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Recovering the Christian Mind

Joe Boot discusses a program for recovering a soup-to-nuts approach to thinking as a Christian in every area – not just about traditionally Christian things like devotions and apologetics. If the world belongs to Christ (and it does), then we have a responsibility to bring our thinking in line with His Word.

The Collapse of the Christian Mind

Some years ago I was speaking in California in the Santa Cruz area on the issue of Christian apologetics. My subject was the centrality of Christ in the task of engaging the culture. After my lecture, I was taken to lunch by a very pleasant young couple. One of the first questions they asked me with a smile was how long I had been an apolo-jedi. I appreciated the joke, but as the conversation went on it highlighted a typical misperception of the real challenge confronting Christians today and how we are to face it.

I am convinced that the urgent task before God’s people in our time is the recovery of a Christian mind – most especially for those in ecclesiastical and cultural leadership – not just the training of an elite group of Christian Jedi to defend key features of biblical doctrine against traditional objections. This is because the greatest problem of our era is not a lack of arguments or evidences; at a much deeper level, we have experienced the near total collapse of the Christian world-and-life-view in the culture and tragically, often in the church. We do not need better evangelism techniques or smarter apologists. What we need is a wholesale recovery, and in some instances a fresh discovery, of what it means to think Christianly and therefore to be Christian.

The questions challenging believers in the West today are qualitatively different from those we faced even twenty-five years ago, because there is no longer a mutual understanding of reality that can undergird a common discourse; the old shared foundations have eroded beneath us. Consequently, it is increasingly unusual to find oneself interrogated by unbelievers about the nature or possibility of miracles, the reliability of the New Testament text, the character of sin, whether good works are enough to be acceptable to God, or whether or not God is triune (unless speaking with a Muslim). Most of these questions don’t even occur to your average millennial or Z generation young adult because such questions already presuppose an underlying broadly Christian worldview and biblical literacy. For the first time in centuries we typically find ourselves in discussion with ordinary people where our most basic religious presuppositions about the nature of reality are antithetical to one another. This situation affects the kinds of questions we each deem relevant to addressing the existential and theoretical problems of life.

The pervasiveness of anti-Christian worldviews in every aspect of cultural life has had a profound impact on the contemporary church. A few cultural prophets saw this emerging problem back in the 1960s. One such individual was Harry Blamires, whose 1963 book, The Christian Mind, had a deep impact on me. He opens this short classic by recognizing the commonplace fact that the thinking of modern people has been secularized. But critically, he goes on to point out that this disaster is not the primary challenge for Christians:

Tragic as this is, it would not be so desperately tragic had the Christian mind held out against the secular drift. But unfortunately, the Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history…there is no longer a Christian mind. There is still of course a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality.… As a spiritual being, in prayer and meditation, [the Christian] strives to cultivate a dimension of life unexplored by the non-Christian. But as a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization. He accepts religion – its morality, its worship, its spiritual culture; but he rejects the religious view of life, the view which…relates all problems – social, political, cultural – to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms of God’s supremacy…[1]

Blamires’ assessment was right on point. And given that many professing Christians today don’t even accept a biblical morality in the manner Blamires understood in the ‘60s, it is clearly no longer enough to speak of equipping Christians to answer a few isolated questions about their ‘personal faith,’ as though all they require is a couple of seminars on dealing with the main objections and all shall be well. Instead, Christians need renewal and reformation in terms of a comprehensive scriptural view of reality, while learning to understand and respond to the underlying religious motives shaping our culture. We need this so that we will be enabled to reformulate the questions of our time by explaining the root and meaning of the unbeliever’s own queries and difficulties – both real and imagined. This can only be done from the standpoint of a consistently Christian world-and-life-view, as Blamires understood:

There is something before the Christian dialogue, and that is the Christian mind – a mind trained, informed, equipped to handle data of secular controversy within a framework of reference which is constructed of Christian presuppositions. The Christian mind is the prerequisite of Christian thinking. And Christian thinking is the prerequisite of Christian action.[2]

In the lives of our children, family and friends who have wandered from orthodox faith and rejected or sidelined biblical truth, adopting unscriptural worldviews and lifestyles, today’s believers have witnessed firsthand that the Christian mind, and thus the Christian way of life, is collapsing around us. The band-aid solutions on offer to our hemorrhaging faith are not up to the task. We need a radical, root and branch response to the crisis of our time. This requires the development of a Christian mind, a total Christian view of reality and the defense of the Christian philosophy of life as rooted in the scriptures – a cultural apologetic capable of confronting systematic unbelief, with systematic belief.

