Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Life of the Mind in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
I thought, for a few minutes, I would talk about what it means to love God with your mind. You’re familiar, I’m sure, with the passage. I will remind you of it by reading a few verses from Mark 12.
“One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’ ‘The most important one,’ answered Jesus, ‘is this: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no commandment greater than these.’
‘Well said, teacher,’ the man replied. ‘You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.’ When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.”
So reads the Holy Scripture.
What does it mean to love the Lord your God with your mind? I’m sure some in the room have read Mark Noll’s book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which begins with its memorable opening sentence: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there isn’t one,” which is a bit of a damning indictment.
At the end of the day, what he wants is a whole lot of Christians to be winning Nobel Prizes, to be front-rank thinkers rather than to be anti-intellectuals. At the end of the day, that’s what he is calling for. It’s not just a certain kind of theological frame of reference, a worldview structure shaped by Scripture.
He is thinking far more broadly than that. Is that what Jesus is calling for? It might be a very good thing, but is that what he is calling for? Even the notion of loving with your mind is not transparent, is it? We think of loving with our hearts. We use the heart as a symbol for the center of our affections. The mind has to do, for us, with reason, with analytical thought, with linear control rather than with the affections.
What does it mean to love the Lord your God with your mind? It gets worse! To love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, all of your heart, well, at least that sounds as if it’s on our turf to love someone with your heart. But, of course, in the symbolism of the first century, the heart really was pretty close to what we mean by mind or your whole being, including how you think.
You have to sort of take the symbolism and knock it down. Why? So that we think up here, and we love here in our symbolism. They think here, and they love about here, which means that in older English Bibles, you have these expressions about reins. Les reins, in French. You love people with your kidneys. Older English versions speak of bowels of compassion. It sounds slightly grotesque to us, but in fact, under the symbolism of the day, your emotions came out of your gut, basically.
Here instead, Jesus is saying, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart [think, mind] and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” In other words, two expressions that have to do with your entire thinking volitional whole-being apparatus and then two expressions that have to do with intensity and the wholeness of your commitment. It really is a strange expression.
I sometimes think the Bible has two kinds of texts, at least in one sort of analysis. There’s one set that seems difficult until you get to understand them a bit, and then they’re pretty straightforward. Ezekiel is like that. Ezekiel is pretty foreboding until you actually read a couple of commentaries. Then you discover it’s a fairly easy book. There are other texts like this one that everybody knows, and it seems pretty straightforward. Then you start to think about it, and the more you think about it, the harder it gets, not only to do but even to understand.
The first thing to observe, it seems to me from the text, is that Jesus does not begin simply with a command. He is asked a question. “What’s the greatest command?” He begins with the Shema. In other words, he quotes Deuteronomy 6, but he quotes it exactly as Deuteronomy 6 has it. He does not just begin with a command. “Oh, well, I can tell you that one. Easy. The first commandment is to love God.”
No. He begins, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God …” etcetera. That’s what Jesus begins with here. Why? The reason, of course, is that in the ancient world, whether the world of Moses or the world of the Greek New Testament, the dominant religions were all polytheistic. Each of the gods had their respective domains. If you wanted to make a sea voyage, you worshiped Neptune and offered the appropriate propitiating sacrifices to make sure Neptune was in a good mood.
If you had to give a speech, then you wanted the god of communication to be on board: Mercury on the Latin camp and Hermes on the Greek camp. You have to get to know these various gods. The Greeks had thousands of them. That meant you could never, ever afford to give all of your allegiance or all of your religious affection to one god, supposing there is only one god.
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.” In other words, the commandment is in the first instance a function of monotheism. That’s fascinating! The Greeks could sometimes say there was one god in a sort of almost pantheistic sense. The Greek texts go back and forth between the god of the singular and god of the plurals, because the sort of “godness” of reality could emerge in all kinds of individual gods.
But the Greeks, although they could say there’s one god, they could never say god is one. That took the Judeo-Christian heritage. That’s what captures our heart and soul and mind and strength. He is the one God. He is the Creator of all. He is the Covenant Redeemer. He has no competitors. That’s the first thing to observe.
The second thing to observe is that in the context of the Old Testament, there is some substance given to what is meant by mind, what it means to love God with your volition and thinking apparatus and mind and so forth. After the commandment itself …
“These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your house and on your gates.”
