The Thinking Cap Series......

I have been sending out these items for several year now. The original distribution list has changed significantly since them, although the motivation has not. For those of you who are interested, in my opinion, here is why I take the time to construct the "thinking caps". Notwithstanding all their other virtues, evangelicals (and especially the fundamental branch) are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations. Despite dynamic success at a popular level, modern fundamentalists have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life. They have nourished millions of believers in the simple truths of the gospel, but have largely abandoned the universities, the arts and other realms of "high" culture.

They have little intellectual muscle. Feeding the hungry, living simply and writing letters to congress are tasks on which different sorts of fundamentalists willingly expend great energy, but these tasks do not by themselves assist in intellectual vitality.

Bible believers acknowledge that in the Scriptures God stands revealed plainly as the author of nature, as the sustainer of human institutions (family, work and government) and as the source of harmony, creativity and beauty. Yet it has been precisely these Bible believers who have neglected sober analysis of nature, human society and the arts.

The great reformers of the past and most stalwarts of the 18th century awakenings (Wesley, Edwards, ...) all held that diligent rigorous mental activity was a way to glorify God. Unlike their spiritual ancestors, modern fundamentalists have not pursued comprehensive thinking under God or sought a mind shaped to its furthest reaches by Christian perspectives. By a "life of the mind" I mean the effort to think within a specifically Christian framework --- across the whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political science, literary criticism and imaginative writing, historical inquiry and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science, social theory and the arts. We tend towards small mindedness, a narrowness of the truth and mean spiritedness.

In the end, the question of Christian thinking is a deeply spiritual question. What sort of God will we worship? With this question we return to the most important matter concerning the life of the mind. The Gospel of John tells us that the Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of a glorious grace and truth, was also the Word through whom all things --- all phenomena in nature, all capacities for fruitful human interaction, all the kinds of beauty - -- were made. To honor that Word as He deserves to be honored, fundamentalists must know both Christ and what He has made.

The effort to think like a Christian is rather an effort to take seriously the sovereignty of God over the world He created, the lordship of Christ over the world He died to redeem and the power of the Holy Spirit over the world He sustains each and every moment. From this perspective the search for a mind that truly thinks like a Christian takes on ultimate significance, because the search for a Christian mind is not, in the end, a search for mind but a search for God. It is to that end that the "Thinking Caps" are written and distributed.

Think about it.