By this I do not mean an elitist intellectualizing of the faith – a new evangelical scholasticism, but rather relearning to think and live by the Word of God in regard to every aspect of life: from human identity and sexuality, to marriage and family, law and politics, economics and the arts, science, business, media, education, and all things besides.

Thinking Christianly

To some, this kind of programmatic agenda might seem a bit alarmist, overly radical or simply unnecessary. As Roy Clouser framed the question of the Christian skeptical of worldview thinking, “While one can articulate a Christian view of God, a Christian view of how to stand in right relation to God, and a Christian view of ethics, why is it necessary to articulate a distinctly Christian view of everything?”[3] This seems like a fair question. After all, isn’t our faith centred in the hope of heaven, an afterlife and deliverance from an evil world? Why do we need a distinctly Christian view of everything, since on this view everything is not really very important? And besides, isn’t it only in the areas of morality and spirituality that Christians and non-Christians disagree? Isn’t the vast majority of daily life and thought basically value-neutral?

Many Christians will agree that we certainly should think about ‘Christian’ things and themes, we should be ‘spiritual people,’ but surely there isn’t a distinctly Christian view of everything? How could there be? Why should there be?

These questions themselves belie the collapse of a Christian mind. Beyond the unbiblical diminishing of the goodness and value of the totality of creation – a latent dualism which divides reality into an upper and lower storey (the upper level being superior and good, the lower lesser or evil) – a fundamental confusion in these objections is equating thinking Christianly with thinking about Christian things. Blamires writes:

To think Christianly is to accept all things with the mind as related, directly or indirectly, to man’s eternal destiny as the redeemed and chosen child of God. You can think Christianly or you can think secularly about the most sacred things – the sacrament of the altar for example. Likewise you can think Christianly or you can think secularly about the most mundane things.… There is nothing in our experience, however trivial, worldly, or even evil, which cannot be thought about Christianly.… The fact that many people are writing about things Christian is in itself irrelevant to the question whether there is still a Christian mind.[4]

To establish this point biblically is important. How do we know there is such a thing as a Christian view of everything? One critical expression that is repeated in several places in Scripture is that “fear of the Lord is the foundation of true knowledge” (NLT) or, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (HCSB: Ps. 11:10; Prov. 1:7; 9:10, 15:33). The word translated foundation or beginning in this passage literally means the key or principal part. Jesus makes the same point when rebuking erroneous and misleading interpretations of the law in Luke 11:52, “Woe to you experts in the law! You have taken away the key of knowledge!” The key to knowledge is the knowledge of God, especially as revealed in the scriptures.

The apostle Paul therefore directs us to Christ Himself as the one who alone gives true understanding: “by Him you were enriched in everything – in all speech and all knowledge” (1 Cor. 1:5). Clearly, what Paul is saying here is that knowing God through Christ affects everything, including ‘all knowledge’, not some artificially restricted ‘spiritual knowledge.’

Then a little later in 1 Corinthians 3:20-23 Paul discusses the godless wisdom of the world that rejects the Word of God, “The Lord knows that the reasonings of the wise are meaningless…everything is yours and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.” We must not spiritualize this text away into a pious sentiment. It clearly means that every area of knowledge, in fact every area of life in all creation, belongs to those who belong to Christ. Truth and life are not captive to the meaningless reasonings of unbelievers. On the contrary, they know neither truth nor life as they should. The implication of this is that, although unbelievers know many things partially, their knowledge of all things suffers from a critical lack. Roy Clouser writes, “there is some kind of mistake with respect to every kind of truth and knowledge that can’t be avoided if one does not know God but can be avoided if one does know God.”[5]

What I am not saying here is that if you want a distinctly Christian view of quantum mechanics, the mating habits of the common cockroach, or the intricacies of human physiology, you need only look up the relevant text in Scripture. Clearly the Bible does not give us exhaustive or encyclopaedic knowledge of all things and disciplines – it does not intend to. Part of the task given to human beings at the beginning of creation was to observe, discover and name created entities and their functions, bringing out the potential of creation by learning about God’s laws for all aspects of created reality in light of His Word.