Then a little farther down. “Fear the Lord your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name. Do not follow other gods …” Then a little farther down. “In the future when your son asks you, ‘What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?’ tell him: ‘We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.
Before our eyes the Lord sent miraculous signs and wonders—great and terrible—upon Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household. But he brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land that he promised on oath to our forefathers. The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God …’ ”
In other words, it seems in the context that to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength entails the constant review of the Lord’s redeeming purposes, the constant repetition of the Lord’s words, and the passing on of them to another generation. In other words, the kind of privatized religion that sees no responsibility for reviewing these things or merely assuming them in the background while you get on with the really important business of cultural analysis becomes a way of not thinking much about God.
When you start to look at things from this perspective, it’s astonishing how many texts line up with precisely this stance. Thus, for example, in Deuteronomy 17, the last three verses (verses 18 to 20), in a context where Moses is envisaging the time when eventually there will be a king in Israel, he writes, “When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law …” Whether this law refers to Deuteronomy or even the Pentateuch, I have no idea.
“… taken from that of the priests who are Levites. It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his brothers and turn from the law to the right or to the left. Then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his kingdom in Israel.”
He becomes king. What’s the first thing he is supposed to do? Audit the books of his predecessor? Appoint a new commander-in-chief? Make sure the Foreign Service is operating nicely? Or, in the ritual of the day, bump off all possible competitors? Nope! The first thing he is supposed to do is take out his quill pen and to copy the words of this law in handwriting that is so clear that it becomes his reading copy for the rest of his life.
Not downloaded from a CD-ROM onto his hard drive without passing to his brain, but rather to write it out in a reading copy that becomes his for the rest of his days and then so to read it as to revere the words of the Lord his God and thus learn not to think of himself better than his fellow citizens, and so forth. If only those three verses of the Old Testament had been observed, all of Old Testament history would have been different.
When Joshua takes over, what is he told? “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; but you shall meditate upon it day and night. Then you shall make your way prosperous. Then you shall have good success.” When the Psalter begins and you have a contrast in the first psalm between the just person and the unjust person, the just person is described negatively in verse 1, what he or she is not like.
“Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers.” Then verse 2 describes the same verse positively. “But his delight will be in the law of the Lord, and on his law he will meditate day and night.” This is a long way from thinking of the Bible as a magic book.
“A verse a day keeps the Devil away.” You know, make sure you have your devotions and then God will bless you, which is surely a form of merit theology. Isn’t it kind of a tit for tat thing? “I stroke God’s back, and he strokes my back.” That’s not the idea at all. The idea, rather, is that by thinking God’s thoughts after him, we become more godlike.
When I first went to Trinity quite a number of years ago, we had an old fellow teaching homiletics on our faculty who was known for his bon mot, his one-liners. You know, he had a lifetime of one-liners he would drop in here and there. Some of them were classic. “You are not what you think you are but what you think you are.” Isn’t that what Proverbs says? “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”
If that’s the case then, “This Book of the Law shall not depart out of your mouth. You shall meditate on it day and night. You should pass it on to your children then when you go by the way and when you’re sitting down and when you’re standing up …” Do you see? How can you possibly have the Christians who love God with their mind if they never think his thoughts after him? Likewise in the New Testament, what does Paul say? “Don’t be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
In fact, if we had time, we could show the second commandment, likewise, is tied to this same vision of the first. For the second commandment (“Love your neighbor as yourself,” drawn from Leviticus 19) is in a context of a whole lot of ethical injunctions. What is surprising is that at the end of about two-thirds of them, the same phrase repeats itself.
“You shall not cheat your neighbor. You shall be fair in giving out the wages to your neighbor. You shall have compassion on the poor” and so on. “And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” At the end of so many of them, the one little line, “I am the Lord. I am the Lord. I am the Lord. I am the Lord …”
Thus the first commandment is the first commandment because it’s the commandment you always break if you break any other. It’s the “de-Godding” of God. It’s the onset of idolatry. But we are to love the Lord our God with heart and soul and mind and strength and our neighbor as ourselves.
The last thing I want to say about this passage is the closing exchange between Jesus and this lawyer who asked the question is sometimes misunderstood. The man responds, “Well …” Then we’re told, “When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.”
