It seems to me that we have lost sight of the significance of the human mind. Here I mean more than one’s brain, but not less than it. Humans cannot be reduced to physical neurology, but neither can they be understood apart from it. We are mind-body unities, created as embodied souls, or ensouled bodies, infused with a rich, albeit mysterious, integration of physical and spiritual realities.
Nevertheless, when I say we have lost sight of the significance of the human mind, I am not referring to the significance we ascribe to our brains. We require young children to wear helmets when learning to ride a bike. We instruct people to cover their heads when walking through a construction site. We are taught in wellness classes how to care for our brains through exercise, eating proper nutrients, and turning off screens. The brain is well cared for in many respects.
The mind, not so much. Apart from mental healthcare, which is on the rise today, the mind is taken for granted as the faculty we possess to focus on whatever we please. These days, online video streaming is one popular option. Another is listening to music and podcasts. Too often, however, these objects of the mind do not offer it real sustenance. The sort of nourishment that comes through contemplating knowledge, the truth, and worthy ideas.
Why did God give us minds? What are they for? These are some of the questions I will explore in this new blog series. By digging deeper into what it means to be human and how we come to know, I hope to put forward a fresh vision for cultivating and caring for the life of the mind.
A Biblical Starting Point
Proverbs 3:5-7 notably instructs the listener to, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD, and turn away from evil” (ESV).
Although this passage does not use the word “mind” specifically, it is a helpful starting point for digging deeper into what it means to be human. In the ancient Hebrew conceptual world, one’s heart and mind are inseparable. As Timothy Pickavance notes in Knowledge for the Love of God (Eerdmans, 2022), the Hebrew word translated as “heart” can mean a number of things, but predominantly the whole of a person. In this way, it both individually and collectively refers to one’s will, emotions/desires, and even the intellect (20).
This conception of a human being’s inner life helps us make better sense of Proverbs 3:5, specifically how the verse connects heart to both trust and understanding. Intellectual activity, what we typically think of as the life of the mind, cannot be so easily disentangled from the emotions we experience, the decisions we make, or the things we love. The mind, we can say, is involved in whole-self flourishing.
Getting the Self in Order
Contemporary culture, as we know, promotes self-authenticity and the importance of expressing our selves to those around us. What we need to wisely decipher is where biblical and cultural views of the self align and where they differ.
One way to test this alignment is through looking at specific cultural examples. For instance, the cultural anthem of the past decade is, arguably, “Let it Go,” featured in Disney’s 2013 film Frozen. In the story behind the song, the main character experiences a crisis of self-identity as she seeks to keep secret a magical power, all within a fast-paced narrative featuring a talking snowman, ice palace, and snow monster. At a key moment in the story, the character finally accepts her identity, magical powers and all, and belts out a solo, promising to hide her true self no longer.
The salient point, illustrated through “Let it Go,” is that in contemporary culture, the self is fundamentally what one feels, in a psychological and emotional sense, about one’s self. The will and the intellect are eclipsed by feeling, steering the mind to a myopically inward focus. (For those interested, Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, helpfully traces the intellectual history of this view of what it means to be human.)
Alternatively, the biblical view observed in Proverbs 3:5 affirms the complexity of a human’s inner life, even while upholding its unity. A human is physical, but she is more than a body. A human is emotional, but she is more than her feelings. A human is intellectual, but she is more than the summary of her beliefs.
Descartes’ Cogito and the Foundation of Knowledge
With this view of what it means to be human, we can now turn to the pursuit of knowledge. As J.P. Moreland observes in Kingdom Triangle (Zondervan, 2007), the Bible has a rich focus on knowledge and the importance of knowing. For example, the prophet Hosea laments,
My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I will also reject you from being my priest. Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.
Hosea 4:6 (NIV)
Here we see an emphasis on both knowledge and forgetfulness. It turns out that the pursuit and recollection of knowledge is no mere intellectual endeavor. It has real-life implications for those who would seek to live as the people of God. It is therefore of fundamental importance that we not only pursue knowledge, but get it right.
In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Rene Descartes (1596-1650) understood precisely this in his own modern context. It was the pursuit of certain and unadulterated knowledge that led him to what he believed to be the only sure foundation of knowledge: belief in his own existence. Descartes’ well-known cogito— “I think therefore I am”– became his starting point as he realized that the only truth he could not coherently doubt is his own self-existence. For, the ability to even doubt one’s existence is evidence for it.
