Healing Our Stinking Thinking

A comment to a previous post continues to bounce around in my mind like a pinball machine – thanks Lenny.

I heard believers “…stating that only “Christian(s)” do the “right thing” for nonselfish reasons and non-believers do the “right thing” for selfish motives. These people have been believers since childhood. It is my opinion that they have had little experience with choosing the “right thing” without relating to God. I remember choosing to the do the “right thing” unselfishly before being a believer, so I disagreed with their belief. With this being my experience I have questioned what difference does God make in our lives?

The quality of a believer’s here-and-now thinking and choosing is the issue (not eternal destiny).  How we answer this question makes a significant difference.

It may feel audaciously offensive to suggest that a significant part of being a Christ-follower is to seek a complete transformation one’s thinking to be radically different from where we began our faith journey and different from fellow non-believers. It sounds arrogant and offensive in our world of pluralist acceptance. But the embarrassingly simplistic answer given to Lenny is also offensive. What Christ-follower wants to claim they’ve always made a good choice from only unselfish motives?

Yet, that that transformation in thinking from natural reason to what T. F. Torrance calls “instinctively theological” is clearly what the Apostle Paul experienced and called Christ-followers to seek:

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.  And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him…. Col 1:19-22a  NRSV

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. Rom 12:2 NRSV

 The difference between the simplistic answer Lenny heard and what Paul is saying is that the transformation is a process and not simply an automatic change of moving to being a Christ-follower. In fact, it is a life-long arduous process that must be embraced intentionally. When the Gospel is “sold” as a quick decision focused on not going to hell someday it lends itself to a lack of focus on the transformation of the mind here-and-now.

But the very heart of the task is “… the transforming of the human mind in such a way that it is no longer conformed to the patterns of this world but brought through renewal into conformity to Christ through the communion of our mind with the mind of God in him and its assimilation to the holiness and truth incarnate in Jesus. This is far from being easy, but it is something which fidelity to the gospel will not allow us to avoid.” T. F. Torrance (Atonement p. 442)

The strong emphasis Torrance makes about this transformation in thinking and his loyalty to the church makes his criticism of the church’s effectiveness in helping people experience it even more audacious:

“This (the rejection of the need for transformation of the Christ-follower’s mind) applies not the least to ‘evangelical Christianity’ today, which on the whole seems to work with what may be called “unbaptized reason’, … Hence the mind of the church and mind of society are not inwardly formed by the Gospel – they remain basically unevangelized. The reason for this is that we have not taken seriously enough this New Testament emphasis that the mind of man is alienated at its very root.” (Atonement p. 440).

More pondering to come ….