What made him not far from the kingdom of God? Was it the fact that the man himself was now loving God so close to perfectly with heart and soul and mind and strength himself and his neighbor as himself that he was pretty close to being in there? If he just sort of kept on along this line a little bit farther, then he would be in. For example, in one of the recent books by Brian McLaren, he quotes this passage, and he says, “This is the summary of the gospel.” He just couldn’t be more mistaken.
The reason why this man is so close to the kingdom is that if he sees that is what God demands, that this is the way the structure of the Old Testament revelation is given, you begin to see for the first time just what the challenge is, and this in a book which, after all, only a chapter and a half earlier, Jesus has already declared very publicly that he came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.
We’re now in chapter 12. After the eschatological discourse of chapter 13, you’re into the passion narrative. You’re into the fact now that Christ came and, in the words of institution, he comes to give his life now, pouring out his lifeblood for many for the remission of sins. In other words, if you put this text within the context of the entire gospel, the Book, then you can no longer conclude that what Jesus means here by, “You’re not far from the kingdom” is, “If you try hard enough to obey these laws, you might get in.”
But if you understand this is right at the heart of absolutely everything, you will see simultaneously what the nature of sin is, and you will see what we must become under the gospel, or the whole thing is a schmaltzy, useless bit of religious tomfoolery. Here is our guilt. Here is our prospect. Here is our glory. Here’s God-centeredness. Here is others-centeredness.
Within the passion of the entire Book, this is what the gospel brings about. It’s what we pursue, because the church still hears the words, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Just as he brought Israel out of the land of Egypt at the time of the exodus, so he brings us out of our slavery by the death of his own Son. The gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ. All four of our canonical gospels are books that are essentially passion narratives with long introductions.
If you don’t see that, you don’t understand how they work. Then the first and second commandments establish our guilt and our shame and the goal toward which we press because Christ Jesus came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. Shall we pray?
Lord God, we confess that considering how long most of us have been Christians, we understand so little of your most Holy Word. We are ashamed. We read it too little. We think about it too little. Lord God, make us hungry to hide your Word in our hearts that we may learn not to sin against you, to reflect upon it, think about it, not as an end in itself, and certainly not that we might be masters of the Word so much as we might be mastered by it.
Grant that this will mean not that we become great thinkers as great lovers but who love you with our minds and hearts, with our souls, our whole strength. For you, O Lord, are alone God. We confess our sins and bow before you and declare our utter and happy dependence upon you because of the gift of your dear Son, in whose name we pray, amen.
Male: If you will just stand for a minute. As I was sitting back there listening to this going on in 10–15 minutes, the image just came to me. There’s just so much richness here. You know? I thought it was like having pieces of cake and just throwing them in my mouth and just trying to swallow them down. But the richness of that holy meditation is not cake. It’s meat. So thank you for that very much.
Don Carson: It’s my privilege to be here.
Male: I don’t know how to move from it, but I want to, because I want to give you all the opportunity for at least the next 10–15 minutes to have an opportunity to ask questions. You know that’s part of what the Study Center does. We like to dialogue. We like to ask questions and have discussions, and even make comments. This is a group many of whom know each other and all of whom have not only obviously the binding of Christ and his Holy Spirit but also a deep love for this place. Please feel free to make comments or to ask questions of Don. Thanks.
Don: Sir?
Male: I’m curious. As you’ve taught seminary students now over the years at Trinity, how have they changed (if they have) in their understanding of loving God with their mind? Go back to when you were a young pup on the faculty versus now. What do you see is the difference in the students as you’re teaching them, at least on this theme?
Don: The question was, since I’ve been on the faculty at Trinity since approximately the time of the ark, what changes have I seen in the profile of students, not least with respect to the kind of question I was dealing with tonight. Is that a fair representation?
Male: It is.
Don: The age has gone up and down for start. When I first started, the average incoming age was 25. It went up to about 34. It’s come down to about 28 or 29. That in itself is quite interesting. There are far, far, far more second- and third-career people, but that’s part of a national trend in which people are not making vocational decisions at 16 or 18 anymore but after they’ve done their first two degrees. Then they change their minds and go in some other direction. I am speaking now as a father paying college bills.
The biggest thing with respect to this theme is that there is a smaller percentage of them who come from Christian homes. A pretty high percentage 30 years ago came from Christian homes, and not an insignificant percentage came from the manse itself. But now the vast majority come from non-Christian homes and got converted somewhere along the line (high school, college, even beyond college) and now are seeking training.
