This
material is cited with gracious permission from:
Dr.
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