Renewing the Mind Clifford Williams
Trinity College
Deerfield, IL 60015
In Romans 12:2 Paul writes, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (NRSV). I want to ask several questions about renewing our minds. First, what has gone wrong with our minds that they need renewing? Second, why do we need a renewed mind? And third, what does a renewed mind look like? To make matters concrete, I shall begin with an imaginary scenario.
Socrates in Sunday School
Let us imagine that Socrates is visiting a Sunday School class. To set up this scenario, we need to know a little bit about Socrates. He is pictured by Plato as an inveterate asker of questions. He asked questions so persistently, in fact, that people got annoyed with him. His aim, Plato makes clear, was not to alienate people, but to discover truth. He was curious—curious about what makes actions devout. Was it, he wondered, something in the actions themselves or was it simply because God, or the gods, liked them? How can we come to know truths that do not seem to be based on anyone’s sense experience?
Socrates also wanted to nurture people in their efforts to be good. In The Apology, he declared that his constant asking of questions showed not that he was trying to corrupt the youth who trailed after him, but that he cared for their souls. He believed, he said, that the greatest harm that could befall a person was for that person to do what is bad.
So, now, here is Socrates walking into the Sunday School room. It is 9:23 A.M.—he is seven minutes early. One or two others are already there. He asks them what the topic for the session is going to be. One of them tells him that it is the second half of Romans 12, beginning with verse 9. Socrates gets up and retrieves a Bible from the sanctuary. He starts reading. “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good.” He smiles. A few of the others who have come into the Sunday School room steal glances at the stocky visitor with his long robe and snub nose.
The leader begins class with prayer. He says a few things about the first clause, “Let love be genuine.” Socrates furrows his brow and shoots up his hand. “I’m not sure about something,” he says, “and I wonder if you can explain it to me.” The leader is a bit startled, as are some of those in the class, but he graciously replies, “Yes, of course.” Socrates continues, “You said just now that genuine love has to have the right motive. If that is so, then love that does not have the right motive will not be love at all, right?” The leader thinks for a bit, then replies, “Yes, that sounds right.” “If that’s true, then what was the point of Paul urging us to love genuinely? Why didn’t he just urge us to love?” Unlike the previous question, this one rankles the leader somewhat. He perceives it as a challenge to the authority of the Bible, because it questions Paul’s use of words. The leader responds with something like, “That is what it says, because that is the way God wanted it to be,” still gracious but with an edge to his voice. Socrates nods, but continues to look puzzled.
The leader now turns to the next clause in verse 9 of Romans 12: “hate what is evil.” Socrates shoots his hand up again. “I’m wondering about those right motives for genuine love,” he says. “Is there more than one or is there just one right motive?” The leader is beginning to sense that if he doesn’t squash this stubborn visitor, he will lose control of the class. He says, “That’s a good question, but we need to move on or we will never cover the material for today.” He says a few more things about hating evil.
Socrates shoots his hand up. The leader continues talking. Socrates keeps his hand up. The leader stares at Socrates. Socrates says, “I like what you say about hating evil, but I’m not sure I see the difference between hating evil and hating people. Is it solely the object of the hate that makes the two different, or is there something in the hate itself that is different?” The leader ignores Socrates, moving to the next phrase, “hold fast to what is good.” Socrates stands. The leader stops. Socrates says, “Can you tell me whether the good is something we hold fast to by a sheer effort of the will or whether we hold fast to it by wanting it intensely?” The leader closes his notes and declares, with barely suppressed anger, “I cannot teach this class if you constantly interrupt me. Either you leave or I do.”
What Has Gone Wrong?
Many of us have had intimations of the antagonism that developed between the persistent and curious Socrates and the polite but perturbable Sunday School teacher. We have perceived that if we were to make too many inquiries, we would invoke the displeasure of others in the church. We have feared that they might wonder about the genuineness of our faith or respond to our questions with remarks like, “I will be praying for you,” which exhibit, no doubt, a genuine concern but also an intolerable suspicion and condescension. So we have kept quiet. Perhaps we have closed down our minds as well, becoming indifferent to wonder or conforming to the crowd or letting ourselves become spiritually blind or allowing the wrong emotions govern our believing.