In one sense, that brings a certain kind of freshness, a certain kind of alertness and awareness of what the gospel does in changing people. It also means a lot of them are carrying a fair bit of baggage. Some of them come from broken homes, broken marriages themselves. They did their round of drugs and various forms of abuse at one time, and now they’re converted.
It feels more and more like the New Testament church. There’s a sense in which you’re working less and less out of a sort of Judeo-Christian heritage environment and more and more out of a pagan, unbelieving/secular environment. That brings another set of challenges, but it also brings a certain kind of freshness and immediacy.
My favorite time of the week is in our formation group, a small group I have. In fact, I run it with another chap … we decided to put them together and run it together … where we spend time in prayer and all kinds of pastoral and other issues. Those are the students we first have to our home, and we get to know them and their spouses and their children and so on.
We have very, very few who are not deeply committed to vocational ministry and increasing numbers who are seeing the importance of worldview formation as opposed to mere how-to’s. I guess I’d go further. There are quite a lot of them who have bought into more post-modernism than is good for them without quite understanding what they’ve bought into.
That tends to make faith merely a personal choice rather than having clear perceptions of how faith relates to truth, which is one of the things I want to deal with briefly tonight. That shapes sometimes notions of loving God in directions of personal intensity, just a bit too divorced from truth for my liking. I don’t want a lack of intensity, but this thing had better be shaped by thinking God’s thoughts after him, or I’m not sure we’re loving God with our minds.
Don: Sir?
Male: Don, when you were referring, of course, to the monotheism that was central, would it be fair to say that in an either polytheistic or other type of society, you really couldn’t have love for God because everything you did was motivated by some fear of not dispensing a sufficient portion to each of the gods? In other words, is that in itself an unusual concept for Jesus to be introducing that you could actually have love for God, or did that exist?
Don: The question is, in polytheism, was the entire notion of loving God virtually unknown partly because you’re parceling out your devotion amongst the gods but also because of the structure of religion and all the kind of tit for tat, “You scratch my back; I scratch yours”? So there’s a fair bit of fear.
Male: [Inaudible]
Don: Yes. There is no doubt that there is a considerable amount of fear in polytheistic forms of religion. That’s true in various forms of animism today, and it’s true that it was also there, especially at the street level in the first century. On the other hand, almost every branch of world religions has some sort of mystical sector to it.
So in Islam, some forms of Sufism, and Hinduism rather likewise.… The more mystical branches often devolve into a kind of fairly sentimental mystical understanding of love that is not exactly loving with your mind but is pretty intense and can involve heart affection in pretty deep ways. Now I don’t think that’s the way most folk religion works, but on the other hand, you don’t want to overstate the case and suggest people can’t really have any sort of appreciation of loving God and feel it unless they become Christians.
Don: Yes?
Female: You spoke of students buying into more post-modernism than is good for them perhaps than they had realized. Could you elaborate at all on your approach to setting out the biblical understanding of truth, of the absolute truth, to somebody who doesn’t think in those categories?
Don: Well, you’ve just pushed my buttons since I’ve written two books on the subject. So I could rabbit on this one almost world without end. I think there are two things to be framed up. It is no answer to respond to post-modernism by becoming knee-jerk moderns. Mere conservatism on this issue is certainly not right. The best Christian apologists and theoreticians were very much aware of the danger of modernism that began with Descartes’, “I think, therefore I am.”
Pre-modernism begins with God, because God has all knowledge. Therefore, all human knowledge is necessarily a subset of his. It’s tied in one sense or another to revelation by definition. Now the problem with the pre-modern period was it was also tied to a whole lot of superstition. It was not an unmitigated blessing. But at least in theory it began with God, the European model.
But beginning with Cartesian thought (or at least around that time), it begins with a finite being as I. Then God becomes a conclusion rather than the premise to begin with. That is already somehow intrinsically wicked. It’s already intrinsically idolatrous. It eventually led to the huge split in Christian apologetics between evidentialists and presuppositionalists, which split, I think, can be put together in a different way once you come to post-modernism. But that’s another whole subject.
The fact of the matter is, insofar as post-modernism reminds us that because we’re finite, we inevitably look at things from a certain perspective, then post-modernism is right. I have often said that there are only two kinds of perspectivalists in the world: those who admit it and those who don’t. We are perspectivalists. In essence post-modernism is saying some very important and useful things.
