3. Habits of the Christian Mind
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Habits of the Christian Mind
The Community of Faith and Personal Growth
My topic in this chapter is the role of the community of faith—the church—in the process of Christian discipleship. For C. S. Lewis, reflecting on his own experience of spiritual growth and theological reflection, it seemed clear that “the one really adequate instrument for learning about God is the Christian community.” So how are we to understand the role of the church in developing habits of thought that are rooted in the fundamentals of the Christian faith? In this chapter, I want to highlight one aspect of the identity of the church, firmly rooted in its history, that I believe to be important for both Christian discipleship and the witness of the church to the world—namely, understanding the church as a visionary community, enabling us to see the world and ourselves in a new and compelling light, and to sustain this sense of wonder through worship and adoration.
The Christian Vision: On Seeing Things as They Really Are
The New Testament affirms that the human situation is transformed by the Christian gospel. This renewal and regeneration is not restricted to moral and relational matters but also extends to the way that we think about ourselves and our world, summed up in Paul’s great injunction to his readers to be actively “transformed by the renewing of your minds” rather than being passively “conformed to this world” (Rom. 12:2). The New Testament uses a wide range of images to describe this change, many of which suggest a change to the way in which we see the world. Our eyes are healed so that we might see properly; a veil is removed so that obstacles to our beholding of God’s world might be removed. For the New Testament, such a process of transformation is invariably seen as a gracious act of God rather than something that we can do by ourselves.
This radical reorientation of the human understanding and manner of beholding the world is often described by the New Testament and early Christian writers as metanoia—a Greek word traditionally translated as “repentance,” yet its full meaning is probably better expressed as a “transformation of the mind.” For those who have experienced a dramatic moment of conversion, this takes the form of disruption of a settled secular habit of thought, leading to the development of a habit of the mind that is rooted in and informed by the Christian faith. For others, it is about continued growth in their faith, in which our minds and imaginations become saturated and infused with the realities of the Christian faith.
This is not an instantaneous event but, rather, is a gradual process of transformation that requires nourishment and development through discipline and practice. The New Testament uses a series of analogies to speak of such intellectual and spiritual disciplines, such as an athlete in training for a race and a soldier negotiating the boundaries between his civilian and military commitments (1 Cor. 9:24–26; 2 Tim. 2:3–4). We may embrace Christ in conversion, yet this act of commitment is followed by an extended exploration of the landscape of faith, which we have now made our home.
Paul’s concept of the “mind of Christ” is open to a number of interpretations, but is perhaps most naturally understood as a settled way of thinking, capable of expansion and consolidation, which allows our experience of the world to be structured and consolidated within the framework of the Christian faith. Through faith, Christians develop habits of engagement with our world that allow it to be seen, understood, and evaluated in new ways. While this process of transformation and growth takes place within the individual believer, it is encouraged and informed by the community of faith as a whole.
This important point was emphasized by Augustine of Hippo, who argued that the Christian church and its ministers had a critically important role to play in encouraging and sustaining the intellectual, moral, and spiritual transformation of believers: “Our whole business in this life is to heal the eye of the heart [sanare oculum cordis] in order that God may be seen. It is for this reason that the holy mysteries are celebrated and the word of God is preached, and it is towards this goal that the moral exhortations of the church are directed.”
Augustine’s arresting phrase “heal the eye of the heart”—which draws on the imagery of Ephesians 1:18—suggests that gaining these new habits of thought can be compared to a blind person being enabled to see and appreciate the world for the first time. The true beauty of the world is hidden from us until we are enabled to see it properly. Yet while God is the ultimate enabler of the process of healing and renewal that allows us to see things as they really are, other agencies are involved in the mediation of this transformation—above all, the Christian church.
Augustine sees the Christian community as playing a critical role in this process by reinforcing this way of seeing things by its proclamation and sacramental ministries, which both narrate and enact this vision of reality, correlating it with human experience. Rowan Williams expresses much the same idea when he speaks of discipleship as a process of formation and discernment by which “the particularities of experience are brought slowly into interconnection with the communally-confessed truth of God’s nature and activity.”
