846. Cultivating the Life of the Mind

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. We're continuing the study series about the doctrine of man. Today's message will be preached by Bible faculty member Dr. Brent Cook, and the title of his message is Cultivating the Life of the Mind. Let's go to John in chapter 14. The early church spent some five centuries exploring, defining, and applying the doctrine of the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

What's most astonishing is not how much time they gave to the doctrine, but how little time the modern church gives to that great doctrine. As part of our series on anthropology, the president has asked that I speak on the topic, Cultivating the Life of the Mind. That's a vast topic, but my modest ambition is merely to advance the idea of the centrality of the incarnation to our thinking. This is a topic that I spoke on last year when I spoke on the value of a Christian liberal arts education, and I hope merely to advance that idea this morning. In 1841, the atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach published a classic text on secular humanism entitled The Essence of Christianity. And he claimed that human belief in God results from projecting ideal human attributes onto a greater being called God.

He did not, of course, believe in God. He argued that we take anthropological concepts like human love and human strength and human justice and we project them out to infinity, predicating them on God. Feuerbach put it rather succinctly, the secret to theology is anthropology.

Now of course Feuerbach is wrong, but he's only wrong because he failed to see how the incarnation rendered his statement true. We know God by knowing Jesus, and we know Jesus principally through his incarnation. And today I want us to examine three passages that illustrate this truth, and then I want to show how this great doctrine can really cultivate our minds here as students at BJU. You're in John chapter 14. In this passage Jesus is involved in a conversation with two of his disciples, with Thomas and with Philip, and they desperately want to know God the Father. And so Jesus has just told them that he's going back to the Father to prepare a place for them, and notice now verse 5. Thomas saith unto him, Lord we know not whether thou goest, and how can we know the way? Well Jesus answers in verse 6, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me. And our tendency is to stop right here and to view Jesus almost exclusively as an intermediary between God and man, and he is that. But Jesus is very different than the kind of prophetic intermediaries that we see in the Old Testament, like Ezekiel, or Jeremiah, or Hosea. These men received the word of God and transmitted it to the people of Israel. But look at what Jesus says in verse 7. If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also.

Here is something the prophets never claimed. If you know me, you know God the Father. Jesus was not speaking merely for God, he was speaking as God. It was as if God the Father was speaking through the human body of Jesus, because Jesus is God. Now if God the Father came to Galilee in a human body, what would he do? What would he preach? What kind of miracles would he perform?

You know the answer to every one of those questions is the same? Look at Jesus. In the Old Testament, God speaks from heaven constantly. But have you ever noticed that when you come into the Gospels, his voice becomes suddenly silent? At Jesus' baptism, there is a voice from heaven that says, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, and then the voice goes silent. And we follow Jesus through Galilee, and we observe his miracles and listen to his preaching. And Jesus will say the most extraordinary things.

He will say things like, You have always heard. And then he will quote the Old Testament, given by inspiration of God. And then he will glibly proceed to say, But I say unto you. As if everything he just said is just as important as anything God said in the Old Testament. And after following Jesus through Galilee, we come at long last to the Mount of Transfiguration.

And Peter there wants to build a tabernacle, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. And all of a sudden, the voice returns. This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Exactly what the voice said back at Christ's baptism. But then it adds these words, Hear ye him.

And it goes silent. Well, you started to get the point. If you had been correctly observing the life of Jesus, you would have seen the Father at every step along the way. Now, Jesus is not done with Thomas. Look at the end of verse 7. Jesus says, And from henceforth you know him and have seen him.

And this is extraordinary, because nothing changes. God the Father does not suddenly reveal himself. When Jesus says, From now on you know him and have seen him, he is talking about himself. To know Jesus is to know the Father.

Well, apparently the disciples still are not getting it. So at this point, Philip enters the conversation. Look at verse 8. Philip saith unto him, Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus, just show us God the Father, and we'll be happy, says Philip. And notice Jesus' response.

It's a rebuke. Verse 9. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you? And yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. And how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?

Now Thomas and Philip had the same problem that Feuerbach had. They did not understand that the secret to theology is anthropology. To know God, you've got to know Jesus of Nazareth. What Jesus is doing is introducing his disciples to a revolutionary new way of thinking.

A new way of thinking about the relationship between God and man. And I want to show you now a second passage which just becomes very clear. So let's go now to Mark chapter 2. Mark and the second chapter.

And we will see just how clear this becomes. And while you turn, let me tell you the story of a famous book that was published in 1962. It was published by an American physicist and philosopher named Thomas Kuhn.

The book is titled, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And Kuhn argues in that book that our understanding of the world does not always develop through the gradual accumulation of new information. Rather, he says, science often develops as one model or one paradigm, as he calls it, is replaced by a whole new model or a new paradigm for interpreting the data. For example, Ptolemy argued that the earth was the center of our solar system. And he argued that all the celestial bodies circled around our earth. That was his model. But in time, the Ptolemaic model began to have cracks in it.

