3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Important book on Christian intellectual pursuits, February 2, 2011
This review is from: The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life (Paperback)
In an age of anti-intellectualism, scientism, and mind-numbing electronic media, how are Christians to live, learn, and glorify God? In The Gospel and the mind: recovering and shaping the intellectual life (Crossway, 2010), Bradley G. Green explores the connections between the Christian gospel and the pursuit of knowledge. In his work, Green leans heavily on such Christian intellectual heavyweights as Calvin, Aquinas, Athanasius, and especially Augustine to respond to other philosophers like Derrida, Nietzsche, and Saussure. Spurred on by the perception that "wherever the gospel goes, it seems to generate intellectual deliberation and inquiry," Green has written a fully-orbed and persuasive apologia of the Christian intellectual life as the primary and best context from which to study the world.
Since Christ died to redeem all of who we are, this includes our minds. Thus, "any sort of meaningful intellectual life will be rooted in Christ and the gospel" (p. 178). To flesh this out, Green examines five interrelated theological themes and their relevance to the intellectual life: the realities and necessities of creation and history; the concept of a telos or goal to all of history; the cross of Christ; the nature of language; and knowledge, morality, and action. He presents a twofold thesis: "the Christian vision of God, man, and the world provides the necessary precondition of the recovery of any meaningful intellectual life; and the Christian vision of God, man, and the world offers a particular, unique understanding of what the intellectual life might look like" (p. 13-14).
It is obvious from the start that Green is well-read and painstakingly researched this book. He writes clearly and professionally, bordering on the scholarly. Green offers persuasive arguments for the Christian intellectual life, and I was very encouraged and challenged by this book. The sections on the five above themes dovetail with each other nicely, and Green effectively weaves together these themes to serve his thesis. While doing this, he interacts with beloved philosophers of the anti-Christian world, discusses the importance of history and creation, shows how modern and postmodern thinkers have taken away any type of hope for life by rejecting the telos of history, points out the destructive influence of sin on the mind, and more. He quotes extensively from myriad thinkers and philosophers to make his point, and the book is filled with excellent quotations. At times it reads like a string of quotations with Green's voice just filling in the gaps and giving structure to the arguments.
Perhaps the most persuasive, challenging, and insightful section is the closing chapter on the moral nature of knowledge. Knowledge is not neutral, as many contemporary thinkers would have us swallow. Green expounds here on Calvin's conviction that to know God is to honor God, and "the honoring is included within the knowledge itself" (p. 150). Thus, as Calvin writes, "our mind cannot apprehend God without rendering some honor to him." From Calvin, Green launches into a biblically saturated discussion of the moral nature of knowledge, supported by the Psalms, Proverbs, prophets, and Paul. The conclusion, drawn also from Calvin, C.S. Lewis, and Cornelius Van Til, is that all knowledge is more than just knowing facts, but is actually personal and moral. Thus, "to live in this world is to face a moral responsibility and duty" (p. 161). This responsibility is to know things truly, as they are known and understood by God. Though we are finite beings and cannot know omnisciently as God knows, we can know in light of who God is and what he has spoken to us in his word. This is how, as Kepler wrote, we are able to think God's thoughts after him. And if this is the case, then
"as we have seen, God has revealed himself to all persons in the created order, then all persons know God and are engaged in the moral, willful, ethical submission to or rejection of the God of Holy Scripture at virtually all moments of their existence...Thus, nothing can be truly understood unless it is understood in relation to the God who created and currently sustains the world." (p. 161-162, emphasis his)
The gospel comes into this discussion of the moral nature of knowledge in that when our hearts have been changed by the Holy Spirit and our minds are renewed by Christ, our moral wills and our natural loves will also be different. Following the Apostle Paul's and Augustine's discussions of this, Green argues that we cannot really know what we do not love: "Augustine seems to be saying that the reason we can know only what we love is that only in love are we able to understand what something is really like in terms of what it is ultimately capable of becoming...God is to be loved, while all other things are to be viewed in relation to that ultimate love" (p. 166-167).
