WITH ALL YOUR MIND

June 11, 1989
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Deuteronomy 6:1-9
Luke 10:25-28

"You shall love the Lord your God with ali your heart, and with all you
soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind..."
--Luke 10:27 (RSV)

A friend sent me a fascinating document with a note indicating that
it had been circulating widely downtown and he thought I'd find it
interesting. The title was intimidating: "A Survey of World Trends
Shaping the Future Business Environment." It was prepared by William Van
Dusen Wishard who was, two years ago, a special assistant to the Deputy
Secretary of Commerce of the United States. My friend was right. 1 did
find it interesting... very much so. In fact when I finished reading it I
wondered if Mr. Wishard's supervisor had read the paper, and concluded that
he had not. ,

The paper describes the far-reaching and fascinating changes
occurring in the world:

Population - we passed five billion two years ago and will add
another billion in the next eight years... since we have been sitting here
in worship this morning 2,200 babies have been born; Nigeria's population
will be 500 million by the middle of the next century; and in just eleven
more years the population of Mexico City will reach thirty million.

Technology - all technology is now obsolete in five years... Micro-
electronics is changing the world as fundamentally as the printing press
did. Robots can sight-read J. §. Bach, shear sheep and check the paint
finish on a new car twenty times faster than a human being. Time and
distance are virtually eliminated as factors in telecommunications. You
can, in fact, talk te anyone, anywhere, anytime.

The paper was inclusive: Economics, - Environment, Life-Styles.
Some of it was encouraging. Some of it was frightening. All of it was
intriguing... the clear challenge to authoritarianism, the nodernization of

China, the increase of terrorism, and new worlds emerging in bio-
technology, genetics, fiber optics, lasers and weapons, always the weapons.

And then, on the next to the last page, this remarkable assertion:

“The central struggle for the future is for the individual - for
every person on earth to know who we are and why we are here + integrated
with every part of ourselves and at home with people from every part of the
world.”

We have paid a very dear price for the material benefits of Western
civilization, observed Mr. Wishard. "In the past 100 years we have
alienated ourselves from the deepest roots of our own inner being. We have
created people who can absorb massive amounts of data, who can manage
complex mechanical and bureaucratic systems, but who are unable to provide
a depth of meaning that links the individual to some larger significance
beyond material gain, technical achievement on personal advancement."

We seem to have arrived at a point in time when the most critical
issues facing us and our future are issues about which science, technology
and economics alone have little more to add. They are issues of how we
shall live on this planet and with one another. They are fundamental human
issues which transcend the various categories of human enterprise, such as
science, economics, politics. These survival issues require a new way of
thinking - or perhaps a very old way of thinking - but in either event, a
way of thinking that doesn't happen much currently.

It reminded me of a conversation Jesus had one time with a
thoughtful, articulate, attorney... who came asking a question. "What
shali I do to live?" Eternal life is what he actually said, but that did
not mean life after death only. Within his definition of eternal life was
a very finite dimension. It meant life now, full, complete, total human
life in the world at this time. It is, therefore, the quintessential
survival question, “What must I do to be alive?"

Jesus enjoys the question, I think. It is the best question anybody
every asked. And good conversationalist, great teacher that he is - he
puts it right back to the lawyer, in the lawyer's own terms. "How do you
read the law on this matter?" The man recites the Shema, the Deuteronomic
introduction to the law: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul
‘and strength..." and he adds "mind"... Love God with all your mind.

It's a very legitimate addition. For the ancient Hebrew the heart
was the seat of the intellect. In Hebrew you "know" with your heart. What
one “knows" as a Jew is the Law, and the God who is revealed in the law.
That is the seat of all wisdom. Even though it is primarily a legal and
ethical system and not speculative philosophy, Judaism from the beginning
has put a premium on learning and the life of the mind as an expression of
faith. Judaism has given to the world the gift of disciplined study,
teaching, learning and passing the accumulated knowledge on to the next
generation as a very real moral imperative... The children are to be
taught; above all else...

One of the great human stories is the way immigrant Jews from Europe
settled in America and immediately formed poetry reading clubs, book
review groups and chamber music societies and how, incredibly, they did the

bh

6/11/89

same thing in the Nazi concentration camps...discussed essays, debated
ideas...