A similar point is made by the American theologian Stanley Hauerwas, who stressed the importance of developing and maintaining a distinctively Christian approach to ethics. Once more, we find an emphasis on the distinctiveness of the Christian way of seeing (and hence evaluating) the world. We need a framework or lens through which we may “see” the world of human behavior. This is provided by sustained, detailed, extended reflection on the Christian narrative, which is articulated and enacted in the life and witness of the church: “The primary task of Christian ethics involves an attempt to help us see. For we can only act within the world we can see, and we can only see the world rightly by being trained to see. We do not come to see just by looking, but by disciplined skills developed through initiation into a narrative.”
The Christian church thus embodies a way of seeing the world that is proclaimed and sustained by its controlling words, images, and actions. There is an obvious correlation here with Alasdair MacIntyre’s insights into how communities maintain their identity through “habits” of thought and action, which are mediated through traditions. We are thus called on to see the world in its true light, by adopting a Christian “mental map” that enables the world to be illuminated and brought into focus, so it may be seen as it really is. Hauerwas thus insists that “the church serves the world by giving the world the means to see itself truthfully.”
The church can thus act as a channel of spiritual insight or as a lens of theological vision. As Austin Farrer once remarked, we “see through the Church of Christ as a man sees through the telescope to the stars.” To speak of the church as a community of theological “vision,” however, transcends the task of making sense of the present, in that the church also looks ahead to a better, transformed future, shaped by the Christian hope. The church has a role to play as a sign, instrument, and foretaste of the kingdom of God, pointing toward the renewal of humanity’s hopes and the transformation of its situation through grace. The church possesses the capacity to disclose this better future and to model and embody this in its witness to the world. The church both anticipates the coming of the New Jerusalem in its proclamation and worship, and seeks to embody and exhibit its values in the present.
The Christian Vision and the Transformation of Reality
My core argument in this chapter is that the Christian faith offers a way of seeing reality that brings about a transformation and reevaluation of our understanding of the world and our place within it. It strips away our delusions about reality, illuminating it and bringing it into sharp focus so that we may see it as it really is. The Christian church is a community that has been molded by this vision and that in turn bears witness to its capacity to illuminate and transform.
The language of “seeing” reality calls into question the adequacy of simply “thinking about” our world. Christian discipleship is imaginative, not simply rational, demanding expansion of the capacity of all our faculties—reason, imagination, and emotions—to accommodate the rich and overwhelming vision of God set out in the New Testament and enacted in the worship and proclamation of the church. This imaginatively compelling and intellectually enriching vision of reality is mediated by the community of faith. Individual believers are thus reflective inhabitants of this tradition, simultaneously being nourished by its received wisdom and invited to deepen their appreciation of its vision of the gospel through attentive reflection (1 Thess. 5:21).
We might think of the church as an “interpretive community,” to use a term favored by the literary critic Stanley Fish, that crystallizes around and proclaims a particular “point of view or way of organizing experience.” The Christian church can thus be seen as an interpretive community that crystallizes around what Rowan Williams styles “the one focal interpretive story of Jesus”—a particular interpretation of the texts of Scripture, history, and nature, understood in terms of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, or a trinitarian “economy of salvation” of creation, redemption, and consummation.
The community of faith thus sees the world in a manner that differs strikingly from what Charles Taylor termed the prevailing “social imaginaries,” a term he uses to designate the ways in which people imagine their social existence. The church should therefore proclaim, exhibit, and embody its own “social imaginary,” which is deeply rooted in the gospel. Christians and others engage with the same empirical realities—what we might loosely call “the world”—but they nevertheless see (and hence understand and evaluate) them in very different ways.
“Nature” is thus seen in different ways by communities or individuals, in that they observe the natural world through different theoretical lenses, which shape what they “see.” The term “nature” thus denotes a variety of ways in which human observers choose to see, interpret, and inhabit the empirical world. The question concerns the best or most appropriate lens or interpretative framework through which we are to behold the natural world. The issue will be familiar from the philosophy of science. The great nineteenth-century philosopher of science William Whewell (1794–1866) pointed out that there is “a mask of theory over the whole face of nature.” More recently, the philosopher of science N. R. Hanson has argued persuasively that the process of observation is “theory-laden.”
Christianity offers us a theoria, a “sort of intellectual seeing”—a way of beholding our world that interprets and values the natural world as God’s creation, with an imparted capacity to disclose the God who created it. We might think here of the moral philosopher R. M. Hare, who wrote of the importance of what he termed a “blik”—a way of envisaging reality meaningfully, which gave him confidence to live and think morally rather than being forced to rely on the severely limited deliverances of possible sense experience.
