Have you lost your mind? That’s the assignment I’ve been given
to address in this message. And one thing I had lost up until a couple
of minutes ago was the Jolly Green Giant. I’ve been looking all over for him. How many of you remember the Jolly Green Giant? Ho, ho, ho. Way to go. But Vesta just informed me that she found
him, so things are good. We’ve got the giant. Now, all we have to do is find a way to recover
our minds. Before we do that, let me just have another
brief word of prayer. Our Father and our God, we are yours. We are yours with our hearts, our souls, our
wills, our minds, and we ask that in this time of thinking that you would refresh us
in every dimension of our humanity, that when we leave here, we will leave with a deeper
understanding of who You are and of who we are, and how we can serve You more faithfully. For we ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen. I’ve said I think many times that we are
living in the most anti-intellectual climate in the history of the Christian church. And what I mean by anti-intellectual is not
anti-academic or anti-technical or anti-scientific, but anti-intellectual,
meaning anti the intellect, anti the mind. There has been an avalanche of criticism resulting
in a wholesale rejection of the significance of the mind in living, particularly in Christian
living, and God forbid, even within the church. And so what I’d like to do in this opening
address of this conference is to look at the relationship of the mind to our bodies firstly,
and then look at the relationship between our minds to our wills and then thirdly, the
relationship between our minds and our hearts. And so let me start with the first step by
looking at the relationship between the mind and the body. And to begin that, I need your help. I’m going to ask you to do something in
just a moment, but I want to assure you and comfort you that what I’m asking you to
do is not to make a commitment to anything, or to volunteer for anything, or even to do
anything of any substance. Simply, what I’m asking you to do, if you
will, is raise your right hand. Now, keep it up there. I want you to look around and see how many
people have responded to this simple request raising their right hand. I just wanted to see what was wrong. I thought maybe I was going too fast here,
that some of you couldn’t get it. Alright, you can put those hands down now. Now, what just happened in the last few seconds
demonstrates and illustrates one of the most mysterious phenomena that we ever encounter
as thinkers and inquirers into reality. I asked you a question. I gave you a suggestion, in a word I gave
you a piece of my mind, and I was hoping that with your minds, you would understand the
request that I made of you. And that so many of you responded to that
request by actually raising your right hand gave me some assurance at least that you had
at least a basic understanding of what I was asking you to do. But what is even more significant, that is
having understood my request in your minds, you responded with a physical, bodily reaction. You had a thought, which I tried to convey
to you mind to mind, an idea about raising your hand, and without coercion, and without
any difficulty whatsoever, you raised your hand. Now, how about that? I mean, isn’t that incredible? And now I know what you’re thinking. Has he lost his mind that he would give any
significance to that? But that question involves the question of
the relationship of the mind to the body, how an idea, which is non-physical or mental,
can give rise to a physical action, which is something material. We’re talking about the way in which the
non-physical relates to the physical, the mental relates to the material. Or we’re asking the question now of the
relationship of mind to matter. Now, in our day, it has been said that the
last frontier of scientific research and investigation is into the phenomenon of the mind, how the
mind functions, how the mind works, where its power comes from. In the second half of the twentieth century
we were treated (or mistreated), however you look at it, to the school of behaviorism that
tried to reduce all mental activity, all thinking, all thought to mere physical material reactions. You may remember the work of B.F. Skinner,
who wrote the well-known book entitled ‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity.’ And in that work, he tried to argue – he
didn’t just try to – he argued that our idea of freedom is really an illusion as also
is our concept of dignity, because we are simply determined masses of matter who have
no freedom whatsoever, but must believe what we believe according to what we have eaten,
or according to the physical impulses that have been around us through our lives. And so that even the conclusions we come to
in our thinking have been rigidly determined by these material forces. Do you follow that? Am I going too fast? No, you get that, of course. Now, it’s one of these cases where a man’s
argument falls by his own weight, because here’s a man who said he believes that every
idea that you have, every thought that you conceive, every position that you espouse
is not the result of free intellectual investigation, but simply the result of how many donuts you
had for breakfast or what other material causes have operated on you. And yet as he tries to argue that your thoughts
are simply the results of material determinism, he actually tries to argue that your thoughts
