LOVING GOD WITH ALL YOUR MIND

 

This book was written and published in 1987 and the revised and updated edition published in 2003. The intention is to encourage young Christian students in the universities, showing them not only how to withstand the attacks on their faith that would come, but, more positively to show them how the life of the mind, in whatever discipline they are called to, is worth pursuing for God’s sake.  There are many worldview collisions that a Christian will be called upon to deal with as they pursue their studies and a career in the academic world.  This book reveals how being a Christian actually helps a person as they participate in the ‘marketplace’ of ideas present in an academic setting.  The book uses as a framework, the lives of Daniel and his three friends as they conducted their lives in the context of the ‘university of Babylon’.  They were educated, as was Moses, and young man Saul, in the up to date learning of their day, but were able to excel from the Godly Hebrew worldview perspective.  Does secular education fit in with being a Christian?  This question is effectively answered in this book.  Both the challenge of ‘modernism’ and that of postmodern thought are faced and considered under the headings of  the ‘magicians and the enchanters’.  These were the two strands of opposition that Daniel faced and overcame, and so the Christian is able to face the challenges of the modern scientific minds and that of the postmodern spin of the concept of ‘the truth that is good for you’.  “Loving God with All your Mind’ shows us that the answer is neither a wholesale rejection of intellectual life and culture, nor blind acceptance of it.  The answer lies in understanding that Jesus is the Lord of all life and that everything in life must be carefully viewed in the light of what Christ’s Lordship means.  The author shows the flexibility of the Christian mind and its ability to move in the paradoxes intrinsic to healthy thought.  On the one side is an accepting attitude and on the other a skepticism which is essential to Christian thought.  There is much to commend in this book and it does help to show how Christians can survive and flourish in a postmodern world while affirming the truth of the Christian faith. 

 

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