In part, we evaluate a theory by trying to work out its capacity to enable us to see something more clearly, more comprehensively, more plausibly, and more fruitfully. A good theory enriches our vision of reality rather than limiting itself to “saving the phenomena.” This point was appreciated by Iris Murdoch, who spoke of the need to see beyond the realm of the empirical to discern deeper truths about the world beyond its horizon. Such an act of informed imagination, she argues, is able to go beyond “what could be said to be strictly factual”; it is thus to be contrasted with “strict” or “scientific” thinking, which focuses on a surface reading of things. This deeper engagement with reality allows us legitimately to construct meaning and value rather than contenting ourselves with the mere identification of natural mechanisms and processes.
Three Elements of the Discipleship of the Mind
Christianity offers us a mental map of reality, which it affirms to be truthful and trustworthy. Part of the discipleship of faith is the exploration and appreciation of the “coherence of Christian doctrine,” which is best thought of as an interconnected web of ideas. This process of exploration can be thought of as having three main elements.
In the first place, we must consider the reasons for believing that a certain doctrine is true. What are the warrants for accepting its trustworthiness? A major responsibility of Christian theology is to explore the web of ideas that enfold the Christian experience of the living God, and demonstrate their interconnectedness and dependence, as well as their plausibility and reliability. The church must therefore respond to challenges to belief from outside the church (for example, the New Atheist critique of the rationality of the Trinity) and reassure Christians of the intrinsic coherence of their faith. The community of faith thus provides a “plausibility structure” for faith, gathering together a group of people who share and affirm the Christian vision, which is reinforced and consolidated by word and sacrament, and exhibited in attitudes and actions.
In the second place, we must consider how best we can express and communicate these ideas. The history of Christian theology is rich in analogies and images designed to help believers grasp some of the truths of faith. For example, Gregory of Nyssa developed a series of analogies to enable his audiences to cope with the challenges of the doctrine of the Trinity, including the oft-cited analogy of a spring, fount, and stream of water.
There is also a third task, which is often overlooked. If a given doctrine is true, what are its implications? What difference does the Christian faith make to the way in which we understand our world and act within it? What new or distinctive way of seeing things does it enable and how does this affect our behavior? If we see the world as God’s creation, how does that alter our behavior toward it? It is not difficult to see how a basic environmental ethic emerges from this process of reflection. Yet perhaps more importantly, the process of reflection both expresses and affirms the interconnection of what Christians believe and how Christians live.
The Church and the World: Distinct but Not Disconnected
While the Christian church engages the same empirical realities as everyone else, it interprets, experiences, and evaluates them in ways that diverge significantly from the shallow rationalism that has become the default setting for contemporary cultural norms. Yet this distinct way of interpreting and inhabiting the world is maintained without entailing, or even encouraging, a disconnection on the part of the Christian community from shared human experiences and concerns. This point is of vital importance in understanding how the church can maintain its distinct identity without becoming separated and isolated from the broader world of human culture and experience. We shall explore this point further in what follows.
While the church is called to be distinct from the world, it is also called to serve that world in many ways, including proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ. As Rowan Williams notes, “The Church . . . is essentially missionary in its nature, seeking to transform the human world by communicating to it in word and act a truthfulness that exposes the deepest human fears and evasions and makes possible the kind of human existence that can pass beyond these fears to a new liberty.”
Yet it is alarmingly easy to move from being distinct from the world to being disconnected from the world, having no shared language or values, no point of contact, with culture at large. A church that emphasizes its distinctiveness from the world while failing to connect with it simply becomes a ghetto, isolated from the mainstream of culture and unable to speak meaningfully to it, let alone influence or redirect its course.
This is a familiar point, often expressed in the somewhat dull and predictable theological platitude that the church is in the world but not of the world. The church finds itself in a creative tension between maintaining its distinctiveness on the one hand and its capacity to engage with its cultural context on the other. So how can the church be both culturally relevant (contextualized) and at the same time countercultural (gospel centered)? How can it be distinct from its context, yet remain connected to or embedded within it? How can the church remain firmly in the public square rather than in some isolated ghetto with its own private language and habits of thought that many of our contemporaries, whether with affection or derision, see as quaint relics of a discarded past?
