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We finished last week with a quote from Gordon MacDonald regarding the vulnerability of people who don't develop their minds. Unthinking Christians, he said, easily fall victim to the ideas of others.
In particular, they fall victim to the ideas of the culture in which they live. "The unthinking Christian," he continues, "does not realize it, but he is dangerously absorbed into the culture about him. Because his mind is untrained and unfilled, it lacks the ability to produce the hard questions with which the world needs to be challenged (p. 97)." Again, he writes, "When a Christian's mind becomes dull, he can fall prey to the propaganda of a non-Christian scheme of things, led by people who have not neglected their thinking powers - and have simply out-thought us" (p. 98).
Exhaustion is another problem that easily overtakes people who are not developing their minds. "In my counselling," Gordon MacDonald says, "I see a startling number of exhausted, mentally empty people who have stopped growing and are spending their lives in pursuit of little more than amusement" (p. 91-92). MacDonald uses the word "amusement" literally. Strictly speaking it means "without (a) thought (muse)." One of the tragedies of our modern world is that many (most?) people exist without thinking, pursuing pleasure-filled but empty fulfillment for the moment.
Part of the reason for that, MacDonald says, is that thinking is hard and disciplined work. It's not lack of intelligence that keeps many from thinking. It's the effort involved and the skill that it requires. "The mind" he says, "must be pushed, filled, stretched, and forced in order to function... The mind must be trained to think, to analyze, to innovate. People fully organized in their private worlds work at being thinkers. Their minds are alert and alive, taking on fresh amounts of information every day, regularly producing new discoveries and conclusions. They commit themselves to daily exercise of the mind" (p. 92).
Christians fail in this area too. Gordon MacDonald suggests that some believers are even afraid to think. "They mistake the gathering of facts, doctrinal systems, and lists of rules for thinking. They are uneasy when dealing with open-ended questions. And they do not see the significance of wrestling with great ideas if they cannot always come up with easily packaged answers" (p. 97). This is part of the reason for the sad decline of Christian influence in the public domain - in politics, education, art and science. "Christians ought to be the strongest, broadest, most creative thinkers in the world" (p. 93), MacDonald claims. But generally speaking that's not the case. All to often we have capitulated to the amusement-saturated, self-interested spirit of the age and not used our minds as we ought. The consequence has been "a drift toward mediocrity in personal living and mental activity and a loss of much of what God meant for his children to enjoy as they walk through creation discovering his handiwork" (p. 97).
These are challenging words and a spur to all of us. Next week we will see how this activity of thinking fits into the gospel and go on to consider how we can overcome the tendency to be unthinking Christians.