Love the Lord Your God With All Your Mind

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”  And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”  Luke 10:25-28 ESV

What does it mean to love God? How are we to love Him? What are we to love about Him? What parts of ourselves are we to employ in this endeavor? 

It has become popular in church circles today to emphasize loving God through the heart, the seat of our desires, affections, and emotions. Scholars such as James K.A. Smith promote recalibrating these desires through implementing intentionally formative habits, liturgies, and rituals. This whole-body approach to worship, Smith teaches, will form over time our desires to long for God’s kingdom above all else.

Smith is writing in response to what he believes has become a key error in the western church today: an overemphasis on human rationality. Smith does not deny that the human capacity to think, remember, and understand is essential to being human. But, Smith contends, it is not sufficient. Therefore, a full-orbed approach to discipleship and education will include the intentional formation of the heart, specifically through encountering beauty in communities through art, music, poetry, nature, and feasts.

In general, I agree with Smith and have interacted closely with his writing, such as here. A human is more than a brain on a stick. At the same time, it is important for Christians today to not swing to the other side of the pendulum and ignore human rationality altogether. In 1994, Mark Noll, who taught at Wheaton College before Notre Dame, famously wrote The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Spoiler alert: The scandal Noll refers to essentially is that, at the time of the publication of the book, there was not much of an evangelical mind. Conservative, Bible-believing Christians too often settled for tweet-length quips (before Twitter), proof texting, and feel-good theology as an alternative to quality research. 

Similarly, in 2018, Jonathan Haidt, an agnostic social psychologist at New York University, wrote The Coddling of the American Mind to raise the alarm that many Americans today have exchanged a rigorous pursuit of truth for group think and emotional reasoning. As a result, we have sidelined the mind from doing the intellectual work God intended it to, specifically the task of thinking through complex topics with lucidity and care.

In this second article in my ongoing series on the life of the mind, I want to dig deeper into Jesus’ command in the gospels to love God with the mind, alongside heart, soul, and strength. According to Jesus, one’s intellectual life is not spiritually neutral. What we think about, how we think, and our approach to learning itself all contain import for the way we know and love God. A key aspect of Christian discipleship, therefore, becomes cultivating the life of the mind for a vibrant love of God to grow. Let us now explore how this might be.

Jesus‘ Pursuit of Wisdom From the Past

One distinctive characteristic of the Christian classical education renewal movement is an enthusiasm for gleaning wisdom from the past. This knowledge of ancient wisdom provides students with a broader context for the history of ideas and helps them better discern truth from falsehood in their own day. 

To illustrate this insight, C.S. Lewis uses the metaphor of a clock. He writes, “If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said…Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeking certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period” (“Introduction” to On the Incarnation, p. 4). 

When we read the teachings of Jesus, we find that our Lord shared this deep appreciation for wisdom from the past. As a faithful Jew, Jesus was a faithful follower of the Old Testament Law, which he believed was wisdom revealed by God himself. In Luke 10:25-28, a legal expert approaches Jesus with the goal to put this knowledge of the Law to the test. With a striking blend of authority and compassion, Jesus showcases his commitment to the Law while counter-testing the legal expert with his own question.

The Shema with Two Additions

The legal expert’s test question is about how to inherit eternal life, the answer of which both he and Jesus agree is found in the Law. Quoting the Pentateuch, the expert recites to Jesus, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” (Deut. 6:5). Without pause, he continues “and [love] your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18).

It is important to note that the Deuteronomy passage is one of the most well-known in Jewish history and culture. It begins with the injunction, “Hear, O Israel,” which becomes the inspiration for the passage’s name, Shema (the word for “hear” in Hebrew is “Shema”). For faithful Jews, the Shema is handwritten on a small parchment and placed at shoulder height on the doorposts of observant Jewish homes (see Joel B. Green’s The Gospel of Luke of the New International Commentary series for further background on this passage). This practice is in accordance with Moses’ command in the passage to teach the words of the Law to Hebrew tradition throughout all facets of everyday life.

Interestingly, in Jesus’ conversation with the legal expert, there are two notable additions to the Shema. One is the neighbor-love command. The other is the inclusion of the mind to the list of ways humans are commanded to love God. (In the Shema, Moses lists heart, soul, and might, but not mind because the heart in Hebrew anthropology includes one’s rationality.) While both additions are worth exploring, in this article, I will focus only on the second, the addition of the mind as a pathway for loving God.

Love’s Four-Fold Structure

In his new book The Life We’re Looking For (Penguin Random House, 2022), author Andy Crouch references the Shema to offer a biblically-informed summary of what being fully human involves: “Every human person is a heart-soul-mind-strength complex designed for love” (33). 

Crouch distills these four categories as follows:

• Heart: the seat of desire and emotion
• Soul: the depth of self that is distinctive to each person

• Mind: the capacity and inclination to better understand our experience of God and this world

• Strength: the ability to work and play with all our being 

Together, this four-fold structure of what it means to be human finds its underlying goal to love, first and foremost, God, and also our neighbor. Crouch writes, “Most of all, we are designed for love–primed before we were born to seek out others, wired neurologically to respond with empathy and recognition, coming most alive when we are in relationships of mutual dependence and trust. Love calls out the best in us–it awakens our hearts, it stirs up the depths of our souls, it focuses our minds, it arouses our bodies to action and passion (35). 

A Loving Mind

The question, then, is how do we love God with our minds? What does a loving mind look? How do we hold together the deep affections of the heart with the activities of the mind? I will continue this inquiry in my next article, but for now, I will leave readers with three potential categories for how we might answer the question.

What we think about

Paul writes in Philippians 4:8 that Christians are to think about “…whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise.” It seems to me that one way we love God is by filtering the attention and content of our minds on what is good, true, and beautiful, all of which comes from God Himself.

How we think

While the mind is often connoted with cold rationality, I want to suggest that there is an artistry to mental activity that can be warm, elegant, and connective. When humans learn to think wisely according to the broader vision of wisdom as described in the Book of Proverbs, they flourish in a way that aligns with how God created the world. Proverbs 8 provides clues, specifically, for how the pursuit of wisdom connects to loving God with our minds.

Our approach to learning

In modern society, learning has been stripped of its relational qualities in service of utilitarian ends. Knowledge is power, or at least, the avenue for getting into college. But what if the pursuit of knowledge is meant to be primarily a relational enterprise? We form relationships with whom and that which we know. We can love God with our minds when we seek knowledge about Him that our love for Him may abound.

Join the Conversation

These are preliminary ideas that I will pick up in my next article. For now, I would be curious to hear what you think. How can we love God with our minds? Please comment below and join me in this exploration.

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