Our aim
with this class is to glorify God by loving him with all our minds, seeing
Christ as preeminent in all things, especially mathematics. In order to do this, I want to continually
bring you back to the big picture, whether that is the big picture of math or
the big picture of God’s world in general.
To begin this process, I am giving an apologetic, or argument, for the
importance of thinking in general. Later
I will talk more about God’s greater purposes in the world and how math
specifically fits into that. But for
now, thinking in general…
You as
a human being consist of many parts, but they all interact and are woven
together to make up you. First, you have
a heart or spirit, which is that deep part of you that wills to do things and
originates plans and pursues what it treasures.
As Jesus tells us, where our treasure is, there is our heart. The heart or spirit is where we primarily
experience emotion. It is from the heart
that we really love and it is also from the heart that we sin. That is the point of so much of what Jesus is
saying in the Sermon on the Mount. Our
body is merely the instrument our heart uses to pursue different things, and
true righteousness is spiritual, internal, a matter of the heart and not just
about external conformity to some standard.
God wants our love from the deepest and central part of us, our heart.
Another
part of you as a created human being is your mind, your ability to think. You were created as a rational being. Your mind was created to discover
truths. Your mind was created to comprehend
and piece things together about the world and learn. As a human, you have the creative ability to
bring before your mind for examination a diversity of things past, present, and
future, far away or near. The created
world has an order and intelligibility that reflect God’s own internal
consistency and character. As humans
created to see and glory in God’s creation, we were made in his image, also
rational, to comprehend such an orderly and intelligible place as this. Our minds are uniquely suited to explore
something like the depths of mathematics.
God has thoughts; he is a thinker.
In this way we are like him, and this is not diminished by the
additional truth that all our thoughts are derivative of his thoughts and
comparatively like a drop in the ocean of his knowledge.
A third
part of you is your body. Your body is
immensely important because it is the only place you can be, and it is with
your body that you serve or disobey. For
good or bad, the body is the instrument of the heart and mind. You can be healthy or sick. Your body can become accustomed to good godly
patterns or unhelpful sinful patterns.
Your existence is nothing other than an embodied existence. Some groups within Christianity have so
latched onto Greek notions about the soul and the sinfulness of the flesh that
they take a too low view of the material body that we have been given as a gift,
and they look forward to escaping it. But
it was material creation that God declared good. And though we look forward to heaven, we see
primarily in Paul a hope for a resurrection body like Christ’s, so this
physical embodied existence is really a preparation for the next physical
embodied existence.
There
is also a social dimension to you. You
were created for relationship with God.
You were created with relationship with others. Think about it. Much of your self-concept is rooted socially
in what your family, friends, and others think about you and what you do. For how much of your action do you feel
influence from others? And isn’t it true
that your identity, who you are, was not simply formed in a vacuum. For good or ill, we necessarily depend upon
and are connected to other people. And ultimately
who we are is determined by who God says we are, not who we say we are, or who
others say we are.
Finally,
you have an eternal soul that is a mysterious and integrating part of you that
brings all the other parts into relationship and a sort of unity to finally
make up who you are. So what do you
consist of? You have a heart, a mind, a
body, a social context, and a soul to integrate all of these parts.
With
this in mind, I want to pose the question, “What was the effect of the Fall on
the whole person, and what importance does that have for the concept of
thinking in general?” It is my
contention that nothing was left untouched by the entrance of sin. Our hearts became selfish and idolatrous, and
with our will we declared independence from God to pursue our own ends. Our minds became clouded, which we will
discuss more in a moment. Our body became
subject to the physical death and decay that now mark our groaning creation which
is detailed in Romans 8, and it became the instrument and playground of our
heart’s sinful movements. Our social
context became ripped apart because we can no longer trust our fellow sinners
and be with them unafraid of exposure. We
blame and despise. Worse than our broken
relationship with other people is our now broken relationship with our Maker,
and it is from this brokenness and rebellion that all the rest flows. We would not be amiss to also note that there
is a sense in which we are not merely alienated from God and other people, but
we are now alienated from our own selves, surprised by our own ugly tendencies,
unable to see to the murky depths of our heart, ashamed of who we are and
scared of what we will find down there.
Finally, our soul feels the Fall as it is pressed with the choice of
eternity. That which was created for
fellowship with God – the human soul - may now, if not rescued, experience
eternal separation and damnation. Indeed,
it is obvious that the whole human person, created in God’s image, has been run
over by a car, dropped off a bridge, and wacked right out of shape.
So how
do thinking and the heart relate? Romans
1 reads as follows… For the wrath of God
is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who
by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown
it to them. For his invisible attributes,
namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever
since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not
honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their
thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and
exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and
birds and animals and creeping things.
From
this passage we see a suppression of truth.
Specifically the suppression of the truth is “by their unrighteousness”. It is from our will flowing from our heart
that we sin, so the heart is the place that has been darkened by this
unrighteousness. I take this connection
to mean that my hearts wants things that it shouldn’t want, and it has enlisted
the mind in service to its goals. In
other words, the heart puts blinders on the mind so that it gets its way. My heart wants me to walk a particular path,
and instructs my mind to ignore truths about God like his existence or his
holiness or his having to do anything with me.
God also makes it plain in this passage that he has made
himself plainly known in creation so that no one can say they didn’t know about
him. We do know God, but we reject
him. Again, For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give
thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish
hearts were darkened. In our
dishonoring of God, in our withholding proper thanks to God, we run our minds
into a dead end. Our thinking is
futile. It leads nowhere good.
It is like this. A young boy sitting on his father’s lap slaps
his father in the face. It is only from
his resting on the father, supported underneath, that he is even able to
perpetrate this injustice and slap his father’s face. So it is with us. It is with the breath that God has given us
that we declare him to not exist or not matter.
It is with the reasoning capacities he has given us that we reason him out
of the picture. As our minds deny God in
the service of our darkened hearts, we are like a man sitting on a tree limb
sawing off that very tree limb, blissfully unaware of our imminent fall.
The conclusion of this talk then is
for the necessity of recognizing all our knowledge in light of God as
Creator. Our knowledge is a subset of
his knowledge and it is of a fundamentally different nature. Take math as an example. It is not simply that God knows more math
than us, or that he knows it all before us, but his knowing of math is a prior
knowing, a creative knowing, an ultimate knowing. It is not simply that God knows 2+2=4, but it
is that his knowing that 2+2=4 is what makes it so. Never will we know anything that way, and God
knows all things that way. Our pursuit
of knowledge must be done with humility taking this Creator/creature
distinction in mind. Our pursuit of
knowledge must be done with humility realizing that our minds are fragile and
easily pulled away from truth so that our hearts can pursue unrighteousness. Prayerful, humble, and thankful. That is what we must be if we are to truly
think and truly know in a way that honors and glorifies God, which is our
ultimate goal.