Indifference to Wonder
Every now and then one reads that the American educational system squashes childlike wonder. Children go to school in their early years with immense amounts of curiosity and wonder. By the time they graduate from high school, much of it is lost, say the commentators. We do not need to be specialists in education to know that this is true. We need only consult our own experience. We want to get good grades, and we know that to do so, we have to please our teachers. This means that we have to give them the answers they are looking for, both orally and on tests. Our main concern becomes to learn the material well enough to give it back to our teachers. Most of our educational energy, accordingly, is devoted to this task and little is devoted to intellectual exploration and adventure. We are more occupied with furnishing teachers the right answers than we are with being imaginative and creative.
By contrast, Socrates was less concerned to adopt the conventional answers than he was to engage in imaginative exploration. His wonder knew few bounds. In this way, Socrates was like what we might picture Adam and Eve being before they fell. Let us suppose for a moment that their time in the Garden lasted a century before the fateful day on which they ate of the forbidden fruit. After raising a large family, they would have had time for other matters. Can we imagine them exploring the Garden? Can we picture them poking around among the plants, bushes, and trees, looking to see what they can find? Can we conceive of them becoming meditative, probing the depths of their inner lives?
We can, I believe, imagine Adam and Eve doing these things. This is because we think of them as having a built-in disposition to wonder. God created them to be imaginative explorers. Perhaps God did so because God is very imaginative, a being that is constantly creating amazingly new things. We, however, have had our wondering imaginations blunted. They are not wholly gone, but they are not wholly there, either. Socrates, we saw, had a good deal more than the rattled Sunday School teacher.
Propensity to Conform
Our propensity to conform makes us uncritically believe what those around us believe. We unconsciously go along with the “crowd” rather than consciously form our own beliefs. Let me explain what I believe goes on.
When we are part of a group, we tend to identify with it. We identify with predominant beliefs of the group, the ethos of the group, and the prevailing sentiments in the group. This identification often goes on rather unconsciously. That is, the beliefs of the group, its ethos, and prevailing sentiments seep into us without our being aware of it. This fact about unconscious identification is significant, for it means that when we identify with a group of which we are a part, we are not fully ourselves. Our beliefs are not fully our own, for they are the group’s. Nor is the dominant ethos we exemplify really ours, or the sentiments we possess. They, too, are the group’s.
This phenomenon of group identification is like identifying with a hero. When we encounter someone whom we admire, we tend to identify with them. We imagine that we have the same characteristics. We picture ourselves acting in the same ways, perhaps even receiving the same accolades. If this identification reaches a certain level, we lose our identity. We no longer are ourselves, for we have metamorphosed into our hero.
The same phenomenon tends to happen with Christian groups and heroes. When we unconsciously identify with the Christian group of which we are a part, or with a Christian hero, our faith is not our own. It is the group’s or hero’s. And this means that it is no faith at all. It is a pseudo-faith, something that looks like faith but really is not faith. Soren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth century Christian philosopher, called people who unconsciously identify with the Christian church “crowd Christians.” Friedrich Nietzsche, a nineteenth century non-Christian philosopher, declared that such people are simply following their “herd instinct.”
The problem with the propensity to conform is not that the group or hero is wrong. It is that the mechanism of belief is illegitimate. This mechanism produces pseudo-beliefs instead of real beliefs. We have let our beliefs come simply from the group instead of taking responsibility for them ourselves.
Blindness
Let us return to Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” There is a connection, Paul is saying, between the propensity to conform and the inability to discern what the will of God is. When the propensity to conform to secular culture—“the world”—controls us, we take in its values, adopt its presuppositions, and make its outlook ours. We are blinded to the truth. In the previous case, the propensity to conform produced pseudo-beliefs. Here, it produces false beliefs or an absence of the right beliefs. This moral and spiritual blindness takes two forms—the inability to see moral and spiritual truths and the inability to notice conditions that are connected to moral and spiritual truths.
An important example of the first inability is the failure to grasp the fact that living well matters. I use the phrase “living well” as a catch-all for loving God, loving our neighbor, and exemplifying Christian virtues. When we are morally and spiritually blind, we fail to value the importance of these. Or we value other states more, states that the world presents to us as desirable, such as owning quality possessions, being highly admired by our acquaintances, or being constantly entertained, often without regard to the violence or noxious values exhibited in the entertainment. In Plato’s literary and philosophical masterpiece, The Republic, Socrates declares, “The struggle to be good or bad is important, my dear Glaucon, much more important than people think” (608B). This is the message of the Bible, but it is not the message of the world, to which we are liable to conform all too readily.
