With All Your Mind . . .

THE CLEAR MIND

The first two installments of this series have given witness to what most of us will admit, even if we may have to be reminded, that the mind matters. Jesus wants our minds as well as our hearts and souls. If therefore we are to think as believers, we are to think clearly. A muddled mind can hardly be the renewed mind that scripture calls for, and we are not likely to love God with all our mind if the mind is confused.

Among the mind’s deadly enemies are those evil forces that invent vocabularies. They are found in Communism in such verbage as “liquidating undesirable elements,” which really means killing party dissidents. Nazism’s “final solution” was a reference to the annihilation of Jews. Our own nation has indulged in the manufacture of terms that are designed to confuse the issue. The “relocation of the population” during World War 2 was actually the forced evacuation of thousands of Japanese Americans from their homes on the west coast. A lot of name-calling goes on that confuses the issue and arouses prejudice, such as sexist, racist, reactionary, and liberal.

Religion has had its share of those who confuse the mind through invention of terminology. Any theology text can leave one’s mind swimming in a maze of lingo that defies simplicity. Sacraments, sanctuary, sacristy, sanctus, suffrages are but a few, to indulge in alliteration. If one gets into prophetic studies he not only meets with dispensationalism, but with pretribulationism and postribulationism, and even midtribulationsim, as well as realized eschatology, the “parenthesis church,” existential eschatology, to name a few. Calvinism has given us the likes of limited atonement and effectual grace.

It is not to be wondered that a reformer like Alexander Campbell would call for “the restoration of a pure speech, or the calling of Bible things by Bible names.” Campbell insisted that more than half the controversies have been about words of foreign importation, which have supplanted the language of the Holy Spirit.

Those of us who are heirs of the unity movement he launched have also been guilty of darkening counsel by a failure to give scriptural terms their proper import, such as minister, ministry, worship, sanctuary, gospel, truth, faithful, communion, church. We have lost one of Campbell’s most important conclusions, that the Bible must be seen as a book of facts rather than a book of doctrines or opinions. This has caused us to yield to the common practice of sermonizing, which is one of those foreign importations, rather than the teaching of the word.

So, for the mind to be clear it must be swept clean of the language of Ashdod and theological jargon. Further, we must come to see that there are rules and principles for clear, straight thinking just as there are for all orderly things in this world. Some logicians through the centuries have been especially helpful in discovering principles of clear thought just as others have discovered mathematical and scientific principles.

Rene Descartes was one of these. His Rules for the Direction of the Understanding, which sets forth 21 rules, was intended to show man how to think “clearly and distinctly.” His first rule states that the purpose of any study should be to be able to give a true interpretation of all that is set forth, one that we often ignore. We should read not merely for information, but with the intent of being able to explain it. If we cannot explain something clearly and solidly (to use his term), it probably is not clear to us.

His second rule is that we should seek to understand only those things that are within our range of understanding, and the third is that we should not rely upon what others have said or what we ourselves conjecture, but what we can clearly deduce from the evidence set forth. Such methods, which began in doubt (it takes doubt to establish faith, he concluded) led Descartes to certainty of knowledge, including a knowledge of God, whose existence the old philosopher believed he could prove logically. Moreover, he believed that God has written such rules as these in nature and upon the mind of man, so that when we reflect upon them we can know that they are true.

He therefore set forth his method for clear thinking: (1) Accept nothing as true that you cannot clearly recognize to be such; (2) Divide difficult problems into parts and work on each part; (3) Work with those parts that are the easiest to handle, then the next easiest, and on to the more difficult, (4) Make your review of all the material so complete as to omit nothing.

Descartes’ rules and method would revolutionize our study of the Bible and change many conclusions that we have drawn from it, too often based on tradition and what others have said. Draw conclusions only as the evidence allows. Accept nothing as true except what is clearly demonstrated to be true. What would these two rules do to a lot of doctrines in the Church of Christ? This is why Campbell, influenced as he was by Descartes, talked about looking at the facts of scripture, not doctrines. That is strange talk to a lot of our people. Let me explain what Campbell was getting at.

A fact is something said or done. The Bible talks about what God has said or done, facts. By applying our minds to them we can come to understand the facts of scripture, and this is the way of unity, for we can believe alike on what the Bible actually says, though maybe not on what men think it means by what it says (doctrines). All facts are truths, Campbell noted, but truths are not facts, for something must be done before there can be a fact. That God exists is a truth, not a fact, while God created the universe is a fact, something done. Paul was an apostle --- a truth; that he preached the gospel as an apostle is a fact. Only facts save, for these reveal what God has done to save us. We should not speculate upon facts, but allow them to bear testimony as to how God has acted. An opinion has never saved anyone, nor has anyone ever been lost for disbelieving an opinion. We are therefore to approach the Bible as a book of facts primarily and seek to have a clear understanding of what is actually said.

A famous essay in the history of thought is one by C. S. Peirce on How to Make Our Ideas Clear, which challenged a lot of traditional thinking, and it bears resemblance to Campbell’s emphasis given above. Peirce contends that any idea or thought can mean only the action (or habit) it produces, or our idea or thought of anything is our idea of its sensible effects. You have no idea of fire, for instance, except in terms of its effects --- it heats, illumines, melts, etc. “To know what we think,” he says, “to be masters of our own meaning, will make a solid foundation for great and weighty thought,” but he regrets that most people cherish ideas that are too vague and meaningless to be positively false and are therefore accepted as true. If all ideas could be seen in terms of the effects they produce, which can be clearly determined, a lot of our fuzzy thinking would be eliminated.

Peirce applies this concept to the theological idea of transubstantiation. He notes that Roman Catholics concede that the bread and wine possess all the sensible attributes of bread and wine, and yet they literally become meat and blood, they claim. He says this is nonsense, for if the wine has all the properties of wine (the effects we see or taste in wine) then it cannot be blood, which has different properties. He insists therefore that there is no real difference between the Catholic and Protestant positions since they agree that the bread and wine have all the qualities of bread and wine, which precludes their having any other qualities. It is simply that Catholic thought in this instance is muddled by theological jargon.

What then is a clear idea? One that we can see in terms of what the idea does or the effect it has, which should eliminate all the vague “subjective” ideas we have. Take the idea of gospel. If you see this as good news that is proclaimed, believed, obeyed, as facts of what God has done to redeem the world, then you see its effects. That is the what gospel is, nothing else. It is not a vague bundle of doctrines, variously interpreted, running all through the New Testament. Some even see a cappella music and anti-millennial teaching as gospel. We come to a clear idea of what gospel is when we identify specifically what it does, its effects or its qualities. It is therefore different from teaching, which has different effects and qualities, and accomplishes something different.

So with all ideas, whether prayer, the Lord’s Supper or whatever. When you determine what happens in the Supper, what it does, all its qualities as revealed in the facts of scripture, then you will have a clear idea of what it is. These things of course, with all biblical themes, involve a lifetime of study.

A mind with clear ideas is therefore a disciplined mind, disciplined not only by love for God but also by rules and method that God has given for’ the direction of the mind. --- the Editor