Ecclesiology 8 - A New Church - part 6: The Mind of Christ

     We shall continue our deep dive into The Problem of Wineskins, and I shall continue using Dr. Snyder's own words.  Where I interject my own thoughts and ideas will be separated by either announcing paragraphs or bracketed sentences as appropriate.

     The next chapter is subtitled "The Mind of Christ," and the concept is introduced with an overview of the prevailing philosophy developing within our increasingly technological age.  Snyder declares that we live in a world increasingly hostile to all that is truly human.  While there is much talk of expanded consciousness, sensitivity training, new forms of community and the like, fundamental forces are moving to undermine the uniqueness of being human.  In the words of Phillip Morrison ("The Mind of the Machine", Technology Review, Jan. 1973), the human mind is more and more being framed as "a slow-clockrate modified digital machine, with multiple distinguishable parallel processing, all working in salt water."  But the church is to know the mind of Christ, the renewed image of God.  In a technological age, this is revolutionary.  In 1 Corinthians 2:16, Paul says "we have the mind of Christ" and again in Philippians 2:5: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus" (KJV).

    The word used most often by New Testament writers for "mind" is the Greek word nous, and its connotation goes well beyond the brain or consciousness.  A closer English parallel could be drawn from the concept of "personality."  In Christian terms, it means to be "conformed to the image of the Son" (Rom. 8:29), and it is this image of God that makes people unique in a world of things, animals and machines.  Jesus Christ came to restore that image among people and it is God's express will for the church that "all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to matur[ity], to the measure of the stature of the fulfillment of Christ" (Eph. 4:13).  This is to incarnate the mind of Christ in the church of God.  But what is the image of God in humanity?  What is the uniqueness of the mind of Christ?

(1) Spontaneity.  Art, love, and play all presuppose the freedom to be spontaneous - to do the unnecessary, the unplanned, the unrequired.  Spontaneity is the unpredictability of Jesus, who did not quite fit anyone's mold.  But spontaneity is the antithesis of technique.  Therefore, spontaneity is not permitted in the world of technology - it is too dangerous.  The worst sin of a machine or computer is to be unpredictable, [and humans are driven by modernity to slowly commit more and more of our thoughts and actions to the algorithms of the machine].   It is this spontaneity, unique to human personality and enabled by the Holy Spirit, which is threatened by technological society.

(2) Individuality.   A short paragraph of my own:  As we become increasingly computerized, we are being forced to become increasingly quantifiable; we are increasingly grouped and pigeonholed.  We are either liberal or conservative, Democrats or Republicans.  Gay or Straight. Left vs. Right.  Coke vs. Pepsi.  Us vs. Them. To be a moderate, to be a fan of RC Cola, or worse, to not like cola at all, is unthinkable.

    [back to Snyder] Technological society, of course, is not ultimately interested in what is unique in each individual but rather in what is identical - what can be counted, standardized, computerized.  And the increasing sophistication of behavioral technology greatly broadens the range of the quantifiable.  Already more advanced technological societies have moved far beyond the mere quantification of income, education, employment, residence, credit standing, and the like, and are moving into records of religious beliefs, political preferences, mental health,  and personality types.  Some are even seeking a quantifiable index to the quality of life.

    All manipulation is a threat to true individuality - and hence to true spirituality.  In the church, manipulation produces a synthetic religion in which religious experience is technically induced and maintained [note the increased use of ever more sophisticated sound systems and video production equipment used to induce a synthesized sense of "religious experience"].  The believer becomes an object, not subject; an "it," not an "I."  We need a healthy fear today of any tendency to reduce evangelism and religious experience to mere technology.

(3) Moral Sense.  Even without the light of the Bible, man and woman distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil.  Through the Scriptures we understand that the question is not, however, fundamentally one of right and wrong, nor a matter of morality or moral codes.  Essentially, our moral sense is our awareness that we are responsible beings before the Creator God.  In this responsibility, we find the meaning of life.

     But what happens to morality in a technological society?  Two things.  First, there is a blunting of the moral sense through the eclipse of ultimate meaning.  Industrialization and urbanization break down traditional worldviews with their accompanying mores and place society in flux.

    But people cannot live long in a moral vacuum: they must have a morality.  Technology expands to fill the vacuum, for technology brings its own morality, [but] technology is concerned with means, not ultimately with ends.  What is feasible (the means) is good in itself, and the question of ends becomes superfluous.  And even when techniques are perceived as not necessarily good, they seem essential for survival (antipollution controls, the pill, new techniques of surveillance, better bombs, computerized information banks, and so on).  And how can what is essential for survival be doubted?  Thus technology produces its own moral values.

    The church, however, is called upon to deepen our moral capacity and give it meaning through Christ-centered relationships, both vertical and horizontal.  The church is in danger of an insidious worldliness at this point.  For all its professed interest in persons, too often the institutional church betrays itself in the way it actually treats people.  Human moral sense - given as a capacitor for true, loving and holy relationships - can all too easily be manipulated by spiritual techniques used to keep people in line.