An example of the inability to notice conditions that are connected to moral and spiritual truths is the failure to notice that possessing wealth tends to undermine sensitivity to involuntary poverty. When Jesus declared, “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matt. 6:24), he was uttering, at least in part, a psychological fact. If our primary allegiance is to God, it will not be to wealth, and if our primary allegiance is to wealth, it will not be to God. We will not trust God with our whole hearts. We will be insensitive to those who inhabit a lower economic-social class. We will be like the rich person who walked past Lazarus at the gate of his estate every day but did not identify with his plight (Luke 16:19-31). Our instinctive reaction to Jesus’ unsettling declaration is to say that we can possess wealth and serve God, because what counts is our attitude toward our wealth. This may well be true. But Jesus’ point was that it is very hard for a person who has wealth to have the right attitude toward it—as hard as it is for a camel to crawl into a rabbit hole. Failure to see this point is an instance of moral and spiritual blindness, a failure that may derive in part from immersion in a culture that worships wealth.
There are numerous other examples of moral and spiritual blindness, some of which come from the propensity to conform and some of which do not. Here are a few: insensitivity to the inner suffering of our acquaintances, failure to understand the deadliness of envy, overlooking the goodness of exhibiting kindness to strangers, failure to apprehend that our universe has a creator.
The frightening feature of moral and spiritual blindness is that we do not know we possess it. We are blind to our own blindness. So we can easily be conscious Christians but unconscious secularists. When Paul said, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds,” he was alerting us to a condition that affects us so subtly that we may not know we are in it.
Allowing the Wrong Emotions to Govern Our Believing
Wrong emotions affect our believing and cognitive activities in a number of ways. Let us look at several of them.
We are anxiety-ridden creatures—we are anxious about our physical appearance, about how others regard us, about our future, about death, and countless other matters. Our anxiety about how others regard us causes us to esteem ourselves more highly than we ought. We imagine we are heroes who save others from distress or admired by all who make our acquaintance. Our anxiety about death causes us to deny it. We will not die, we tell ourselves. Only other people die.
Pride, too, affects our cognitive activities. Because of pride, we engage in unwarranted dogmatism. We disdain beliefs we think are false, we disdain people who have these beliefs, and we become unwilling to listen to them. Our discussions with them become one-way conversations. We do not recognize that we can have strong beliefs and still be gracious to those who differ from us.
Self-preoccupation distorts our beliefs and cognitive activities in a variety of ways. It skews our perspective and undermines impartiality. It closes us down to new avenues of learning—what is not immediately pertinent to our own concerns gets ignored. We are unable to imagine the standpoints of those who believe differently, so we do not truly understand them.
I am not saying that no emotions should affect our thinking, for some should. Wanting our beliefs to be true certainly should. Without this desire, we become too willing to believe on insufficient evidence. Loving what is good also should. Without this love, we become unable to recognize people’s needs, even though they are conspicuous. Caring about eternal matters should as well. Without this caring, we become unwilling to consider cosmic questions. What has gone wrong is that we have allowed other emotions to affect our thinking.
Here, then, are four ways in which our minds need renewing. We are indifferent to wonder, we possess a nearly irresistible propensity to conform, we are morally and spiritual blind, and we allow the wrong emotions to affect our minds. It is not too strong to say that we have made a mess of our cognitive lives. Our minds have departed from the way in which God designed them to operate.
Why Do We Need a Renewed Mind?
We need a renewed mind so that we can be free from the ways in which it has gone wrong. We need one for a number of positive reasons as well.
To Discern What Is Good and Acceptable and Perfect
When Paul declared that we need to be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we can discern what is good and acceptable and perfect, he was referring not only to problematic situations, situations in which there is a conflict or dilemma, but to everyday life. What should our priorities be? What should we value most? If we are morally and spiritually blind, we will not always get the answers to these questions right. We will underestimate the value of some activities and emotions, and overestimate the value of others. Or we may perceive what our priorities should be at some times, but lose that perception at other times.