are only the result of material determinism. And he’s trying to change my mind by what
he perceives to be cogent arguments. And I would say to Mr. Skinner, “I can’t
help what I believe. I can’t help that I disagree with you with
everything in my being because I had a glazed donut this morning.” Other critics have put it this way against
B.F. Skinner, that the only thing beyond freedom and dignity are slavery and indignity. So that the idea that we are more than materially
determined objects, and that there is such a reality as thought that is not materialistically
controlled is an idea that is absolutely critical and essential to our Christian experience
and to our lives as human beings. The mind is not material. We associate the mind with the function of
the brain. The brain is material. The brain can be weighed and measured. The brain does take up space. But we still must distinguish between the
thoughts that we have and the organ in our physical body that is related to them. And that’s most critical, for example, for
the Christian who at the heart of our faith is the affirmation that when we die and this
earthly tabernacle dissolves and the brain deteriorates into the dust, that we continue
to have a conscious, awake, personal identity that goes forever. I could ask you the question in another way. Where do you live? I’ve asked my students that in the past. When they introduce themselves, I’ll say,
“Where do you live?” And they say, “Well, I live in Abilene,
Texas.” And I say, “Well, that’s interesting.” They say, “Why?” I say, “Do you have the attribute of ubiquity
or omnipresence?” And they look at me strange – “What do
you mean?” I say, “Well, you tell me that you live
in Abilene, Texas, and here you are in Orlando, Florida. Are you not alive now? If your life is contained in Abilene, and
you’re not in Abilene, you must be dead.” And they say, “No, no, no, no, what I meant
by that is my residence is in Abilene.” And I said, “Yes, that’s what you mean. But where do you actually live? You live wherever you are.” And even wherever you are, you live contained
within the boundaries of your physical body, which to some degree identifies who you are. But if you really want to know who I am, and
you want to know who you are, we have to do more than give a police sketch of your physical
characteristics or to look at your medical records. To know who you are requires getting into
the mind, because the chief place where we live is in our minds, in our thoughts, in
our thinking. Well again, what’s the difference between
our bodies and our minds? I had a professor once who was asked the question
of the difference between our bodies and our minds, and he said, “What is mind? No matter. Well, what is matter?” He said, “Never mind.” And with that cute little repartee, he was
trying to explain to us that we must never, ever, ever, confuse the material and the mental. And those of you who are students of the history
of theoretical thought know that in the seventeenth century in the world of philosophy the relationship
of the mind to the body was one of the most penetrating and compelling questions that
occupied the investigation of the great philosophers of that period. I’m thinking initially of the mathematician/philosopher
René Descartes, who’s famous for his formula, “I think, therefore I am,” nevertheless
went beyond that formula and was asking the very question I’ve been asking, how can
a non-physical reality, a thought, produce a physical reality such as raising your hand
and vice versa? If when I raise my hand you slap it, that
might provoke some thinking in my mind about you for having injured me in that manner. And so Descartes wrestled, bringing all of
the power of his own mind to the question, and he said we see two categories – the
mind and the body – and he said the body or anything that is material has what he called
extension – extension. That is, it has something that takes up space
and can be measured. And that’s true of all of us with respect
to our bodies. We all have extension. Some of us have more extension than others,
and sometimes we have more extension than we would like to have. But he said unlike the body, the mind is not
extended. A thought cannot be put on a scale. It can’t be weighed. You can’t use a ruler to measure it. And so he defined the difference between mind
and matter as the difference between extension with respect to matter and non-extension with
respect to the mind, and then proceeded to his investigation saying, well how can the
extended give rise to extension? How can the extension or the extended give
rise to non-extension? How does that happen? And he developed a somewhat complex theory
that he called ‘interactionism.’ You know, sometimes we think we’ve explained
things by simply describing them. It doesn’t necessarily explain anything. I mean, it’s obvious to him at the outset
of his investigation that there was some kind of interaction between thinking and action. And then he proceeded to give his theory that
the point of transition between thought and action, and action and thought was in the
pineal gland up in the brain, and he said that it – the transition took place at a
point. Now he was relying on his mathematical knowledge. He said because a point is something that
takes up space but has no dimension. And so he played with that theory. His disciples came along and said, “No,
there’s not enough God in this theory. We have to see that God is actively involved