Thus, we serve a "personal, relational, triune, and rational" God, who is
"not primarily sensed or felt - although that is part of our experience - but known. This, the fundamental goodness of knowledge is at the heart of a Christian understanding of the intellectual life. This God has made a world, and this world reflects the one who made it. We humans as image bearers reflect God in a unique way, but the world as a whole ultimately reflects the God who made it. And hence, the Christian faith encourages attention to the world, its structures, and its mysteries." (p. 178-179)
While one of its strengths, Green's precise scholarship and philosophical interactions might also be one of the book's downfalls. If one of the purposes of this book is so that Christians will be spurred on by the gospel to recover intellectual pursuits, I'm not sure this book is the starting point. It does not score very high on the accessibility meter. The chapters on the nature of language are especially technical and dense (as admitted by Green). I am afraid that Green's valuable work will mostly be read by the "choir" - Christian intellectuals and Christian lovers of knowledge - and not by those who might need this book. Green's scholarly, philosophical, and sometimes technical discussions is not the best introduction to those Christians seeking to recover intellectual pursuits. I wish it were, though. It is sadly ironic, but if "non-intellectuals" are the audience, this would not be the first book to give them. But I do hope this important book receives a wider audience than it ultimately will.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Overcoming the Caricature of Christianity, February 24, 2011
This review is from: The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life (Paperback)
A young person heading off to university would do well to spend a few weeks reading The Gospel and the Mind. Actually, someone who has not stepped foot on a campus in decades or one who has no intentions of doing such would do well to read it.
The stigma attached to the modern Christian Church is a stereotype and a caricature. But the thing about stereotypes and caricatures is that we get them for a reason. Are they all legitimate? Certainly not! But we must take into consideration why they exist.
This caricature checks their brain at the church door. If this only misrepresented mere humans, fine. But since this misrepresents the God we serve, we would not be doing ourselves any favors by avoiding this discussion.
The Gospel and the Mind challenges and encourages the believer to be intellectually competent--not for bragging rights, but to instill in us a godly confidence that the Gospel is essential to our morally faulty society and that belief in this Gospel is reasonable.
The unfortunate reality is that many who call themselves Christians shun intellectual pursuits. But as Green says, "We should ultimately see all endeavors of our minds as a subset of discipleship." (p. 99).
At the end of the day, the point this book drives home is that intellectualism apart from God is meaningless. If the greater good to be achieved is knowledge for knowledge sake, we may as well pack up and head home now. But as Christians we know that all of our pursuits (academic or otherwise) are for the glory of God. And thank God for his mercy to us by making Himself known through the Cross.
There is no inconstancy, but rather a beautiful unity between the Gospel and the mind. This book is an excellent place to start in search of that continuity.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Gospel: the Precondition for Knowledge and Purpose, September 29, 2011
Professor Bradley Green (Union University) endeavors to demonstrate that there is no ultimate meaning to man's cognitive ability and intellectual pursuits devoid of the foundation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the worldview it underwrites. The Christian worldview (CWV) provides the ground for significance and purpose as it reveals the rational necessities for reason, truth, purpose, and aesthetics. Objective truth, moral absolutes, and epistemic rights (knowledge) presuppose Christian theism and these provide the tools utilized in man's understanding of the nature of the cosmos and its actuality.
Within this fine volume the reader will discover:
- The foundational necessities behind our universe
- The essentials that theism provides to understand and account for language
- Man's need of the Gospel: Christ's death and resurrection
- The a priori necessities utilized in fixed ethics and knowledge that God grounds.
Green, using Van Tilian terminology, asserts that the CWV "provides the necessary precondition of the recovery of any meaningful intellectual life..." (p. 13). One needs faith in the work and person of Christ with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit for our ethical and intellectual lives to have real significance and purpose.
Proverbs 2:4-6 instructs men to seek understanding like precious metal. The Apostle Paul writes in 2 Timothy 2:7 "... the Lord will give you understanding in everything." Thus by God's grace, from the foundation of His word, true knowledge is a joint endeavor. Believers are not to be intellectually lazy, academic sluggards; we have the true truth so we must study, ponder, think, and apply truth by the power of the Holy Spirit.
"You will know the truth and truth shall set you free" (Jesus Christ: John 8:32).
The author challenges anti-intellectualism as he reveals that absolutes are established on God's immutable nature and His law. If someone tries to assert that there are no absolutes, he must use an absolute statement. This, as we have now learned, is self-impaling. If it is true, it is false. The only absolutes that are not self-refuting are those from God. So anytime a relativist asserts that something is true universally and immutably, they are wrong because their own worldview cannot provide unchanging, universal, and absolute truth. that is devastating. And the truth found in Christ devastates and demolishes all vain imaginations.
"Casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:4,5).
This book is about the spiritual importance of the gospel in the life of a good thinker. It will encourage attentive, faithful, unpretentious thinking that leads to the true knowledge of God through the Gospel, which leads to glorifying God as one learns to better love others.
Mike Robinson Author of:
"Truth, Knowledge and the Reason for God: The Defense of the Rational Assurance of Christianity"
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