It developed numerous explanatory deficiencies and the whole model begins to implode. And then comes Copernicus in the 16th century. And Copernicus comes along with a new model based on a very simple idea.

The earth moves. And that changed everything. Well, Kuhn calls this shift from one explanatory model to another model a paradigm shift.

And that term has caught on in the world of business and coaching and education and leadership and science. But while the term paradigm shift may be new, the idea long predates Thomas Kuhn. And it's actually found right here in Mark chapter 2. In Mark chapter 2, beginning in verse 1 and continuing through chapter 3 and verse 6, Mark is going to record for us five distinct narratives in which Jesus of Nazareth is going to confront an entrenched form of Judaism that is hostile to a very simple truth. God became man.

And they are hostile to this idea. And what we're going to find here in Mark is that Jesus is deliberately acting in ways and saying certain things that are designed to upset the old paradigm. He is deliberately exposing cracks in Judaism. In the first narrative, there are some four friends that will bring a paralyzed man to Jesus. And they will let him down through the roof to be healed. And Jesus looks at him and does not heal him immediately. Instead, he looks at him and he says, your sins are forgiven. And the Jews are scandalized. Who can forgive sins but God only, they say. That's a very good question.

Well, here's a new idea. You're looking at God. In the second narrative, Jesus calls Levi, a tax collector. He calls him to abandon his despised little tax booth and to follow him. And then Jesus proceeds to eat with sinners. And the self-righteous Pharisees again are scandalized by his behavior. Well, here's a new idea.

God came for sinners, not for the self-righteous. In the third narrative, the followers of Jesus are not observing certain fasts as prescribed by the Jewish law. And if they're going to neglect these fasts, how can they prepare to meet God? Well, here's a new idea.

The bridegroom is here. There's no need to fast. In the fourth narrative, the disciples were plucking heads of grain and eating them on the Sabbath. And there was almost nothing that offends the zealous observers of the Old Testament law like Sabbath violations.

Well, here's a new idea. The Son of Man, he's Lord of the Sabbath. That's what Jesus claims. This very ordinary looking Galilean man, he's Lord of the Sabbath. In other words, Sabbath worship is really about him. And in the fifth narrative, Jesus will violate Jewish religious scruples again by healing a man with a withered hand. And the Pharisees and the Herodians conspire together to murder him. They cannot accept this new idea that God has come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. So in these five narratives, we have a revolutionary idea. God walks among us in a human body.

And they are hostile to it. And now embedded right at the heart of these five narratives in verse 22, you'll see why I say that Kuhn's idea is not new. Verse 22 reads, Well in the first century, animal skins were used as containers for new wine. But over time, those wine skins would shrivel up and begin to crack.

And you pour new wine into them, and they explode. Well in this context, what Mark is doing is presenting to us a revolutionary new idea. God has come in a human body. And that does not fit the Jewish paradigm.

It explodes the old paradigm. And now I want you to go to 1 John 1. 1 John 1, and I want to show you the idea of the incarnation in a third passage. And just notice how this epistle begins.

It begins with a magnificent testimony to the incarnation. John writes, And now in verse 2, John is going to reiterate that we actually saw the living incarnate God. Verse 2, We actually saw it. And in verse 3, John emphasizes that the person that we saw, the person that we heard, is the means by which we have fellowship with God. It's the means of that incarnation that we are united with God and with Christ. Verse 3, So he begins with the statement of the incarnation.

And now go to chapter 4 and verse 1. Chapter 4 and verse 1, and notice just how serious John is about the incarnation. John writes, And this, says John, is that spirit of antichrist. For John, the very center of orthodoxy, is the incarnation.

You confess that Jesus Christ is truly come in the flesh, you are of God. You deny the incarnation, you're antichrist. Now friends, if we don't get the incarnation correct, we will never understand God the creator. And if you don't get the incarnation correct, you will never understand man, created in the image of God. The incarnation rests on two great truths. In the virginal conception, God became what he made in order to redeem what he made. And in the bodily resurrection of Christ from the grave, Jesus, God, kept his incarnation permanently, so that he could be permanently united with the creation that he loves. Two mistakes that are often made by Christians, are number one, viewing the virgin birth as little more than a prerequisite for Christ's suffering. And number two, viewing the resurrection as a kind of undoing of the incarnation. It hardly occurs to us to think of Jesus as permanent, everlasting, joyful human life. Jesus is the most infinitely joyful human being anywhere in the universe today. The incarnation was so important to the early church, that they spent some five centuries through a whole series of church councils, trying to get it stated with precision.

