Over the next few days I will post the scripts I’ll be reading for the Glory Seed Radio series of spots on WIHS.  Here’s the first.

Back in the early 1970’s, 1972 according the Ad Council, The United Negro College Fund began broadcasting commercials with the memorable by-line, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

That is certainly true.  I haven’t come across many people who disagree.  The odd thing is that the few I have come across tend to be concentrated in the church.  I thought that perhaps I had a bad sample, that my experience was idiosyncratic, and not representative.  I thought that way until I noticed that others had noticed too.  In 1995 the then Wheaton College history professor, Mark Noll, had a book published entitled: The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.  “…the scandal,” he said in that book, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”        

It turned out that most people who think about such things agreed.  Those that didn’t agree don’t tend to spend time reading books.  So, unwittingly, they confirmed the thesis. 

Ironically, nearly everyone who agreed with the premise of the book also agreed that things were not always like this.  The spiritual forbearers of evangelicalism were the folks who founded Harvard, Yale, Brown and Princeton.  Once upon a time, when people thought of popular education, people thought of us.  We were the people who read the Bible daily and on Sundays sang Amazing Grace with all our hearts.  The two geographic regions with the highest literacy rates in the world in the eighteenth century were Scotland and New England.  Why?  Because they were Calvinist strongholds.  And Calvinists were the evangelicals who believed that education was instrumental to one’s salvation. 

But it all came apart in the nineteenth century.  By the end of that century things had gotten so bad that many Christians felt that education was actually detrimental to one’s prospects for salvation.

What happened?  Well, it’s a long, sad story with many defeats, and few victories.  I don’t have time for that story today.  What I do have time for is identifying the place of the mind in Christian discipleship.  (At least in a cursory fashion.)   

It’s hard to imagine that the God who gave us our minds wouldn’t want us to use them. 

Yet, there have been Christians who have set the Spirit against the mind claiming that Christianity is mostly concerned with experiences and feelings and that the mind is not only an obstacle to faith, but an enemy of it.  These folks like to quote 1 Corinthians 1:21 – “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.”  Unfortunately, that’s where they stop.  If they continued reading they would come to chapter 2, verse 6, which reads, “Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, . . ..”  So we do believe in a place for the mind after all.  But rather than residing in the world, the Christian’s mind resides in Christ.  If that doesn’t mean we should think long and hard about our Lord, I don’t know what it means.

Furthermore, our Lord tells us that the greatest commandment in the law is this, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”  (Mt. 22:37)  It doesn’t sound like there is any conflict between the mind and the heart there.  In fact, one of the ways we’re suppose to demonstrate our love is through the exercise of our minds.           

Now, when it comes to thinking, one of the best things to have happened to the church in a long time is the rise of popular atheism.  I say that for a couple of reasons.  First, I’ll take militant hostility to blithe indifference any day.  At least atheists care.  They’re hostile because they understand what’s at stake and they take Christianity seriously.  You can count on your atheist uncle Ed being closer to the Kingdom than your polite, but indifferent aunt Mabel.  The bigger reason, though, is that for the first time in my life, atheists are challenging Christians to think.  In the past, silly atheists like Madalyn Murray O’Hair simply attacked Christianity superficially through political activism.  The new popular atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins has gone straight for the head.  And the beauty of that is, Christians are discovering they have heads – perhaps they’re a little neglected and partly empty – but they’ve got ‘em!

Christians who confess that God is sovereign know that all things work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose.  God used Egyptian slavery to his glory, Babylonian captivity to his glory, Judas’ personal betrayal to his glory, and now popular atheism is being used to his glory.

Over the course of this week I intend to talk about ideas – ideas that matter to God, and ideas that should matter to you.  I’ll be challenging you to think about some things that you may not have thought about before.  I hope you’ll listen and use that God given brain of yours, because, whether you do or not, you can be sure that the atheists are using theirs.