Most Christian students can’t read when they arrive at university. It’s a reality we come across every year in the ministry I work with in Brisbane as an Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students staff-worker.

Each February we welcome a large group of students into our campus group. Most of them are keen, intelligent Christians from healthy churches. We introduce them to a new style of Bible study. Rather than a sheet of questions, we confront them simply with the text of Scripture. Rather than giving out answers, the leaders keep referring questions back to the group to resolve them together from the text.

What we discover is that most of these students today can’t read. Sure, they can tell you what the words say. However, the basic skills of reading comprehension — looking at context, identifying structure, working out themes — often seem completely foreign to them.

My experience of working with university students has confirmed what the history and sociology books tell me. We live in an age that, by and large, no longer believes in the value of the mind — and the church has docilely followed the spirit of the age.

Of course, the church has had good reason to be wary of an over-confidence in the mind. Some Christians have fol­lowed rationalism to deny the supernat­ural, reducing the Bible to a self-help man­ual. Others have constructed a dry-as-dust orthodoxy that is all head and has no heart-devotion to the Lord. In Scripture we find various warnings against the limitations and dangers of knowledge. “Knowledge puffs up,” Paul cautions the Corinthians — a truth that can be con­firmed by anyone who has ever won Trivial Pursuit. So some Christians have gone to the opposite extreme and empha­sised the direct experience of God to the detriment of knowledge and sound doc­trine.

However, as biblical Christians we need to reject both the worship of the mind and its moderns denigration. The gospel teaches us this. Every aspect of our created being, including our minds, is made by God for his glory. Every aspect of our created being, including our minds, is naturally in rebellion against God. Paul describes those separate from God as walking “in the futility of their mind, darkened in their understanding”.

When the grace of God comes to us, it comes both propositionally and personally. We understand, however feebly, that Jesus is our Lord and Saviour. We experi­ence, however faintly, the renewing work of the Spirit that gives us faith, cries out to the Father, and transforms our lives. As Paul tells the Ephesians,

 ...if indeed you have heard him (Christ) and have been taught in him ... lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind.

Our minds are meant to be subject to the lordship of Christ, being slowly trans­formed from their darkened and ignorant state so that they’re dedicated to serving and pleasing him.

How does this work out practically? I believe there are two main implications. We are to study Scripture, and we are to study the world. The former, because it is the source of all our principles for understanding reality; the latter, because it’s the reality in which those principles must be applied.

The need for rigorous personal study of Scripture has always been an important conviction in Reformed Christianity.

However the danger remains for leaders at all levels to talk endlessly about the authority of the Word, but never model good methods of Scripture reading. Preaching doctrine, preaching topically, preaching on a single verse, are all valid methods of imparting biblical knowledge. However, unless leaders preach regularly through passages of Scripture — demon­strating the process of looking at context, identifying the structure, working out what it means and how it should be applied — then the congregation will never learn how to read the Bible for themselves.

I am convinced that one of the reasons young evangelicals are so vulnerable to the cults is that their understanding of basic doctrine is usually supported by proof-texts. When they are confronted with a cult member who can present more con­vincing proof texts, they are easily swayed. We need to ensure that our young people don’t believe in justification by faith alone just on the basis of one verse in Romans. They should have discovered through Bible teaching and study that it is a doctrine found as thoroughly in Exodus or Ezekiel as in Romans.

Second, the dedication of our minds to God should lead us to think critically about our society and its culture. Of course, Scripture tells us the most important things we need to know about any society — that it’s made up of created but rebellious people who need to be called to repentance.

Detailed knowledge of any culture is not necessary for this basic diagnosis and prescription. However, if we are to think in a godly way about the specifics of our culture, we need to know what we are dealing with. A doctor may know everything there is to know about human anatomy and medicine, but she still needs to examine her patient in order to explain how her knowledge applies.

The wisdom literature of the Old Testament calls us to be people who live well, not foolishly, in God’s world. This involves deep and thoughtful reflection on the realities around us from the perspective of our fear of the Lord.

It’s not simply a matter of accumulating more knowledge — which is the world’s solution to ignorance. We don’t need more Christians with university degrees. We need Christians who, whatever their knowledge and experience, are committed to understanding knowledge and experience from a gospel perspective.

A commitment to thinking wisely about our culture will benefit us, our Christian family, and our witness. It will benefit us because the reality is that whether we like it or not, we all think about our society and its culture. We are all bom­barded with cultural information through TV, advertising, newspapers, conversations. We all take this information into our minds, order it, make judgments about it.

As God’s children, our great desire should be that these thoughts and judgments are truthful and gracious. However, if we think without biblical reflection and without a wider knowledge of the issues involved, we will often be simplistic or plain wrong.

A pertinent example for Australian Christians is the debate surrounding the welfare of Aboriginal people. I am stag­gered by the number of Christians I hear confidently proclaiming the “biblical stance” on issues involved in this debate — when on further investigation they are unaware of even the most basic facts of Australian history. Such ignorance leads not only to superficial and racist judg­ments, but it also has terrible repercus­sions for our Christian fellowship and witness.

This leads to a second benefit of think­ing more deeply about our culture, the maturing of the Christian family, the church. In a world that is hostile to Christ, we need to be assisting each other to think about the world in a godly way. In this we have much to share with each other — some have knowledge about history and society, some have special insights into literature and art, some have reflected on their experience as parents or family members in helpful ways. Those of us who are younger need to learn from the mature reflections of older Christians — those who are older need to ensure that they have godly wisdom to pass on, and not just entrenched conservatism.

Third, thinking more deeply about our culture and society will benefit our wit­ness to the unbelieving world. In our evangelism we witness to a God who is Lord of all the universe — his gospel is true and has explanatory power for every aspect of reality. We do him dishonour if we present the gospel as though it applies only to the individual soul and not to physical and cultural reality. We also do him dishonour if we, his people, disdain the exploration and enjoyment of the world he has given us richly to enjoy.

In a world which has largely given up hope of finding meaning, we can testify to the truth of the gospel by demonstrating that it does give us the ability to live in the world wisely and well.

In summary, God calls us to be wholly his. Our minds, hearts and actions are to be passionately dedicated to him and his glory. It is our duty and our great blessing that we can use our minds to understand him and the world that he created. As we do this, and strive to live out what we learn, we honour him in our own lives, in the building up of his people, and in the eyes of our lost and chaotic world.