Both individual Christians and the church journey through the same natural landscape as everyone else. Yet while the church shares in this common experience of humanity, it brings to bear on it an interpretative framework that allows this journey to be understood and evaluated in a new way. It offers a vision that we believe and trust to be imaginatively compelling, that has the capacity to attract others to this pilgrim community of faith as it passes through this world.
The church thus invites others to “try seeing things this way,” trusting that the outcome of this process of reflection will be the realization of the viability and potency of this vision of reality. The imagination is thus a gateway to faith, allowing people outside the church to catch a glimpse of the “vision glorious” of human existence that faith offers. For some, it is the truth of faith that attracts; for others, however, the attraction of faith is found to lie in its outcomes.
The Place of Worship in Discipleship
Earlier, I raised the question of the tension between deepening our understanding of our faith and becoming entrapped in a shallow and superficial rationalism. It is a real risk. Human beings are very good at limiting reality to what they can comprehend and constructing impoverished and truncated worlds that turn out to be little more than prisons of the mind. Instead of limiting reality to what we can comprehend, we ought to be expanding our vision of reality by contemplating the vastness of the universe and the glory of God—two trajectories of thought that coalesce in the psalmist’s celebrated declaration that “the heavens are telling the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1).
In the natural sciences, we often have to face up to the inadequacy of the human mind to take in the vastness and complexity of our universe. Acknowledging this, Richard Dawkins emphasizes the need to recognize the validity of the category of “mystery” in science: “Modern physics teaches us that there is more to truth than meets the eye; or than meets the all too limited human mind, evolved as it was to cope with medium-sized objects, moving at medium speeds through medium distances in Africa.” To limit reality to what the “all too limited human mind” can cope with is to diminish our world. We must be challenged, on the contrary, to expand our intellectual vision, even if this causes us mental discomfort.
There is, of course, an obvious parallel in the world of theology: the importance of worship as an expression of the glory and majesty of God and our inability to comprehend or express this fully. Worship both expresses and helps to shape a faithful Christian imagination, which shakes off the restrictions of inadequate and limited conceptions of God and invites us to apprehend and embrace the greater reality disclosed and expressed through the church’s adoration. The Christian practice of worship emerges from its theological vision of reality and expresses that vision in an imaginatively and emotionally powerful—yet appropriate—way. The worship of the church invites us to cultivate a receptivity to mystery, encouraging us to expand our minds to appreciate a glorious and majestic reality that is greater than our capacity to comprehend it fully.
The word “glory” is viewed with suspicion by some today, but we need to keep on using it and keep on appreciating it. The term “glory” expresses the “weightiness,” the infinite beauty and greatness, of God—something that is simply too great for us to take in. Glory is about the intellectual and imaginative capacity of God to overwhelm us, reminding us that our attempts to capture God’s nature in human words can only end in frustration.
It is no accident that so many theologians have seen an analogy between Jacob’s wrestling with a mysterious figure at Peniel (Gen. 32:24–32) and the human struggle to do justice to God. Just as Jacob withdrew from this struggle, wounded and defeated, so theologians must also recognize the limits placed on their discipline. Theology is perhaps one of the few disciplines that transforms intellectual defeat into a virtue, precisely because it discloses the limits placed on human reason and the folly of relying too much on it.
That’s why good theology leads to worship, in that it confronts us with a vision of God so compelling and overwhelming that we cannot help but adore it on the one hand and fail to put it into words on the other. Theology informs our minds without limiting reality to what our minds can enfold, thus alerting us to a greater horizon of divine activity and presence that is best expressed in worship and adoration rather than in theological speculation. To borrow a phrase from John Henry Newman, it is through the devotional, spiritual, prayerful practice of Christianity that we come to have a “real apprehension” (rather than a purely “notional apprehension”) of what theology is all about.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have emphasized one aspect of the church’s distinctive role—to function as a community of discernment, enabling the growth in faith that is integral to Christian discipleship. I appreciate that some of the ideas and writers I have explored here are intellectually demanding and are often expressed in somewhat opaque ways; nevertheless, I am offering them to you precisely because I have found them helpful in my own reflections and would like to offer them to you in case they may be helpful to you as well. It is my hope that the approaches I have outlined in this chapter may serve both to deepen the quality of the Christian life of the mind within the church on the one hand and to enable the church to discourse persuasively with its fellow travelers about the meaning and goals of life on the other.
Based on a talk given to Christian graduate students at Oxford University in June 2016.