Reason and the Message: Difference between revisions

Jesus said the greatest commandment was “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”. (Mat 22:37) We could unpack this verse to the tune of a one hundred page book without exhausting the treasures contained therein, but for the purposes of this discussion, I want to zero in on what it means to love God with all your mind.

The Greek word for mind here is “Dianoia”.

:'''''diánoia''''': literally "thorough reasoning," incorporates both sides of a matter to reach a meaningful (personal) conclusion. Such "full-breadth reasoning" is essential to loving (25 /agapáō) the Lord and our neighbor (see Mk 12:30).– properly, movement from one side (of an issue) to the other to reach balanced-conclusions; full-orbed reasoning (= critical thinking), i.e. dialectical thinking that literally reaches "across to the other side" (of a matter). (from 1223 /diá, "thoroughly, from side-to-side," which intensifies 3539 /noiéō, "to use the mind," from 3563 /noús, "mind") <ref>Strongs Concordance</ref>

:''‘You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with '''all your thinking'''.’ This is the great and first commandment. But there is a second which is like it: ‘You are to love your neighbor as yourself.’ The whole law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.<ref>R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publication Co., 2007), 842.</ref>

There are many Greek words that Jesus might have used if he meant that we love God simply by thinking about him, or by committing his promises to memory, or any number of other mental capabilities. All of those things are wise habits for a Christian, but the implication of this word choice is abundantly clear here. We are to love God with all our mind by using the gift of intellect that God gave us to make good, balanced, informed decisions through critical thinking, and thorough, full-orbed reasoning.

This flies in the face of everything we were taught in the message. We were taught to fear our minds, to distrust the mind as evil, to cast it aside as an abject hindrance to faith.  

The irony is, we have no trouble following Jesus’ command when purchasing a home, or a car, or looking into a business. Most message believers would agree that it is basic God-honoring Christian stewardship when we make decisions in exactly this manner. So why is it, that when it comes to the most important matters of one’s life, [spiritual matters] that we delude ourselves into thinking that the life of the soul is so utterly detached from our brain, that we are so directly led of God, that we not only can, but, should, give up the faculties of our mind, our dianoia, altogether, in favor of, presumably, faith?

That is the problem.  We have been programmed to operate spiritually from a ''faith vs. reason'' paradigm that says that in order to activate one [faith] we have to deactivate the other [reason].  The problem is, the Bible teaches no such antithetical relationship between the two. God intended them to work in perfect synthesis, with spiritual faith working at a higher level above our human capacity to reason, not in a vacuum devoid of all logical sequence of thought.