in everything that takes place in this world, including our thinking.” And they were trying to look out for people
who were already trying to remove God from the framework of human agency and activity
and to get rid of the whole idea of God’s providence, by which He rules His creation. And a distinction was made then in the seventeenth
century that made its way into our Reformed creeds and confessions that were very important,
a distinction between primary and secondary causality. I’ve illustrated this at earlier conferences,
and I’m going to do it again now with a very deep and profound and difficult illustration,
so you’re going to have to concentrate now intensely if you want to get this. These are my glasses. Am I going too fast? You got that. OK. Now, watch what I do, and you will see that
at no point does my hand ever leave my wrist. OK. Careful. I just dropped them. What caused that? Well, the atheist would say there was only
one causal agent involved in that – me. R.C. Sproul made the glasses fall down on the table. Yet the Bible tells us that in Him, that is,
in God we live and move and have our being, that I can’t move even from the lectern
here without the ultimate power of God energizing that activity. I can’t live for a second without the upholding
power of our sustaining providence of the God who created us in the first place. I can’t be independent from God’s eternal
being. And so what the Bible is saying there is that
the primary cause for everything that takes place in this world is God Himself, that whatever
power I introduce to the equation is always and everywhere secondary. It’s not the ultimate or the primary cause. And so some of the disciples of Descartes
looked at this and said, well it’s not as simple as an interaction between a thought
and a material response. But these followers who were occasionalists
said here’s the way it works. That I thought that I made these glasses fall
on the table by my own volition and my own power, but actually there was a simultaneous
activity where I let go of the glasses, but what made the glasses fall was not the power
of R.C. Sproul or even the power of gravity, it was
the power of God that made it happen, and that my action was simply the occasion for
God to bring about the action. Now, that theory, of course, rescued God and
kept His involvement intact, but it seemed to eliminate any significance to our activity. I get this question all the time about the
sovereignty of God and His will and the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives – how much
of it is our decision, how much of it is God. You know how these questions go. But even that theory by the occasionalists
didn’t solve the equation, although many people would go to conferences in the seventeenth
century and listen to these people argue about this, would go away saying, “Have you guys
lost your mind thinking about all this business?” Then there’s Leibniz who in his monadology
introduced the theory that was called the law of pre-established harmony – that God
is not simply the occasion for my dropping the glasses, but that occasion that took place
was established not a few moments ago when I decided to drop the glasses, but that that
was determined in the decrees of God back in eternity. And so the seeming present agreement or harmony
between mind and body is something that God established eternally. That didn’t satisfy Spinoza, who then gave
his substance philosophy, which I won’t get into that with the modalities and all
the rest. But they were all arguing about the same question
– the relationship of mind and matter. How many of you have ever heard of anything
about David Hume’s critique of causality? Let me see your hand. Alright. That’s not completely obscure, is it? That those of you who are students of history
and know of the assault that David Hume made on causality, which atheists made much of
then and now, was you can’t understand it if you didn’t understand this prior question. Because Hume was looking at what Descartes
was saying, what the occasionalists were saying, what Spinoza was saying, what Leibniz was
saying, and he said, “Nobody knows.” We can’t really perceive the relationship
between the mind and the body. We don’t know what’s making this happen
whether invisible spirits are making me drop my glasses, or if God has established it from
all eternity. So it’s a fool’s errand to even try to
explain it, which I really haven’t explained, and I really haven’t tried to explain. I’m just trying to tell you there’s a
long-term question about the relationship between thought and action. But from a Biblical perspective, we know that
there is a relationship, and that we are responsible for our actions, and we are told that our
actions are determined even within the scope of divine sovereignty and God’s providence
and His primary causality by how we think. The Bible says, “As a man thinks in his
heart, so is he.” Now, the Bible is aware that the heart is
not the organ of thought. The Bible understands that the heart is the
one that causes the blood to channel through our bodies and that the brain is the idea
of our mind. But when the Bible says, “as a man thinks
in his heart,” the distinction there, friends, is this, that we have thoughts that pass through
our mind, maybe dreams that are as soon as we wake up there they dissipate. And we may think at the surface level about
