Love God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul
by J. P. Moreland
NavPress, 1997

Guest Review by J. T. McCubbin

I have sat through church services and listened to the outpouring of concern for lost souls. I have been bombarded with messages how, as a Christian, I should continue to seek ways to serve the unchurched in order to demonstrate Christ’s love through us, thereby appealing to the seeker in them, and further enhancing their curiosity about what should fill the obvious void in their life. There is certainly a thread of truth in this mindset, but something seems to miss the mark.

I have also overheard conversations from people at work and other social spheres, about how religion is a private matter to be kept to oneself and within one’s family. After all, what is right for one person is not necessarily right for another. Even we as “Christians” have no place telling, or even urging, others how to behave or believe.

The seeker-centered church presents multiple opportunities to invite my seeker friends and acquaintances to an entertaining church event where they will be exposed to the message of Christ. I don’t have to worry about the discomfort I might feel presenting the gospel to others. All that is required is to get them through the doors and allow the experience to take over from there. In these cases, I have repeatedly failed to fill the seats to which I have been allotted. Upon reflection it occurred to me, first, maybe I don’t have many friends, and second more importantly, I have no friends who are seeking.

Virtually everyone I encounter who is not a Christian has seemingly filled their void with a secular reality, with their individualism, with fulfillment from working toward, or achieving, their personal life goals, and developing the seven habits of overly-stressed people. They are confident in their life-experiences, and they are happy at having fun.

In reading J.P. Moreland’s, Love Your God With All Your Mind, something began to awaken; perhaps my soul even began to stir. After years of being lulled into “God said it, I believe it, and that’s good enough for me,” Moreland’s book passionately cries out for us to become mature Christians and use our minds--to take the first steps of a journey along a path not only to greater accountability, but also loving God in a way that we have long neglected.

Love Your God With All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul, is structured into four main parts:

Part One: Why the Mind Matters in Christianity
Part Two: How to Develop a Mature Christian Mind
Part Three: What a Mature Christian Mind Looks Like
Part Four: Guaranteeing a Future For the Christian Mind

In part one Moreland provides the framework for the spread of anti-intellectualism throughout the church and what the result has been. For example, this anti-intellectualism has led to a misunderstanding of the relationship between faith and reason.

While few would actually put it in these terms, faith is now understood as a blind act of will, a decision to believe something that is either independent of reason or that is a simple choice to believe while ignoring the paltry lack of evidence for what is believed. By contrast with this modern misunderstanding, biblically, faith is a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true. Understood this way we see that faith is built on reason.

Part one continues by demonstrating how we have allowed our society, media, and education systems to marginalize Christianity. I recognized an example of this shortly after the latest government elections, where the media and late-night entertainers over-simplified the moral based political thought and defined Christian Conservatives as residents of Red states. From my personal experience, these Christians now accept the label and proudly display their newfound label on license plates and bumper stickers. They do not realize how they have allowed their entire belief system and spiritual faith to be wrapped up into a geographical color. This also assumes that because Christians might have morally-based thinking, that they are right-wing conservatives--another set of labels.

Part one also recognizes the reluctance that many Christians might have with a more intellectual structure to a Christian life. Moreland adequately deals with five common misconceptions about a Christian intellectual approach, allowing the remainder of the book to unfold unimpeded.

Part two deals with what Moreland calls the “Hobgoblins, Thieves, and Cobwebs” of our Christian minds. These are the mental enemies we struggle with and how we can begin to gain the upper hand. Dealing with the cobwebs, we dust off our own understanding of reason, logic, and recognizing false argument.

One of the most serious Hobgoblins Moreland contends with is the Empty Self. Reading through the characteristics of the Empty Self, one will recognize many traits indicative of members of our culture. More convicting, one may also recognize traits found within themselves. Overcoming this Empty Self with a “careful intellect,” Moreland argues, is the first step in cultivating a Christian mind.

In the third part Moreland deals with cultivating the Christian mind with a heavy dose of apologetics, and how it can find its place in evangelism. Well-founded apologetic reasoning can then be used to answer the skeptic, the moral relativist, and the philosophical naturalist (scientism). Even for the thought-novice like myself who still has to muster up the courage to rhetorically engage others, understanding these cultural pitfalls allows us to more readily recognize them in our workplace, social circles, and in the entertainment we choose for our family and ourselves.

Finally, in part four Moreland contends with the future of the church with suggestions for recapturing the intellectual life of the church. While in the first three sections, Moreland articulately and appropriately argues for the need for such a recapturing, the suggestions outlined in the fourth section seem to suffer from a superficial element. The suggestions themselves are worth consideration, but only scratch the surface of what may more appropriately require something close to a complete re-engineering. Where the fourth section is redeemed is in the following two appendices full of additional resources for further study. While not diving into these appendices directly, Moreland’s book has more than inspired me to keep studying, digging, reading, and thinking.

For me, Love Your God With All Your Mind has served as a jumping off point into other introductory philosophical reading that has helped me understand the origins of much of today’s flawed secular thinking.


J. T. McCubbin can be contacted at JT.McCubbin@hexionchem.com.

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Rick's note: In my opinion, this is one of the most significant books I've read in the last five years. Don't let the title fool you; Moreland's book is not a call to an Ivory-towered, private academic study. Rather, it's a call to Christians in our culture to a life of serious discipleship that among other things, will prepare the believer for encounters with those outside the walls of the church.