Think

While I was waiting for someone to come to my place last night, I read John Piper’s Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God (Kindle edition).  The book is about loving “the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength” (Mk. 12:30). The book reminds me of the highest purpose of Christian scholarship. 

The task of all Christian scholarship—not just biblical studies—is to study reality as a manifestation of God’s glory, to speak and write about it with accuracy, and to savor the beauty of God in it, and to make it serve the good of man. It is an abdication of scholarship when Christians do academic work with little reference to God.

Christian scholarship is not threatened but served when it is permeated by spiritual affections for the glory of God in all things. Most scholars of observable objects to deal with (texts, witnesses, chemicals, people, behaviors, etc.) affections degenerate into groundless emotionalism.

Therefore, we cannot do Christian scholarship if we have no spiritual sense or taste for God—no capacity to apprehend his glory in the things he has made. (Kindle location, 2264-2265, 2281)

The life of the mind is indispensable. The supremacy of Christ and the glory of God ought to be the center of Christian scholarship. Love the Lord with our minds is part of the great commandment.