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How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind

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This book is a balm for the Christian who struggles to reconcile the uniqueness of Christ and the need for honest dialog with other faiths. Hughes shows how the Christian message supports openness and honest exchange. Christianity teaches humility (all have sinned...), the value of paradox (Christ as God and human at the same time), and love for others, including really listening to the others' point of view. The book is a gentle treatment of the subject, modeling the kindness and humility that Hughes promotes.

"Can Christian faith sustain the life of the mind?" queries Richard T. Hughes in his book examining the bifurcation of religion - Christianity in particular - and learning. According to Hughes, an active faith not only can but should nourish a combination of humility, curiosity and critical thinking which then leads to a successful acquisition of knowledge and truth. By interacting with a wide range of perspectives and worldviews that differ from our own, we are able to avoid a narcissistic isolation that fears making mistakes or receiving criticism. Instead, we "learn to see the world through someone else's eyes" (3), embracing diversity as well as growing in self-articulation.

Furthermore, Hughes urges us to acknowledge our status as created and therefore finite beings with intellectual limitations while avoiding the denigration of the mind so prevalent in many contemporary charismatic settings. Instead, we ought to recognize that our personal relationship with an omniscient Creator gives a godly mandate to engage in a consistent quest for higher truth. Finally, a healthy life of the mind requires intellectual creativity and imagination, Hughes writes, as "we seek to make connections among a variety of categories... think new thoughts... develop new insights, and... create new and fresh ways of understanding old material" (4). Hughes concludes with the observation that by learning to think theologically, Christianity begins to act as a filter and point of reference through which the life of the mind is enhanced instead of hindered.

Hughes clearly opposes a "one-dimensional" (4), absolutist interpretation of the Bible and other traditions, cultures and perspectives. By comparison, he advocates a more open-minded, curious outlook on all aspects of life which embraces diversity without compromising one's beliefs. At the same time, the author fails to successfully address the potential pitfall of synthesizing faith and learning to the point where the first becomes compromised and the second is too watered down. For those of us who have experienced frustration with that very issue, we can testify to the fact that the result is an unsatisfactory understanding of either one. Perhaps it would be more advantageous, therefore, for the Christian scholar to view the relationship between the two as building ties between the life of the mind with that of the soul instead of the more idealistic integration that Hughes seems to posit. It is finally when this type of bridging is achieved, then, that we can truly begin to understand that all our work and achievements are "based upon and framed by and always in the service of [our] identity as a Christian" (10-11).

While he may not be particularly explicit regarding actual ways of implementation, Hughes powerfully delineates the difference between practicing a mindless spirituality and exercising an active faith that explores, analyzes and learns. As Hughes points out, if we seek to reduce Christianity to a series of systematic and linear traditions, we rob the Christian faith of its powerful ability to sustain the life of the mind. Instead, by adhering to Hughes' admonitions to engage in a disciplined search for truth, to turn a critical thought process towards understanding diversity and to enjoy an intellectual creativity, we are instaneously transformed into effective Christian scholars and change agents.