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Loving God with your mind
As a student of the law, I think of the Pharisee lawyer who sought to test Jesus Christ,
when he queried what was the most important law. Jesus responded that “You shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (New American
Standard Bible, 1975/1995, Matthew 22:37). How does one love God with all their mind? How
should we glorify God with our minds? These are not easy questions, so I will examine the topic
and answer them as I conclude.
Many of those that espouse that they are highly intelligent deny the existence of the
divine as they cannot prove its existence by scientific inquiry alone. That scientific inquiry also
cannot disprove its existence either. Therefore, they argue that religious belief is a matter of
superstition and emotion and has no standing to be considered in the realms of law or academia.
The left-wing newspaper, The Guardian (a favorite of the “Academy”) argues that the recent
decision of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) “lies the conviction that the
power of government can and should be used to impose a certain moral and religious vision – a
supposedly biblical and regressive understanding of the Christian religion – on the population at
large” (Stewart, 2022, para. 3). Stewart clearly fits into that group. Clearly, like many, her legal
history is a bit shaky, seeing as the Biblical Christian worldview is the foundation of both the
Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution (Samples, 2016).
Unfortunately, there are also pastors who believe that anything that has to do with
rational thinking is suspect and strongly discouraged (Smith, 1995). They view reason as being
of the world and, therefore, cast against heaven. They view that we should come to God through
faith alone, not reason. The Rationalist worldview did usurp the Biblical Christian worldview so
that may be another reason why the Church does not always embrace rational thought.
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However, logic and reason are essential to biblical Christianity. As God is the Creator,
everything has been created by Him. This means that if the laws of scientific reasoning are true,
they were also created by him. Jesus also made use of logic to expose the inherent fallacy of
questions put to him by the Sadducees. The Sadducees did not believe in the future resurrection
of the faithful. Therefore, they queried about the case of a woman who had seven successive
husbands, who would be her husband upon resurrection. This was a logic trap as to pick any one
of them would be arbitrary, to pick all seven would violate monogamy laws, so the Sadducees
viewed that their position, that the souls would die with the bodies, was the only option. Jesus
detected and rejected the hidden, false premise, that the resurrected would be married. Jesus said
that “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (New American Standard
Bible, 1975/1995, Matthew 22:29-30), and continued stating that with regard to “the resurrection
of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, the
God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” (New
American Standard Bible, 1975/1995, Matthew 22:31-32). Here, the logical argument made by
Jesus is as follows:
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God is the God of three dead patriarchs
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God is not the God of the dead, but of the living
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Therefore, the three dead patriarchs must, in some sense also be alive.
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Their bodies are not alive
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Therefore, there souls must be alive.
We are called to “walk just as [Christ] walked” (New American Standard Bible, 1975/1995, 1
John 2:6), therefore if Christ thinks and argues logically, so should we. We are instructed “As
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each one has received a special gift, employ it in serving one another as good stewards of
the multifaceted grace of God”(New American Standard Bible, 1975/1995, 1 Peter 4:10)
Going back to our questions, the answer is now much clearer.
References
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. (2022).
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
New American Standard Bible. (1995). The Lockman Foundation. (Original work published
1975)
Samples, K. (2016, July 26). How a Christian worldview influenced America’s founding fathers.
Reasons to Believe. Retrieved June 26, 2022, from
https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/reflections/how-a-christian-worldview-influenced-
america-s-founding-fathers#
Smith, G. (1995). The ‘Toronto Blessing’. Apologia, 4(2), 37–40.
Stewart, K. (2022, June 25). How the Christian right took over the judiciary and changed
America. The Guardian. Retrieved June 26, 2022, from
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/25/roe-v-wade-abortion-christian-right-
america