My hunch is that most of us most of the time just barely grasp what really counts in life. I am referring here to us Christians. We have encountered Christ, we have accepted Christ as our savior, we have God’s word, and we go to church regularly. Still, when we try to get ahold of what our lives are all about, it just about eludes us. Our self-preoccupation, our emotional baggage, our concern to make something of ourselves in worldly ways, our wealth all obscure the main point of life. The fruits of the Spirit somehow do not seem quite to fit in.
Our minds need renewing, therefore, so that we can make out what often is almost beyond us, so that we can gaze clearly and steadily at it¾at that which is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise (Phil. 4:8).
To Detect Inner Subversion
The most dangerous adversary to our faith comes not from external opposition, but from sources deep within. Pride, envy, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, and spiritual sloth nibble away at our faith, undermining it insidiously.1 We think that the really bad sins are overt and public—and such sins are, indeed, really bad—but in pouncing on their horribleness we are evading these underhanded nibblers. Secretly, we like to indulge our pride, envy, lust, and greed. So we hide from God, much like Adam tried to hide from God in the Garden. We are afraid of meeting up with God, for we would have to take responsibility for our secret indulgences (some of which we keep secret even from ourselves).
We are also afraid of taking responsibility for our faith, so we adopt the faith of other Christians without owning it for ourselves. We feel safer in doing this. It is easier to have a pseudo-faith and think that it is real than it is to have a real faith.
Our minds need renewing so that they can detect these subversive forces. We need as much cunning and ingenuity as the underground drives and pseudo-faith themselves employ. Keeping faith pure and real is not merely a matter of the will. It also requires using our minds well.
To Shore Up Sagging Faith
Shoring up sagging faith is not just a matter of the will, either. We do not simply decide to have more faith. To think we do is bad psychology. Faith is a whole-person phenomenon. It is connected to emotions, feelings, habits, desires, and thoughts. So bolstering faith requires cultivating the right emotions, forming the right habits, and engendering good desires. Exploratory thinking also contributes, in at least two ways.
MAKING SENSE OF FAITH When we make sense of an idea, we make it more believable. The idea at first may strike us as odd and not worthy of our credence. But as we make more sense of it, we come to believe it more. Making sense of an idea involves clarifying it, connecting it to other ideas, connecting it to our experiences, unpacking it. Suppose an acquaintance of yours unexpectedly informs you that she has taken up skydiving. You are incredulous, because your friend is normally timid and unassuming. She explains how it is done, she tells you what it is like to be plummeting toward the earth without a parachute, then floating with it open. You begin to believe your acquaintance.
It is the same with faith. As we clarify ideas in Christianity, connect them to other ideas and to our experiences, we gradually make more sense of it. And as we do, it becomes more entrenched in us. Perhaps you run across Jeremiah’s famous declaration, “The human heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) You do not think of yourself as devious, so you find this allegation extreme, applicable to criminals and psychopaths, but not to normal people like yourself. Then you read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart, and Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. You reflect on your deepest desires and your unacknowledged motives. As you do, you discover recesses of your character you never knew existed. You uncover deviousness. Though the discovery is painful, your faith in the Bible’s portrayal of human sinfulness becomes more secure because you perceive how it connects to your own experiences.
Christianity is extraordinarily rich conceptually. When we explore its wide array of ideas and make sense of them, our faith becomes firmer.
DISCOVERING THE NEED FOR FAITH A different way to shore up faith is to discover how it meets our basic needs. In doing this, we are not showing that Christianity is true, but are making it attractive to us psychologically.
One of our basic needs is to deal with death. Death not only disappoints, it shames and terrorizes. As a result, we invent ways of denying death. We imagine ourselves being unconquerable heroes whom death cannot touch, whose reputations will last forever. We picture our accomplishments as being so unassailable that death will never get to us. It is only in rare moments that we see through these deceptions, and it is even more rarely that we feel the full force of Paul’s rhetorical question, “Where, O death, is your sting?” (I Cor. 15:55) Paul is saying here that faith meets our need to deal with death. Faith in God’s promise of resurrection is, in fact, the only thing that does so adequately.