Loving God involves the intellect. It is there from the beginning.
[t is one of our oldest, most precious traditions. It was eloquently
affirmed by that articulate attorney who came to Jesus and it was
celebrated by our Lord in that intriguing conversation.

Part of what Christianity is about is the human mind, the intellect,
the incredible human capacity to reason, to figure, to question, doubt,
calculate, create. When the accumulated learning of Greece and Rome was in
danger of being lost during the Middle Ages, the monasteries preserved it,
protected the books, copied the manuscripts, kept the study of languages
alive. In the medieval universities theology was called the “Queen of the
Sciences": One of the first things the Reformers did was translate
Scripture into a vernacular and the second thing they did was organize
schools so people could read.

Our own Presbyterian tradition has honored education and the life of
the mind. In the new world we created colleges wherever we went and
schools alongside churches in every community.

Loving God with the full participation of your mind is one of our
oldest traditions. But it is not true that Christianity is an academic
course of study. Even as we are celebrating the life of the mind, we must
recall that Jesus did not administer an academic test for would—be-
disciples. Jesus called people to follow him and the response to his
invitation, the acceptance of his Lordship and the obedient following, is
what has always defined Christian discipleship, not the intellectual
discussion of ideas about him.

We have been inclined to forget that. It has seemed sometimes that
to be a Christian one simply had te understand a sequence of ideas about
God and Jesus and human history. The unfortunate result has been that
thoughtful people who struggled with the ideas, have not felt that there is
a place in the community of faith for them.

Leslie Weatherhead, famous London preacher to the last generation,
used to say that the words "must" and "believe" should never be used
together. People find Christianity unreasonable, he said, when they are
told that they must believe things they are intellectually incapable of
believing. His favorite analogy was from Alice in Wonderland, when the
Queen says she is a hundred and one years, five months and one day old.
"'T can't believe that,' says Alice. ‘Can't you?' said the Queen. 'Try
again. Draw a long breath and shut your eyes.’ Only by such a method can
many a Christian accept the improbabilities of the religion."

In any event, when Christians have insisted that their religion is a
sequence of dogmatic assertions which must be believed, the intellectual
community has backed away. Surely it was in the middle of that apocryphal
medieval theological dispute over the number of angels that could dance on
the head of a pin thal someone thought up the idea of a “secular”
university.

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a/11 f/oa

Love God with all your mind. If you use your mind at all, you will
inevitably question assumptions. That's how the human mind works. Someone
makes an assertion ~ someone else challenges it. Someone says the earth is
flat because it appears to be flat. Someone else says it can't be flat.
And so there has always been an important role for doubt, skepticism and
challenge within the community of faith. Beware of religion that has no
room for that.

One of Harry Emerson Fosdick's most famous statements was this: "All
intelligent faith in God has behind it a background of humble agnosticism."
That is to say, it is honest and responsible and faithful to say "T don't
know. I do not comprehend all mystery. I don't have the answers to every
question." There is a sense in which challenging the assertions and
assumptions of religion in every generation is a sacred duty.

Now, what is lamentable and tragic is that what is questioned,
challenged and often rejected is not the real thing. What I hear young
people rejecting is not thoughtful Christianity but a collection of
euphemisms and old misunderstandings. Nathan Pusey, former President of
Harvard, said in a graduation speech one time that college students find
religion irrelevant because of its juvenile concepts, primitive notions of
God as an old-style father, petty judge or angry tyrant. “It has been my
impression," he went on, "that atheists often have in mind some such gods
as these and so it is not surprising, though it is ironical, that in so far
as the unbelievers kill them off, they undoubtedly serve the cause of
religion."

You shall love God with all your mind... How?

You begin, it seems to me, by simply inviting your brain to the
encounter. Bring your intellect to the relationship. Don't park it
outside on the steps to the sanctuary. Don't believe what you can't.
Bring into church your critical ability, your faculty for analyzing and
probing and questioning. It is an insult to the Gospel of Jesus Christ to
assume that it cannot stand in the presence of the scientific method, or
dialectical materialism, or the latest discoveries in palenthology or
recent theories in micro-biology. Try it out. Truth is never to be
feared. Truth, the Bible teaches, will set us free.