a multitude of things, but if I want to know what you really think, if I want to know what
you really believe, not what you say you believe, not what you affirm on an examination, but
what makes you tick, I have to look at your life, because your life will tell me what
you think in your heart, because that’s what God said. “As a man thinks in His heart, so is he.” And so if a Christian is interested in how
he lives, he needs first to consider how he thinks and what it is that he thinks. The second question I want to look at briefly
is the relationship between the mind and the will. We have a tendency to think about our minds
as something that happens here close to our brains, and that the faculty of choosing that
we experience is found in the will. Now, let me ask you this question, where is
the will located? Is it like three inches behind your liver
or maybe just behind the esophagus? Where is the will? Or to ask it another way, what is the will? And how does the will function and operate? What is its role in our lives? Well, I think the magisterial work on this
question ever written was written by Jonathan Edwards in his book entitled ‘The Freedom
of the Will.’ And I always encourage Christian people to
read Edwards, ‘The Religious Affections’ is a treatise on original sin. And if they don’t want to read those heavier
things, that at least get a hold of his sermons and read those sermons and digest them. But I almost never encourage laypeople to
read ‘Freedom of the Will’ because if I do and they do, I’m afraid they may never
forgive me, because you almost have to have a PhD in philosophy to wade through that particular
study of the will. It’s difficult stuff. It is. But in simple terms, Jonathan Edwards defined
the will in this manner. He said the will is the mind choosing. That’s interesting to me at least because
Edwards is saying we distinguish between the mind and the will, between thought and choice,
but really what the will is, is just one function of the mind. Now, you may respond by that and say, “Well,
many of the choices that I make in my life, I don’t make for mental reasons, but rather
I am driven to make the choices that I make because of physical needs or physical appetites. I get hungry. I choose to eat. I get thirsty. I choose to drink. What does that have to do with the mind?” Now, Edwards would not deny that physical
appetites and inclinations would be part of the function of choosing. But in the final analysis, for the choice
to be made and especially if it’s to be a moral choice, it has to involve a voluntary,
conscious choice, and what happens is when I consider my options and my inclinations
and my desires, I will choose what my mind deems to be best for me at the particular
moment. In fact, he defines the act of choice as doing
that which you’re most inclined to do at a given moment. And he would say, not only may we choose what
we want to do the most at a given moment, but we must choose what we are most inclined
to do at a given moment, or we wouldn’t make that choice. In fact, you have never chosen anything in
your whole life against your will. Every single act that you have done that was
a voluntary act – I’m not talking about your heart’s beating and involuntary actions
like that. You maybe have had a heart attack, which you
didn’t choose to have at that moment. But I’m talking about actual choices of
moral value and complications. Edwards says, and I believe irrefutably so,
that we always choose according to our strongest inclination at a given moment. And I’ve used the illustration before of
Jack Benny. Some of you are too young to remember Jack
Benny. Some of you who are old enough will never
forget Jack Benny. But there was a time on one of his programs
where he was giving one of his monologues, and suddenly this bandit rushed on stage with
a pistol and a mask and pointed the gun at Jack Benny, and said, “Your money or your
life.” And Benny, who was notorious for being a tightwad
and being cheap, just stood there like that. And the robber said, “What are you doing?” “I’m thinking it over.” But actually we would say in that case, Jack
Benny didn’t really have a choice because the gun was pointed at his head. Well, no, what the gun at the head did was
severely restricted his choices to two – hand over the money or get shot. But he still had a choice. And he maybe was thinking about it this way. Well, if I don’t give him my money, he’s
going to shoot me, and he’s going to get my money anyway. So I may as well give him my money, so it
would seem to me that the thing to do is to hand over the money. Or he could have been this way in saying,
“He’ll get my money, of course, but it will be over my dead body. I’m not going to capitulate to this coercion. Go ahead and shoot me because I’d rather
die than hand my money over to you.” Now, which would you do in that situation? And we’re not sure what we would do because
we haven’t been there. But I assure you, and Edwards would assure
you that in that moment you would do according to the strongest inclination that you had,
and you’d do it a hundred times out of a hundred. And you say, well that’s not real freedom
if I always choose according to my greatest inclination. Like I say, you’re here at this conference,
and it may be that the last thing all things being equal that you wanted to do on this
weekend was to come to a Christian conference on the mind. So all things being equal, you’d rather