As intriguing as this argument is, a foundation of knowledge centered on the self should give us pause. Though the logic holds up, and no doubt sheds some light on what we can know with confidence, the cogito propelled Descartes and modern philosophers who came after him down a path illuminated by human reason alone. In doing so, they lost sight of divine illumination and the limitations of the human mind to fully understand.
Modernism: From Progress to Desolation
Postmodernism, along with its offspring relativism, is feared by many Christians today (and for good reason). However, what some fail to remember is that late modernism was no friend to Christianity either. While it is true that Descartes did reason from the cogito to the Christian faith via deductive logic, it was not long for subsequent modernists to reach a different conclusion, using their minds to argue for a naturalistic view of reality.
The chief problem with modernism is that it puts too much stock in the power of human reason to know. While modernists held to universal and objective truth, what they failed to see is that knowledge of the truth is a gracious gift of God. In a post-Fall world, every facet of a human is fallen. This is what Calvinists mean by the phrase “total depravity.” There is not a single square inch of a human person that is free from the effects of sin. This includes the mind.
As a result of this optimism in human reason, it was not long for the modernist conception of knowledge to simultaneously achieve impressive outcomes and run off course. With the success of modern science and technology, mastery over the natural world accelerated quickly, and with it, impressive advances in everyday life, from efficient machinery to increased life spans. However, at the same time, philosophers and scientists began to imagine life without God’s existence as not only possible, but probable.
Of course, we know that the era of modernism did not end well. The same modernistic philosophy that led to the birth of modern medicine paved the way for the creation of the atomic bomb. It need not be hypothesized what unbridled human reason leads to: two world wars, nuclear weapons, and multiple instances of genocide.
Postmodernism and a Post-Truth World
While modernism was correct to assume the existence of objective truth, it lost its way by untethering the quest for this truth from theology. Our modern scientific era has led us to believe that belief in the supernatural is unfounded, dubious, and impossible to reasonably defend. And yet, for as long as humans have existed, common wisdom has pointed to the existence and need for the divine. It takes a fair amount of hubris to disagree with millennia of sagacious insight on the deep questions of existence, and yet, this is precisely what the modern era has maintained.
That is, until the emergence of Postmodernism. Nowadays, it is acceptable to believe in God so long as one does not claim that truth about God’s existence is objective. Truth now resides communally rather than universally. How did this shift come about?
In Knowledge for the Love of God, which I quoted earlier, philosopher Timothy Pickavance suggests that the turn came, in part, with the shift from Newtonian to Einstenian physics (35). Isaac Newton (1643-1727), like other modern scientists, conceived of the world within a closed system. As he discovered and articulated the laws of physics, the universe was perceived to be orderly and predictable. However, with Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, this mechanistic view of the universe was displaced (see video below). Today, scientists know that the laws of the universe are relative to the space-time relationship and that atoms can be broken down into smaller, unpredictable entities called quarks. The upshot is that a purely materialistic conception of the universe turns out to be nothing other than a bunch of tiny things endlessly bumping into each other.
Postmodernists, conscious of this scientific discovery as well as the maladies of the 20th century, continue to feel the human longing for meaning but can no longer confidently ground it in something universal and objective. The result is that truth is now posited as subjective and relative to communities. These days, the deposing of truth as the final authority, especially biblical truth, has left the door wide open for Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power” prediction to come true. The emergence of different critical theories which offer totalizing power-centric explanations of society is the result of a world that left confidence in objective truth behind. Throw in the internet’s ability to fragment information and stoke mob-appeal instincts, and you have a recipe for the confusion so many people experience today.
Conclusion
To cultivate the life of the mind, we need to have clarity on the nature of the mind and what it is for. In this blog, I have attempted to show that the mind is one faculty within a complex, fully integrated self. As we observed in scripture, the mind is not so easily separable from the heart as contemporary culture would have us believe. The thoughts, beliefs, desires, decisions, and feelings we experience are all bound up together into what it means to be an embodied soul. To care for the mind, therefore, is to likewise care for all areas of one’s inner life. As we seek together to foster an educational renaissance in our modern era, a pivotal first step will be to retrace our steps to this full-orbed view of the mind. When we take this physical-spiritual perspective, we will not so easily lose sight of our need for divine grace in the pursuit of real knowledge, a trap into which both moderns and postmoderns have fallen.