You proceed by asking questions and pursuing the answers. The sad
truth, however, is that the process of religious education stops for most
of us before we get to high school. And before that it is a low priority
activity carried on for about forty-five minutes, three times a month and
few months out of the year. The best we can expect, I estimate, is thirty-
six hours of Christian education per year. The average American teenager
watches more television than that every two weeks. To make matters worse,
families frequently decide that church school isn't worth the trouble, or
that the child has only one morning a week to sleep in, or that it's too
much like school, or that in this area of life alone an eleven-year-old is
mature enough to exercise seif-determinalion. And so a process which has
been going on more or less sporadically for about a decade ends at
adolescence when the junior high is confirmed and drops out, and then
coneludes a few years later that religion is irrelevant. That's a little

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like taking half a dozen piano lessons and announcing that Beethoven was a
lousy musician.

One of my faverite images of the church is theological ‘seminary... a
congregation ought to be a place where people are helped to think
theologically about the rest of life, where old ideas are examined and new
ones tried with enthusiasm. The church ought to be a very lively place
intellectually. Adult education courses ought to be relevant, timely and
full; the church library ought to be the most heavily trafficked room in
the building.

How to love God with your mind? By using it to its fuliest, [I
believe: by being open intellectually to the whole world: by adopting and
learning the graceful humility of one who is learning something new about
the world and oneself every day: by rejoicing in this magnificent capacity
God has given us to think and evaluate and conclude: and by resisting in
ourselves that smug arrogance which too frequently finds a home in
religion; that sense that we know all the truth about God that is worth
knowing; that posture of absolute doctrinal certainty which can always find
a justification for imposing its truth on others and which is immune from
mystery and therefore isolated from wonder and the pure joy of discovering
something new.

God calls us to be faithful in a particularly exciting and dangerous
time. The issues of vital importance for the future of the human race on
this planet are moral and theological issues. And part of the excitement
of our time is that more and more people understand that and are expressing
hew curiosity about religion and new interest in pursuing the insights and
propositions of religion.

That often happens outside the church. The Chicago Tribune
reported that 80% of college and university students today think religion
is important. Two weeks ago, when I was asked to make a presentation on
the topic of Creativity and Spirituality to a group of people interested in
the Arts, I was astonished with the theological sophistication of their
questions - and their urgency. I continue to learn that when the barriers
are down and people feel free to say what's on their minds the conversation
will become, in some way or another, a conversation about religion...
Where did we come from? Why are we here? What becomes of us? How shall]
we live?... And T also continue to discover that people do not so much
want answers, particularly the glib answers they have come to associate
with religion, so much as some sense that the church and church people are
asking the questions too.

God created the human mind. Think of it. Your intellect was Gad's
intent. God is honored when it is well and thoroughly used.

To love God with your mind is to Keep it open, And that may mean the
discomfort of doubt and the pain of prowing. It may mean saying those
three little words that we have such difficulty saying... "TI don't know.’
It may mean assuming the occasional posture of reverent agnostic. Paith
allows that. If 1 am certain of anything it is that God blesses the search
for truth and smiles when people join it.

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64/11/20

The late J. Harry Cotton was a scholar, professor of philosophy at
Harvard, and for a brief time, President of McCormick Theological Seminary.
He was also a pastor, a predecessor of mine and it was in that capacity
that I was privileged to be in the chancel with him when he preached a
sermon during his eightieth year -— not long before he died. I shall never
forget what he said, paraphrasing Shakespeare, "There are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,"

[Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5]; said Cotton in the conclusion to that service:

"There is more to this Christian faith, oh much, much more, than you
and I ever imagined.”

T have found that to be true... To live in openness and
anticipation, confessing that the Christian faith, the Gospel of God is
always bigger than my capacity to comprehend... that is what the words mean
which the lawyer recited to Jesus and which Jesus himself believed... and
which IT commend to you this morning...

“You shall love the Lord your God with...all your mind.'

Amen.

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