I find myself wondering how the apostle would react if he were to visit Western Christendom today. I think he would deplore, as Harry Blamires has justly deplored, the contemporary lack of a Christian mind. A “Christian mind” is described by Mr. Blamires as “a mind trained, informed, equipped to handle data of secular controversy within a framework of reference which is constructed of Christian presuppositions,” presuppositions (for example) of the supernatural, of the pervasiveness of evil, of truth, authority and the value of the human person. The Christian thinker, he goes on, “challenges current prejudices . . . disturbs the complacent . . . obstructs the busy pragmatists . . . questions the very foundations of all about him and . . . is a nuisance.” But, he says, Christian thinkers with Christian minds do not seem to exist today. On the contrary:

The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history. It is difficult to do justice in words to the complete loss of intellectual morale in the twentieth-century Church. One cannot characterize it without having recourse to language which will sound hysterical and melodramatic. There is no longer a Christian mind. There is still, of course, a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality. . . . But as a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization.

It is a sad denial of our redemption by Christ, whom God is said to have “made our wisdom.”

- John Stott, Your Mind Matters