Another basic need is to know we are okay in a moral-spiritual way. Underneath the surface of our everyday awareness lies an uneasy conscience. We sense that somehow our lives do not measure up to what they could be. We have failed to pursue the ideals we know we should. We have the perception of going wrong in a big way. To compensate, we tell ourselves that we are pretty decent people whom others should admire. We don’t steal, we don’t get drunk, we are not sexually promiscuous, we are friendly to strangers—God should admire us, too. When we see through this deception, we realize that it is only with a repentant faith that we can salve our disturbed conscience.
Discovering the need for faith attracts us to it. With exploratory thinking, we are led to a surer faith.
To Promote Human Flourishing
Doing good, like having faith, is also not just a matter of choosing. It, too, involves knowing, in several ways.
First, we must clear up misconceptions about values. For example, some people may interpret the command to love others in such a sacrificial way that they do not develop their own talents. They constantly give themselves to others, and as laudable as this is, it leaves no room for self-development, which is also a significant value. Women have sometimes been conditioned in this direction. They need to see that love does not require a complete denial of their own interests and projects. Men need to acknowledge this, too, so that their insistence on the value of self-sacrifice does not turn into a demand for subservience.
Consider another example. Some segments of Christendom view feminism unfavorably. Their negative sentiments toward feminism may, however, come from being acquainted only with militant feminism, the kind that disparages men and exalts lesbianism. But anyone who looks into feminism will quickly discover that it has different versions, including several that call themselves biblical. Biblical feminists conceive themselves as being true to the Bible without adopting the extreme stances of militant feminists. Clarifying the different kinds of feminism opens the way to a more serious consideration of it instead of an uninformed and hasty rejection.
Second, we must know the conditions of those to whom we connect. To love well we must know how others need to be loved. To aid those in distress, we must know what kind of aid they need most. For example, dealing with world hunger is partly a matter of giving aid and partly a matter of avoiding conditions that cause it. High tariffs on imports to the United States mean that foreign countries cannot flourish economically. Corruption in governments of countries where starvation is high results in poor economic strategies in those countries. Lack of water and ignorance of good farming methods also contribute to starvation. Dealing with these complicated conditions requires both will and intellectual acuity.
Third, we must use our imaginations to discover how other people feel. We will not be able to identify with their anxiety and depression or excitement and delight unless we do. This identification is especially important for those who are ethnically different from us. Our proclivity is to look at the outside of people—their color, nationality, clothes, hair style, size, shape, and possessions. We categorize people according to these features. In doing so, we dehumanize them and treat them as mere objects. To treat them as people, as members of the same family, we need to imagine what they are like on the inside. We need to imagine that, like us, they have fears and hopes, distresses and delights. They resent it when others treat them unfairly, just as we would, and they smile at those who smile at them, just as we do.
We need to possess these kinds of knowing in order to promote the biblical conception of human flourishing, a conception in which people are at peace with one another, in which a sense of community is prominent, and in which people are enabled to live the abundant life that Jesus offers us (John 10:10).
To Enrich Our Lives
Most of us live impoverished and constricted lives. We shut ourselves off from various goods, keep people at bay, run from risk, and do not seize unforeseen opportunities to love. Doing these is like reading cheap fiction instead of world classics, or eating junk food all the time¾we will have a cheap life, a junk food life. On the other hand, when we open ourselves to love and set aside what is trivial, our lives become richer. We are more like what God originally wanted us to be. A renewed mind can play a part in a richer life in several ways.
KNOWING Most of our knowing is utilitarian. We use it for something—to get something done, to improve our condition, or to speed things up. This is because we are practical creatures. We like to do things. We like to improve our lot and increase good feelings. So we conceive of thinking and learning in utilitarian terms.
There is another stance toward knowing that improves our lot in a different way. This stance is to conceive some knowing as intrinsically good¾good, that is, apart from what we can do with it. We are enriched by this kind of knowing in the same way we are enriched by appreciating beauty or praising God. We do not do anything with these—they are just there, doing nothing except being good. Their mere presence makes our lives richer. So it is when our thinking and learning aim at knowing for its own sake. A renewed mind opens itself to this aim.
OBSERVING TRAGEDY AND MAGNIFICENCE Indifference to tragedy and magnificence also constricts us. Most of us move through our days numb and detached. We get up, get ready to do our tasks, do our tasks, eat, do more tasks, eat again, relax a bit, then go to bed. We do not observe the tragedy and magnificence that surround us unless they are pronounced and obvious. As a result, reality for us is dull and flat. It is largely uninteresting, there only to be used. From this standpoint people, too, are dull and flat. Their main function is to give us comfort, satisfy our need for friendship, assuage our loneliness. It does not occur to us that they can be valued for their own sake.