Why is it so important to them? Well the fact is that nearly every heretical challenge to the faith, is a departure from the incarnation. The Gnostics denied the full humanity of Christ, and had an impoverished view of God's creation. The Arians denied the full deity of Jesus Christ, and did not understand God's trinity. The Sibelians denied the distinctions between the members of the trinity, and viewed Christ as merely a kind of temporary apparition of the Father, not a completely distinct human person. The Nestorians could not fully embrace the virginal conception of Christ, and taught that Christ was kind of two persons, not one. The Apollinarians denied the complete humanity of Christ's mind. And the Monophysitists denied the distinct divine and human natures in Christ. It's no wonder that John says that any departure from the incarnation is the spirit of Antichrist. That's why it's so important to the early church.

Listen to what the authors of the great Chalcedon Creed said in the year 451. We then, following the Holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach people to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead, and also perfect in manhood. Truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body, consubstantial with the Father, according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us, according to the manhood.

Now again, why is it so important to them? To the early church, the incarnation was the very epicenter of all human learning. Because in Jesus, we understand the Creator. And in Jesus, we understand the creation. Gregory of Nyssa, the great patristic champion of Orthodoxy, was quite emphatic.

Listen to what he says. The Logos has spoken in creation in the life and teachings of Jesus. The Logos made sense out of the madness of the world and the power of evil. The Logos held forth the promise that there could be a system and a connection between the disparate elements of the universe as it was experienced.

And the Logos has not snatched humanity out of the goodness of the created order, but has transformed the created order into a fit setting for a transformed humanity. And numerous other theologians have made very similar observations. In the opening pages of the great 16th century work by John Calvin, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, he presents us with a rather stunning observation. He claims that there are two kinds of knowledge that are available to us humans. There is, first of all, knowledge of God. And there is secondly, knowledge of ourselves. To put it more broadly, there is knowledge of the Creator, and there is knowledge of the creation. And Calvin says, if you want to know God, you have to know yourself as His creation. And if you want to know yourself, you have to know God as your Creator.

And where can you go and study them both? And the answer is Jesus of Nazareth. Contemporary theologians John Clark and Marcus Johnson have said, the modern church does not sufficiently see and savor the astounding mystery, the supreme mystery at the very heart of our Christian confession. God the Son, without ceasing to be fully God, has become fully human. The incarnation of God, therefore, is the supreme mystery at the center of our Christian confession and no less at the center of all reality. Well, are you interested in cultivating the life of your mind to know your Creator and to know the creature? Then what you need is an incarnational paradigm. What you need to do is let the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, be the center of your thinking. And frankly, I don't know a better place to go to develop that kind of thinking than Bob Jones University, where all of you take a Bible and liberal arts core.

What do you think we are trying to do with that core? I know of no greater justification for cultivating the mind through science than the incarnation of God. Physicists have been searching for a very long time for a so-called theory of everything, an attempt to unite the four forces and to solve the riddles of quantum field theory and general relativity. What is it that holds the universe together?

What is it that keeps the billions of stars spinning around in endless galaxies and endless billions of electrons spinning around their nuclei? You know the answer given in the book of Hebrews is the incarnate Son? He upholds all things by the word of his power. He upholds every atom in your body. He upholds every star in the galaxies above by his word. Has it ever occurred to you that the words in the Bible that you are reading right now are breathed out by the voice of God?

And so too are the atoms that compose the page. You are holding the breath of God. I know of no greater justification for cultivating the mind through the humanities than the permanent, joyful human life of Jesus. The story of human civilization is a story that God entered. And when he resurrected from the grave, he claimed to have authority over it all. The study of the great literary texts of the world is the study of human emotion and the triumphs of human joys and the complexities of human relationships. And God in Jesus is human.

And as I said last semester, study art, music, beauty, and human creativity. Because the first thing your Bible tells you about your incarnate savior is that he is a creator. And if he redeems you to be like him, then he redeems you to create. John Williamson Nevin, the great 19th century American theologian proclaimed, the incarnation is the key that unlocks the sense of all God's revelations.

It is the key that unlocks the sense of all God's works and brings to light the true meaning of the universe. The incarnation forms thus the great central fact of the world. My friends, you let the incarnation begin to cultivate the life of your mind.

You will find that a lifetime is insufficient to comprehend the incarnation. Let's pray. Our Father, we are so thankful that your son has come, that he has died, that he has resurrected again, and that he is going to redeem his lost creation. And I pray, Lord, that we would truly cultivate our minds as we think about you through him and as we come to understand the creation through his work. We pray it for Christ's sake. Amen. You've been listening to a sermon preached by Bob Jones University Bible faculty member, Dr. Brent Cook. This is part of the study series about the doctrine of man. Listen again tomorrow as we continue this series here on The Daily Platform.