(4) Self-consciousness.  The Psalms repeatedly speak of our interior life [the fact that humans, in a very real way, live our lives inside our own heads].  There is much in the world that can either develop, distort, or deaden self-consciousness.  Much that comes through television and films [and social media] actually has such a deadening effect, as do alcohol and many kinds of drugs.  In George Orwell's 1984, the development of "Newspeak" was actually intended to limit consciousness and eliminate conscious choices, and thus reduce behavior from a rational to an instinctual level.  [I'm looking at you, Fox News and Facebook.]

    In a world that tends to reduce human self-awareness, or to treat it as a mere evolutionary quirk legitimately subject to behavioral engineering, the church of Jesus Christ must never forget that self-consciousness is a gift from God.

(5) Volition. Jesus said, "I have come...not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me" (John 6:38).  Volition is a part of the image of God.

    Much contemporary psychology (as well as so-called secular theology, when we examine its presuppositions) denies the possibility of true volition.   We behave in a certain way, but the belief that this behavior springs from a conscious choice is an illusion.  Beginning with a purely empirical presupposition, this is the only conclusion one can logically reach.  Volition, purpose, intention - all are beyond the possibility of scientific investigation and, therefore, presumed not to be real. [I recently watched a YouTube video in which a group of neuroscientists, having conducted experiments with subjects who were asked to make decisions while inside an fMRI scan machine and were thus able to map the mental process of decision-making, concluded that, since we could map the process, volition must be an illusion.]

    By contrast, a Christian begins with the fact of the revealed Word of God, and thus with a personal, volitional, conscious God rather than the blindered view of an empirical presupposition.  The Christian faith is unthinkable without the fact of the will of God - and, derivatively, the will of man or woman. 

    Why does all this matter, and what is the Church's responsibility in it all?  In our computerized age, we find ourselves facing either a reduction of the options available in significant choices, or we confront a dizzying multiplication of choices, which tends to incapacitate our volition.  This, of course, leads us to the whole arena of advertising and propaganda.  The average person (better known as a "consumer") is the target of incessant propaganda about how he or she should use his or her money.  John Kenneth Galbraith commented that "on no other matter, religious, political, or moral, is he so elaborately instructed."  [I disagree with Galbraith on one point and that is that I find politics not far behind advertising in this regard.  The ever-increasing sophistication of "divide and conquer" political campaigns seek also to sap human volition and divide us politically into camps of winners and losers.]

    So, what does all this mean for wineskins?  First, church structure must make room for the individual if the mind of Christ is to become a reality in the church.  This may sound strange, since the legitimate point has often been made that Western Christianity has tended to overemphasize the individual.  But the biblical corrective is not to ride a pendulum swing to the other extreme; neither is it to seek a bland, middle-of-the-road approach.  Rather, the solution is to affirm the breadth of the revealed Word of God: the gospel has both corporate and individual dimensions, and both must be incarnated in the church.  So any unbiblical swing away from individuality must be resisted.

    Second, church structure must be flexible and varied.  Church structure must provide a variety of outlets for ministry and for expressing the meaning of faith in Christ.  There must be some freedom of choice in discovering and developing a Christian lifestyle (or a variety of Christian lifestyles) for our age, but with the authority of Scripture and the context of the Christian community.

    Third, church structure must help sustain a Christian's life in the world.  The church's task is not to keep Christians off the street but to send them out equipped for kingdom tasks.  The Christian community must be structured for such equipping.  Such structures must reinforce the values of personality through small groups, an emphasis on family, and other one-on-one relationships.  This may mean forming special-interest cells for Christians called to specific ministries [although I strongly caution the church against letting any of these cells evolve into cliques or "secret societies"].  And certainly it means a serious theological involvement with the Scriptures to determine the shape of Christian responsibility in society.

    Finally, church structure must build upon spiritual gifts.  I will be taking over at this point.  Snyder has much to say here, and it serves largely as a segue to the next chapter. Therefore I shall take the liberty of summarizing without direct quotations.

     1 Corinthians 12-14, Ephesians 4 and other references make it clear that each Christian is endowed with a spiritual gift and all gifts are given as a means of building the Christian community.  Snyder's emphasis here is that the church structure must be able to find and make use of these gifts for the benefit of the whole, echoing the statements made previously about hiring professional staffs and thereby stymieing the gifts given to the congregants.  The metaphor of the body is useful here.  The ear does not hear because it enjoys hearing, but that the body may function.  The hand grasps, not because it needs the exercise (which it does!), but that the body may act.

    One can argue that the emphasis Snyder here places on the individual stands in stark contrast to what I have been saying about our need for emptiness and self-denial.  Indeed, my selection of quotations while typing this condensation was partly determined to omit certain passages which, at the time, I found disagreeable.  However, now that I have finished the treatise, I realize that there really is no conflict at all.  While I have been emphasizing the need for individual Christians to remit their individuality to the Body of Christ, I understand upon re-reading the above that it then becomes incumbent upon the church as a community of empty beings to, in turn, respond to the needs of the individual.  I strongly suspect that it is and has been the failure of the church to understand, teach and nurture this emphatic dichotomy that has forced it to require the occasional reformation, a renewal of spirit just such as we are herein describing.

Pax