With a renewed mind, however, we recognize that reality is encumbered with tragedy and overflowing with magnificence. People possess spiritual decay and moral beauty. They are more than objects that satisfy our needs. They are there to be suffered with and delighted in.
Consider, for example, an ordinary conversation. Most of the time we use conversations to express ourselves. We want people to attend to us. We crave to be understood. But when we set aside our own needs and look for the tragedy and the beauty in the person who is talking to us, we will regard them in an entirely different light. We will agonize with the hints of tragedy we now detect coming through. We will exult in the goodness we now perceive.
ENCOUNTERING GRACE It is the same with encountering grace, a central Christian reality. Too often we slip back into self-justification. We act as if our good features or accomplishments make us acceptable to God. We forget that we have been saved by grace, not works, lest we boast (Eph. 2:8-9). We like to boast, though, and we do so in innumerable subtle ways. In order to remind us that our boasting is vain, we need to encounter instances of grace.
With a renewed mind, we will do so. We will be on the lookout for instances of grace in what we read—in fiction, poetry, and biography. We will be sensitive to the working of grace in our acquaintances.
This is my positive case for renewing our minds. They need renewing so that we can discern moral and spiritual truths, detect inner subversion, shore up sagging faith, promote human flourishing, and enrich our lives.2
What Is a Renewed Mind?
When Paul says, “Be transformed by the renewal of your minds,” he has in mind a conversion. Our immediate reaction is to link this conversion with the conversion that takes place when we become Christians. This link seems to me to be right. Part of what Christian conversion involves is a renewal of our minds.
All conversions have two parts¾a change of stance and a change in action. By a change of stance, I mean a change in attitudes and emotions, in what we love, and in our general outlook on life and reality. When our minds become renewed in Christian conversion, three changes occur in our stance.
The Stance
First, we come to love truth. Truth matters to us. The truth about the origin of the universe matters, the truth about sinful human nature matters, and the truth about redemption matters. Truth matters to us because it is intrinsically good for us to know our cosmic status and because with it we will have full and rich lives. Because truth matters, we pay attention to it. We do not let ourselves be swayed by popular culture, in which pleasure, entertainment, and social status often seem to matter more than truth. We do not let ourselves be influenced by emotions that distort truth.
Second, when our minds are renewed, we come to love what is good, or in Paul’s phrase, “what is good and acceptable and perfect.” We adopt the moral seriousness that pervades the Bible, the conviction that how we live matters. We want to discover what God wishes for our lives. We want a genuine faith. We love to encounter people who have been transformed. We meditate on biblical ideals, and we crave to exemplify those ideals.
Third, when our minds are renewed, we become alive to wonder. We are no longer indifferent to our surroundings or to the inner recesses of our personalities. We want to explore the intricacies of both. We want to reflect on the nature of God and of our faith. We become entranced with new discoveries, especially when we make them ourselves. We treasure experiences of awe.
Activities
Conversions also include outer changes. When we come to love what is true and good, and become alive to wonder, we adopt new priorities. Our style of life changes and we engage in different activities. I do not want to suggest that all of the following activities are necessary for everyone who has a renewed mind. It does seem to me, though, that a person with a renewed mind will engage in some combination of them.
CULTIVATING INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES When the mind is renewed, it will exhibit a range of virtues, including “intellectual carefulness, perseverance, humility, vigor, flexibility, courage, and thoroughness, as well as open-mindedness, fair-mindedness, insightfulness, and the virtues opposed to wishful thinking, obtuseness, and conformity.”3 Acquiring these virtues is not automatic. It requires effort and practice. With nurturing and training, however, these virtues will become second nature to us.
LISTENING Most of the time we would rather talk than listen. But we cannot learn if we do not listen. So we will have to stop talking and start asking questions, being ready to listen to what we get in reply. We will have to set aside our own agendas and let ourselves go where the other takes us. We will have to stop feeling threatened by viewpoints that differ from our own. We will have to become open to new avenues of investigation. This is what true listening involves: being willing to receive what comes to us.
