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The Christian mindset is no mere affirmation of a set of doctrines on a page. It is the meticulous application of the truth of God to the whole of our lives. It is the painstaking yet joyful work of taking up one’s cross and following Him and learning to do so more and more, day by day, year by year, holistically. The Christian mindset must be pursued. How did Paul put it? “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5). We do not fight for a Christian mindset so that we can be accepted by God. Rather, the Christian mind is our way of life as a people who have already been encountered and saved by God’s grace. As it has been said by theologians of old, putting on the mind of Christ means “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.”
Created in God’s image, we are creatures full of complexity—souls and bodies; quarks, atoms, and purpose; language and destiny; intellect, emotion, desire, and action; heads and hearts. The Christian mindset includes all of who we are. It begins with the condition of our hearts and then works out in our thoughts, our intellect, our emotions, and our decisions. There is a temptation to relegate the Christian mindset to the head, a mistake of worldviewism in which the Christian worldview is just a standard subscription to a certain list of propositions. But that’s not all that Paul means by putting on the mind of Christ.
We can find some help here from Ephesians. Paul offers us the theological framework for this command to take up the Christian mindset. Ephesians is pregnant with the concept of union with Christ. Theologians and commentators point out the prepositions “in” and “with” Christ as shorthand for a mind-bending, soul-redeeming, Spirit-wrought legal and relational connection that followers of Jesus have with the ascended Jesus Himself. That means, in short, that we believers in Christ already have everything we need to put on a Christian mindset. Thus, Reformed spirituality is basically this: becoming who we already are in Christ, taking up the riches and resources that have been legally and relationally granted to us. Paul says that God “has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing” (Eph. 1:3). Notice the past tense: “has blessed.” And notice the holistic term: “every.” We already have what we need, totally. Paul’s prayer for the church is that we would “know” (1:18–19) this reality in our lives, work it out, and take hold of the riches that we’ve been given. To know includes the intellect, but it begins in the heart.
What is it that prevents us from taking up the treasures we already have? Why do we lack? Why do we consistently fail to put on the mind of Christ? I think we can answer this pivotal and life-changing question by considering our lacks as concentric circles. There are the most outward problems, and the easiest to deal with, but then there is the center, the central lack—that which takes away our Christian mindset most fundamentally. Let’s consider three rings, drilling down to the center so that we work our way to the depths of the soul to come back up ready to fight for the mind of Christ as our mind. Our lack comes from (1) enculturation, (2) prayerlessness, and (3) pride. There are more problems than these. But these three rings take us to the heart, and the heart is often the problem with the mind.
enculturation
Enculturation can be defined as being saturated with the godless culture of the surrounding world. When our hearts are not full of God, they become susceptible to worldly ways of thinking. We can enculturate in two directions: (1) unconsciously taking on the subtle and not-so-subtle idols of the cultures in which we reside as kingdom exiles; (2) allowing moralism and legalism to squeeze out the gospel. Here, we are primarily thinking about the first of these two, though the latter is one manifestation of the former.
In everyone who follows Jesus, two principles are at work. Robert Louis Stevenson captured this well in his story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll allowed Mr. Hyde, a representation of his depraved inner life, to take over. Dr. Jekyll calls it the “perennial war among my members” and the possibility of a “dreadful shipwreck”—the fact that “man is not truly one, but truly two.” The Bible shows us that for us as followers of Christ, the old self has been crucified with Christ; we have been given a new self, being born again, and that can never be taken away. And yet all of us know the struggle to put to death the Mr. Hyde within.
Another way of putting this is that the two principles in our hearts are the city of God and the city of man, as Augustine labeled this biblical idea. The city of God is built by Christ, through the laying down of one’s life for one’s friends and by the wind of the Spirit that blows where He wishes, rescuing people from the enslavement of self. The city of man is built by selfish ambition, power hunger, violence, gossip, and slander. The city of man is a principle whereby one builds culture for self, rejecting the soul-fulfilling invitation to love God with all the self and love other people sacrificially. The city of man rejects the command to be the image of God that we are. To put it in brief, the city of man is the love of self against God, and the city of God is the love of God and denial of the self-glorifying Mr. Hyde.
When we become citizens of the city of God by way of union with Christ, we are called to the “renewal of our minds,” to see the antithesis between the city of God and the city of man within and without and to deny the city of man by putting on the mind of Christ evermore. But do we? It is both the case that the victory is guaranteed, that total transformation will win out, and that we can be struggling in this fight.
On taking up an awareness of the natural (sinful) process of enculturation, we can get help from a concept developed by the Dutch Reformed theologian J.H. Bavinck: the difference between a worldvision and a Christian worldview. Worldvision describes the unconscious adoption of the principles and practices that the common cultures and subcultures in which we live constantly train us to think, feel, and do apart from the Christian calling to adopt the way, truth, and life of Christ. We must be aware that adopting the “social imagination” or idolatrous practices of the cultures around us is our default. Putting on a Christian mindset or Christian world-and-life-view requires an awareness of the natural process of heart calcification and a decision and fight to put on the Christian mindset continuously, an ability to always be distinguishing between the gifts of common grace on display versus the sinful habits of our cultures.