have gone fishing or gone out to play golf. That would have been my preference. But the problem is you’re married. And your wife said, “Honey, I want you to
go to this conference with me,” so now all of a sudden all things aren’t equal, are
they? Now, you have to choose between going to a
conference that all things being equal you don’t want to attend and thereby alienating
your wife, or submitting to her request, keeping the marital peace and missing your weekend
golf game. And if you’re here, it’s because you decided
that the lesser of two evils in these options was to make your wife happy. But however you decided, whatever was your
strongest inclination right there, was the one you choose. And I’ve challenged people before to give
me – send me a letter, don’t do it here, and don’t do it – yeah, do it by letter. Give me one example in your whole life where
you made a decision or a choice that was not according to the strongest inclination that
you had at the moment because usually we don’t have one inclination or one disposition. We have many of them. And it’s the one that reaches the strongest
point that determines what we will do. And we’ll say, well, that’s – if we’re
determined by our strongest inclinations, doesn’t that mean that we’re not free? No, it is a kind of determinism, but it’s
self-determinism. And self-determination is the very essence
of freedom. That’s what we want to be free to do, to
be able to choose what? What we want. And again, Edwards would say not only do you
have that ability to choose what you want, you can’t not choose what you want with
your strongest inclination. When it comes over into the – with respect
to the things of God, there’s our problem that in our natural state we have no inclination
for the things of God, other than to escape God. I’ll look at that more fully, God-willing,
on Saturday, how we don’t want God in our thinking, we don’t want Jesus in our lives. So left to ourselves, we are completely disinterested
and disinclined in coming to Jesus. And I’ll guarantee you, one thing you can’t
do is make a decision to change your inclination. The inclination has to change before the decision
will ever change. Now, one last dimension of this element – in
the nineteenth century, one of the most important philosophers at the end of the century was
a man by the name of Edmund Husserl, who was called the Father of Personalism. Two of his most famous students he mentored
were Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, two of the most important atheistic philosophers
of the twentieth century. But in trying to determine what it may mean
to make a person a person and what is personality, Husserl came to the conclusion that what makes
for personal existence is what he called intentionality – that what makes a person a person is that
we have the ability to act with intention, with intent. Joseph, you know, with his brothers when they’re
terrified that he’s going to punish them for their awful treatment of him, and he weeps
with them, and he says, “Who am I to judge you? I’m not God. But you meant it for evil. God meant it for good.” There was your intent in this drama, and there
was God’s intent in this drama. But what Husserl was getting at is that it’s
intention that defines us, and intention can be found only in the mind. So, if you want to change what you mean to
do, somehow your mind has to be changed, which gets us to the last point – the relationship
of the mind to the heart. And I’m only going to say one thing about
that because I’m going to look at this more closely, God-willing, on Saturday. When we wrote ‘Classical Apologetics’
several years ago, I made a statement in that book that sounded contradictory. It sounded like I had descended into dialectical
theology, where I said in the Christian life we have the primacy of the mind, and in the
Christian life we have the primacy of the heart. And people say, “Wait a minute, R.C. You can’t have it both ways.” And I said, “You can’t have it both ways
in the same way in the same relationship.” That would be contradictory. But if from one perspective, in one sense,
there is a primacy of the mind, and another sense there’s a primacy in the heart, and
what’s the difference? When I talk about the primacy of the heart,
in the final analysis when we stand before God, it’s not what we say or what we affirm
in our creeds that will get us into the kingdom of God. God will be looking at the heart. God wants to know, is this heart on fire for
me? Is there love of My Son in this heart? That’s the primary concern we have in the
final analysis. In terms of the primacy of importance, the
heart is greater than the mind. Well, what’s the primacy of the mind? Well, the whole point of this conference is
to demonstrate that there can’t be anything in the heart, that’s not first in the mind. So, if you want to get your heart to change,
you have to have your mind changed. And that’s what Christian sanctification
is all about – the renewing of the mind, the sanctification of the mind so that our
hearts may respond in love and adoration. My time is up until Saturday, so let’s pray,
shall we? Thank you, Lord, that we are so fearfully
and wonderfully made, that You’ve given us the capacity to think, and that our thought
so influences who we are and what we do. Help us not to despise that which is of the
mind, but that we might embrace it seeking to please You by discovering nothing less
than the mind of Christ. For we ask it in His name. Amen.