OBSERVING CULTURE If we are immersed in a culture, we tend not to notice what its salient values are. To discover these values, we need to detach ourselves from the culture and look at it from the outside, somewhat as an anthropologist does who investigates ancient cultures. In this way, we can disentangle ourselves from the values that are alien to our faith.
READING THE MASTERS Too often Christians restrict their reading to books and articles written by known Christians. We need to make our acquaintance with the master analysts of the human condition, the best novelists, respected scientists, articulate writers, accomplished poets, foremost theologians, thoughtful social commentators, and classic writers on Christian spirituality. A fair number of these world-class writers are Christians. But even if they are not, we must remember that all truth is God’s truth. Both Christians and non-Christians have illuminating insights.
EXPLORING If we never get out and about, we will never encounter what is beyond our own horizons. Our minds will be like hermits who have shut themselves off from the grandeur of life. To experience that grandeur, we must go exploring. I do not mean that we must travel widely, or even that we must travel very far. There are treasures everywhere.4 If we look in unlikely places near our own homes, we will find moral splendor. If we rummage around in libraries and bookstores, we will come upon fresh and fascinating ideas worth looking into. If we hunt around in the uncharted terrain of our psyches, we will uncover a plethora of emotions and sentiments.
WATCHING LESS TELEVISION A large amount of television watching does not promote a renewed mind. Thoughtful reflection decreases, inner exploration decreases, wonder decreases, active looking for goodness and magnificence decreases, promotion of human flourishing decreases, and the propensity to pick up alien values increases. Some of us may need to stop watching commercial television altogether for a time—a year perhaps, or two, maybe even ten. Debilitating diseases often require radical cures.
CULTIVATING IMAGINATIVENESS When we become alive to wonder, we become more imaginative. We will ask what it would be like to look at a phenomenon from a different perspective. We will wonder what would happen if conditions were altered. We will picture ourselves being in the position of those with a different race or gender. We will not take assumptions for granted. We will ask “What if … “ questions.
ASKING FOUNDATIONAL QUESTIONS When we probe what underlies surface phenomena, we get to what really counts. Most of us, however, are content with the surface. We drift along on it, letting it determine what we think and where we are going. If we do that our whole lives, we may escape going bad, but we will also be prevented from having much good. To live richly, we need to ask foundational questions.
PURSUING EXCELLENCE If we are called to have a renewed mind, we need to give ourselves to its formation whole-heartedly. Having one is not simply an abstract intellectual exercise, devoid of spiritual significance. It is integral to our Christian lives, as I have tried to show. It is, therefore, worthy of being pursued vigorously and persistently, with excellence as our aim. Anything worth doing is worth doing well.
Two Risks
Little in life is free of risk. This is certainly true of our present concern. When we come to have a renewed mind, we might change our minds about our faith, and we might find that we do not fit in well with other Christians.
We May Change Our Minds
If we think about our faith to any degree, we may change our minds about central features of it or give it up altogether. There is no guarantee that attempts to shore up sagging faith will work. We might find ourselves losing our faith instead.
We need to take this risk, though—both students and teachers (in the way they teach). For there is as much of a risk in not thinking as in thinking. The risk in not working toward a renewed mind is that we will have a shallow faith and a shallow life. We may even have no faith, by being unconscious imitators of good Christians. Or we may be among the living dead—walking cadavers that only appear to be alive.
I do not want to minimize the risk in efforts to expand our minds. It is real. We could well move away from the Christian faith. I have had students who did. Unsettling as this prospect is, it is just as unsettling to imagine presenting ourselves to God beyond the grave and wondering how we will answer when God asks, “What did you do with your minds? Did you live in safety and shallowness, or did you take risks and acquire depth?” Those who have experienced the depths that come with a renewed mind will certainly receive the divine commendation, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
We May Not Fit In
Intellectual explorers make people uneasy. They are uncomfortably different; they cannot be controlled; they ask too many disturbing questions. That is why most of us prize conformity. We know what we are getting and we know that others are like us—they have the same ideas, the same way of living, and the same faith.
If we sense that others are uneasy with us, we will be uneasy in return. We may even want to leave the Christian community that does not fully accept us. If we stay, we may feel a good deal of frustration and have a hard time connecting to others in the community. We will be tempted to give up efforts for a renewed mind in order to avoid turmoil. The hypothetical scenario with Socrates illustrates this tension. It is hard to imagine Socrates wanting to stay in a Sunday School class that resolutely rejects his inquisitiveness.