We are not conscious enough of how the environment we live in changes us slowly and consistently. We have not yet discovered the depths to which the city of man remains within, and so we struggle with the lack of a Christian mindset—the lackadaisical allowance of the emergence of Mr. Hyde. The cultures around us, Jekyll-and-Hyde as they are too, cause us to forget who we are, and so the process of enculturation draws the old self to the surface, and it does so dangerously slowly.
Our natural inclination to be satisfied with the comfort of a mere worldvision must be crucified and transformed into the Christian mindset or worldview. This happens as we take hold of the call to do the hard work of seeing the world and our own cultural contexts in the light of God, allowing and pursuing this question: “How does the triune God make sense of my experience, change my daily practices, and teach me how the Christian faith unlocks joy in the particulars of this life?”
There is an invitation here to renew our minds. What does this look like? The slow emergence of the fruit of the Spirit in your life, thinking about God more and more, a life of prayer, taking on the principles of the city of God, and active “disenculturation” from the city of man by unmasking idols. There is an invitation here to be a master of the cultures of the cities of man, to be a “cultural ethnographer,” to understand the city of man all around you, to see the difference in the common-grace gifts and selfish ambitions.
On the positive side, we can say that what we need is true spirituality: to be on the pilgrimage journeying through the dangerous hills and valleys of this life with enemies on every side (the world, flesh, and devil) and with eyes fixed on Jesus. We need self-denial and eyes of faith. True spirituality is a fight to be unshackled from our bondage to the old self toward experiencing the renewal toward the image of God that we are. True spirituality is the pathway to getting rid of the lack. True spirituality is not mysticism but walking in the steps of the Spirit. The lack of a Christian mindset begins with a lack of spiritual health. Faith seeks understanding; knowledge begins with the fear of the Lord.
prayerlessness
Drilling into a deeper ring, enculturation will happen in proportion to our lack of prayer. Prayerlessness is the specific way that we lack true spirituality, which results in a lack of a Christian mindset. In one sense, enculturation is just prayerlessness. It is God-forgetfulness throughout the humdrum of life because we are not “constant in prayer”—a vital spiritual discipline of this earthly pilgrimage and the central activity whereby we commune with God.
This point is simple: we fight our lack of a Christian mindset with prayer. We fight enculturation with prayer. And obviously, we increase our lack of a Christian mindset with prayerlessness. Prayerlessness is a lack of spiritual cultivation, a failure to protect, care for, and treat the soul above all. It is a failure to acknowledge that our relationship with the triune God is everything. It is to forget about God in our day-to-day lives and open the door more and more to the idols of the cultures in which we live, which feed the Mr. Hyde within.
This is why Paul tells us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:16). Of course, prayer honors God, acknowledges His glory and goodness, and brings us ever closer in the relationship that is most important in all the universe. Paul’s command is our protection and joy. Prayer protects us from idols and thus protects our happiness. It is much more difficult to be unconsciously swayed by the idols of our cultures when our souls are in conversation with God consistently.
Our idols exist in some proportion to our lack of the pursuit of true spirituality, of seeking the God who has found us by His grace, by lacking the hunger for prayer as soul renewal. We must take up the treasures we have been given in Christ. One of those is that we can talk to our God as He has spoken to us.
pride
We conclude by going one ring deeper to point to the deepest disease, where the lack of a Christian mindset is a manifesting symptom: we are prideful to the bottom. The corruption of this world began with that sin, pride. While prayerlessness leads to enculturation as a default, pride leads to prayerlessness, which leads to enculturation.
This is the point when Paul tells us to take on the mind of Christ. The mind of Christ is humility, maximally evident in the incarnation and crucifixion, and its opposite is “vainglory.” To return to how we began, Paul tells us in Ephesians 1:3 that we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing. We’ve been given the treasures of Christ Himself. But we struggle to take hold of what we have. It’s like being desperately hungry when someone gives you an entire kitchen of good food. And objectively (forensically), if someone asked, “Do you have enough food?,” the answer must be “Yes, I have a storehouse.” Yet you’re still starved because you don’t go into the kitchen and eat. We don’t come to the table. The lack is not in Christ or what He has given us but in our “taking and eating.” It is a sanctification problem on our part. Where does this refusal to take up what we’ve been given come from? Our pride.
Our self-centered souls are oriented to selfish ambition and vain conceit. This is the problem from the beginning: we want to be the kings and queens of our own lives, the masters and commanders of our own destinies. The Mr. Hyde within is hungry for honor, respect, and self-glory. We lack a Christian mindset because of our soul-level refusal to let God be God. We still want to be our own gods. We lack the constant battle of unmasking our idols; enculturation ensues and we cease to pray.
The Christian mindset means letting Christ be the King, losing ourselves to His mission and glory, and thus finding our purpose again. We must exchange the small ambitions that our pride generates for the huge ambitions that Christ offers. The cross calls us to go down in order to go up. We must lose our pride to take up our purpose.
Humility is the key that unlocks the storehouse called the mind of Christ. Absolute dependence is the beginning of the Christian mindset. Prayer is humility enacted. And the humility of our prayerfulness is our protection from the enculturation that blocks and destroys thinking God’s thoughts after Him.