The danger.… I now, usually, when I talk about these things, make a distinction between strong post-modernism and weak post-modernism, hard and soft post-modernism. I think soft post-modernism is basically a good thing, because it softens some of the categories of hard modernists. We are perspectivalists. The problem is the strong post-modernists then want to say, “Because we look at things from a certain perspective, we cannot know anything truly.”
Then implicitly the standard of knowledge is omniscience. If the center of human knowing is omniscience, then obviously we can’t know anything. Then the standard is ridiculously high. We can know some things truly without knowing anything exhaustively. Even in eternity, we’ll never know anything exhaustively. We’ll always be finite beings. Omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of God. That is an attribute of God he cannot share with others. We’ll never know everything. We never know everything about anything.
Therefore, a certain kind of humility in recognizing that we do look at things from a certain perspective is not a bad thing, but it can still be a truthful thing. There are all kinds of models that can be shown to work out appropriately, developed by others. I spend quite a lot of time with my students working those things through. I don’t think Christians should ever be enthralled either to modernism or post-modernism, but there are some things to learn from both and things to repudiate in both.
The problem is there are quite a lot of people with the emerging church movement, and so on who could only say bad things about modernism and only say good things about post-modernism. They’re in terrible danger of getting snookered at every front because the strong forms of post-modernism ultimately lead, whether you like it or not, to forms of relativism and a lack of moral absolutes and so on.
Don: Yes?
Male: Don, you ended your meditation with what you called the gospel. Could you tell us the ways you see your students misunderstanding the gospel?
Don: It depends what background they come in from, because Trinity draws students from about 75 denominations. So they come in from different sectors. At the risk of horrible over-simplification, I think different branches of biblically-based Christianity, more or less, are tempted to certain kinds of sins. If you’re in the Arminian camp, you may be tempted toward openness theology.
No Reformed type is going to be tempted by openness theology. Give me a break! On the other hand, if you’re in the Reformed camp, you might be tempted by theonomy. I’ve just stepped on some toes. Sorry, but it’s a mistake.
Male: What do you mean by a theonomy?
Don: Is that not a category that is …?
Male: Oh yeah.
Don: Yep. Yep.
Male: It’s more subtle.
Don: Well, let me finish my point before we take that little excursion. Then if you want to come back to it, we will. You could say that about quite a lot of other things too. In other words, there are certain kinds of temptations that are connected with certain branches of evangelicalism, broadly considered. So some who come in to us from Bible Belt evangelicalism simplicture, a simplified form where the gospel is the easy bit, just to admit, believe, confess, or something very simple. Do you see that? That’s what the gospel is.
Then it’s all this theology over there, that rather dubious stuff, instead of seeing, in fact, that the gospel is at the heart of absolutely everything. It’s the controlling category, and theology is a reflection on it. Then obviously there is a whole lot of re-categorizing of things that has to be done. Then you get some people who come in with a lot of proof text knowledge, Sunday school proof text knowledge, but have no idea about how the Bible is put together as a storyline.
I don’t think you can have worldview formation until you get the Bible’s storyline, the Bible’s metanarrative, put together. I don’t think you can do it. You have to spend time building up that too. It depends an awful lot, it seems to me, on what people are bringing with them and what they’re kept by.
Then inevitably, you get some who come in.… Formally, they believe you’re saved by grace through faith. But in reality, if you haven’t had your devotions today, they’re going to be guilty all day. I’m not saying this becomes an excuse for sloppiness in life, but at the end of the day, they have gospel plus some legal code to win God’s approval. Then I think there is a shortage of really understanding what the gospel is.
Or the gospel becomes trusting Jesus as your personal Savior, and there is some understanding that Christ died for our sins. I mean, he bore our sins in his own body on the tree. They can recite those texts, but they really haven’t thought through what the atonement is really about, what penal substitution looks like, why it works, how it functions in Scripture, and how it’s related to questions of reconciliation and exemplary moral categories and Christus Victor themes, and so on.
It’s not thought through in a holistic way. It’s almost formulaic. Unless you see that the human being’s biggest problem is, in one sense, God, then you’re not prepared to see that the human being’s only hope is also God. Until you begin to see that, you don’t understand the cross. People come in often with pretty deficient views of what the gospel is, and it takes a while to work through the biblical text, the biblical theology, to get to that place. Thank you.
Male: All good things must come to an end, right? Let’s thank Don one more time.
