Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God
Author John Piper
IVP, £8.99
978-1-84474-488-6
This is more an insight into the American evangelical psyche than a book about thinking. There have been some notable other books addressing this topic over the past 50 years and indeed Piper helpfully lists some of the evangelical ones in contradistinction to his own. So his book is "less historical than Mark Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, less punchy than Os Guinness's Fit Bodies Fat Minds, less philosophical than J P Moreland's Love Your God with All Your Mind, less vocational than James Sire's Habits of the Mind and less cultural than Gene Veith's Loving God with All Your Mind."
So what is Piper's book 'more of' than these or say Harry Blamire's classic The Christian Mind? Well, much more of Scripture. And much more of the 18th century theologian Jonathan Edwards with nothing of Hooker, Lewis or Pinker. It was a disappointing read for me, rehearsing old arguments that still seem to preoccupy much of North American evangelicalism. I liked Anna Moyle’s comment in her Amazon review; “Piper has a tendency throughout the book to get caught up in stale agendas and arguments… He thus devotes two entire chapters to the subject of relativism, which could have been better used to write positively about the rise of scholarship within the Christian community in the past few decades.”
There is a chapter on the meaning of ‘thinking’ where Piper explains that his main understanding of it is “working hard with our minds to figure out meaning from texts.” There are chapters on rationality and three chapters combatting anti-intellectualism. And he concludes by commending a humble attitude to Christian knowledge that will result in love of God and Man. It is a triumph of the cataphatic over the apophatic; of statements of faith and two sentence positions on abortion, divorce and homosexuality; with little of the struggle of faith seeking understanding, of acknowledging our limited rational powers before the Divine Mind. There is scant room for mystery or bewilderment and consequently not much engagement with how to work alongside other Christians who also ‘think’ but who come to very different conclusions about so many things.
Piper writes well and although I suppose he does set out with an admittedly limited agenda, this probably made better sermon material than a book. My guess is that the people who will benefit most from reading this book are not reading this review.
Published in the Church Times on 4th November 2011
