“But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16)

The Scandal
One of the great scandals of modern Christianity, as others have pointed out, is Christians without Christian minds. Followers of Jesus who don’t think Christianly about the world, life, God, issues. They may worship and pray as Christians, but they do not think as Christians. There is a “secular drift” in our thinking “unmatched in history” (Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind, 3-4).

The reasons are plenty. Lack of motivation. Lack of discipline. Lack of attention span. But I think for many of us there is a scarier explanation. What one writer calls “religious anorexia” – a loss of appetite for growth in Christ. We don’t really desire to grow in the renewal of our minds. This is a problem that must be reversed – especially since “a commitment to Christ is a commitment to believe in things that go far beyond the surface of life” – which reading and study help us mine (R. Kent Hughes, Disciplines of a Godly Man, 78).

The Jewish radio talk show host Dennis Prager pointed this out about Christians years ago: “One thing I noticed about evangelicals is that they do not read… the Bible, great Christian thinkers, they have never heard of Aquinas. As a Jew, that’s confusing to me…When I walk into a Christians home and see a total of 30 books, most of them best sellers, I do not understand. I have bookcases of Christian books, and I am a Jew. Why do I have more Christian books than 98 percent of the Christians…That is so bizarre to me.” (cited in R. Kent Hughes, Disciplines of a Godly Man, 78).

Bizarre indeed.

This problem is interestingly and tellingly more prominent in men than women. Statistically, only twenty-five percent of all Christian books are bought by men. There is a Master’s thesis waiting to be written somewhere in there about all the reasons this is the case (revolving around both the problem with men, and with what pop-Christian culture produces and how it markets). But suffice it say, men, we have to step up!

Hope & Resources
There is always hope though. We can turn it around. It is, as Hughes says, ‘within our reach and it is our duty.’ Bible study and reading Christian thinkers – or thinkers at all versus daily blogs (like this one!), Buzzfeed, click-bait and the Kardashian’s Twitter feeds – will help with the renewing of our minds in a way that will lead to our transformation (Rom. 12:1-3).

Where do we begin?

Years ago R. Kent Hughes sent out a survey to top Christian leaders such as J.I. Packer, Eugene Peterson, Chuck Swindoll, Charles Colson and others, asking them what the most influential books in their thought-life had been. The books mentioned multiple times in their responses were these – and they are a great place to start your life of Christian thought!

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for his Highest

John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion

Dietrich Bonhoffer, The Cost of Discipleship

A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

Matthew Henry, Commentary

Mr and Mrs Howard Taylor’s Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret

Elizabeth Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov

John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

William Dallimore, George Whitefield – a biography