There is a danger of thinking that
we are obeying this first commandment if we live and work in the domain of
Christian intellectual endeavour. It is easy
to understand how this comes about.
Anti-intellectualism still inhabits a wide swath of evangelicalism, and
sometimes serious thought is mocked and dismissed by those who prefer sentiment
and emotion. Both tendencies have called forth biting denunciations, and these certainly
have their place. They have also called forth prophetic appeals to young
Christians to devote themselves, for God’s sake and for God’s glory, to the
life of the mind.
But we should not ignore a converse
danger, the danger of intellectual arrogance. Biblical scholars, theologians, and
other Christian academics are easily tempted to think that they are obeying
this first command simply because they working the intellectual arena and
happen to be Christians. After all, studying distinctively Christian themes can
be all-absorbing, in precisely the way that studying almost anything can be
all-absorbing, provided you have the right sort of temperament and
education. I know first-rate scholars
who are absorbed in the study of the metal alloys in the blades of jet
propulsion engines and others who devote themselves to the properties of
recently discovered quarks with unbelievably short half-lives or to the finer
points of Sahidic Coptic. The only difference between these scholars and
theologians is that the latter may delude themselves into thinking that the
effort they put into their
disciplines demonstrates that they are fulfilling these words of Jesus, while
those who study the sex life of sea turtles are unlikely to be similarly
deluded. We cannot ignore the brute fact
that this first command of Jesus is not a command to think but a command to
love, even if that command to love includes the modifiers, “with all your
heart...with all your mind.”
D A Carson, discussing Mark 12:28-34 in his book, Love in Hard Places, pg 22.