I am afraid I do not have a good response to this second risk. It is more than a possibility. It is a likelihood. I do, however, have four pieces of advice for those who find themselves in the situation of not fitting in because they value thinking and learning.
1. Balance persistence with graciousness. Persistence is not always a virtue; carried too far it becomes obstinacy. We need to know when to stop. Perhaps Socrates should have stopped after his second question to the Sunday School teacher.
2. Encourage others to renew their minds, but if they do not change, continue to welcome them, just as you want to be welcomed.
3. Find Christians who also value renewed minds.
4. Keep on the right track even if other Christians are not with you.
Jesus in Sunday School
I want to return to the scenario with which I began, except that I want to change it somewhat. Instead of picturing Socrates in Sunday School, let us imagine that Jesus is visiting. And let us suppose that the regular attendees do not know it is Jesus. He does not come with a robe or long feminine hair, as he is commonly depicted.
To set up this scenario, we need to know a little bit about Jesus. Like Socrates, he asked questions. They were not curious questions, as Socrates asked, but they nearly always provoked thought. He asked his disciples, “Who do you think I am?” (Matt. 16:15) and “What does it profit you if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?” (Matt. 16:26) Most of the time, though, Jesus is depicted as telling people things—parables, moral truths, truths about God, and the like. He talks as if he is an authority. That, of course, startles his listeners.
Jesus strides into the Sunday School room early. He finds the Scripture passage for the day and reads it. He listens raptly as the leader prays and begins expounding on the first verse: “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good” (Rom. 12:9). He raises his hand and the leader calls on him, wondering who this stranger is. “I have a story to tell you,” Jesus says, and without waiting for permission to tell it, he proceeds. “There were once a sister and a brother. The brother spent much of his spare time doing volunteer work with a homeless shelter, but he treated his sister shabbily. The sister had only enough energy for her full-time job, but she never failed to be kind to her brother. She listened patiently to him and remembered his birthdays. Which of these two had genuine love?”
Someone in the class says, “The sister, because she treated well someone who is hard to love.” Someone else says, “But the sister did not volunteer for anything.” A discussion ensues. The leader gets restless and says, “We have to talk about the next verse or we will not get through today’s passage.” But before the leader can say anything else, Jesus asks, “What good would it be to spend your whole life doing volunteer work if you treat your sister shabbily?” Everyone is silent.
After a moment, Jesus says, “I have another story.” He tells it and another discussion ensues.
At this point, our scenario could go in different directions. The leader, fearing that he is losing control of the class, might attempt to re-exert his authority. Jesus would have to keep quiet or leave. Or the leader, recognizing that something unusual is taking place, could let Jesus keep telling stories.
Of course, the scenario with Socrates might have gone differently as well. The leader might have pursued Socrates’ questions. Socrates may then have felt less need to be so persistent. And he might have come back.
Both of these scenarios illustrate the difficulty of pursuing a renewed mind in a context that does not value intellectual exploration highly. They also illustrate different ways of going about intellectual exploration. And they illustrate the necessity of doing so.
Notes
1. These are the seven deadly sins. For an exposition of them, see Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today (Notre Dame: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1978) and Solomon Schimmel, The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
2. Some of the main ideas in this section on why we need a renewed mind are drawn from Chapters 1-3 of Clifford Williams, The Life of the Mind: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2002).
3. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 155.
4. Bill Watterson, There’s Treasure Everywhere: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1996).
Questions for Reflection
1. How is renewal of the mind related to becoming a Christian?
2. Are we totally blind with respect to moral and spiritual truths?
3. What part does thinking have in coming to have faith? In intensifying faith?
4. Could a person with little intellectual ability have as deep and genuine a faith as one who has much intellectual ability? If so, would renewing the mind be irrelevant to faith? If not, how is intellectual ability connected to the ability to have faith?
5. Is knowing ever good for its own sake, or is all knowing good only for what we do with it?
6. Are curiosity and imaginativeness more dangerous than they are good?
7. In what ways is renewing the mind related to spiritual renewal?
8. What does it mean to love God with our minds? (Matt. 22:37)Copyright 2002 by Clifford Williams