A distinctly Christian view of all things therefore centres, not on finding a prooftext for thermodynamics or heart disease in the Bible, but on recognising Christ as the religious foundation (key) to all knowledge and taking full account of what the scriptures say about God, his creation, his law and his work in history in all our observations, thinking, theorizing and living. To reject the triune God and the creation, fall, redemption, consummation paradigm of the scriptures is to make a tragic and perilous religious mistake that sets aside the key (principle part) of all true knowledge, misdirecting our total understanding.

Thinking Unchristianly

Those who reject Christ and the revelation of His Word obviously do not have a Christian view of things. This does not make them neutral. It does not mean they do not have a religious foundation for their thinking, something that takes the place of the living God. The unbeliever’s ‘explainer’ for reality will always posit something that ‘just is,’ that is ‘self-existent,’ something that does not depend on anything else for its being. Everybody either believes in the living God or will give something else, something created, the status of divinity that belongs only to God, which the Bible calls idolatry. It is this foundation that impacts all knowledge and all truth.

Over the centuries, unbelievers have tried to give divine status to everything from planetary bodies, to emperors or states, to numbers and ideas, to logic or human reason, to matter, energy and much else besides. Clouser’s explanation of this is instructive:

Those who don’t see the divine as the biblical transcendent creator will make it some part of the world instead. And regarding anything in the world as self-existent will slant, guide and control the (deeper) content of every concept…. The name given to this way of explaining, the way that identifies what part of the world all the rest depends on, is “reduction.” A reductionist explanation is one that claims to have found the part of the world that everything else depends on…. A Christian should say, these are all wrong. They are all examples of regarding part of creation as the creator. The ultimate explainer is no part of creation at all. Every one of these divinity candidates is real, but they all depend on God.… The Christian would adopt a systematically non-reductionist approach to every sort of theory, every sort of knowledge, and every concept of everything.[6]

The attempt to replace God and worship the creature rather than the creator (cf. Rom. 1) can therefore take on remarkable and deceptive forms, so that man’s creative idolatry can appear very sophisticated. These idols then shape people’s thinking and through them, culture.

One common example is when people take the physical and biological aspects of reality (material reality) and use them to explain everything else. The physical and biological are said to be truly real and everything else, non-physical properties like logical thought, beauty, love, number, are either illusory or just by-products of what is physical (what philosophers call epiphenomenal). Everything is made dependent on the physical/biological facet of reality and so every other facet is diminished in status as less important or less real. The importance of the physical/biological aspect of creation is therefore overestimated relative to everything that is said to be dependent on it.

By contrast, the truly Christian mind will regard everything as equally real, equally dependent and equally subject to God and his law-Word, so that no one part of the cosmos explains or generates all the rest. The Christian mind has a non-reductionist worldview because it does not reduce the universe in part or in whole to one or more aspects of the cosmos, or even to God. Scripture unequivocally asserts the distinction between the Creator and creation, meaning the dependency of all creation directly on God, making every facet of creation equally real, with no part reduced in its importance or role relative to the rest. This is what marks out the basic framework of a truly Christian mind. This framework establishes that there is a Christian view of everything.

For example, it means that the immaterial aspects of creation (spirit, thought, emotion, ideals of beauty) are not higher, more real, or more important than the body. The earth is not less important than heaven, nor are spiritual exercises more holy than doing the gardening. In other words, a Christian mind would destroy all artificial divisions of sacred and secular. Law and politics, the body and human sexuality, art and culture, marriage and family are as important and as subject to God and his law-word as church services, prayer and personal devotions.

This may seem quite abstract, but the real-world consequences of reductionistic unbelieving thought are devastating when consistently applied. Atheistic materialism helped give us both Nazism and Communism that took millions of lives in the twentieth century. The loss of a Christian mind will always have destructive consequences.

The Nonsense Machine

This brings us to the present predicament of Western culture. As with the example of material reductionism, it is also possible to try and make the linguistic aspect (sign mode) of creation, in concert with our thinking, into a divinity concept that determines reality. This particular reduction marks our present culture and constitutes one of the imposing idols of our time.

We live in very strange days in the West. If ever there were an illustration of St. Paul’s ‘reasonings of the wise’ being meaningless (1 Cor. 3:20), the present cultural posture is an exemplar. If ever there were a time for believers to see the need for a Christian perspective of everything, that time is now. Verities, virtues and norms that went largely unquestioned for centuries have been subject to radical revision, while truth has increasingly been reduced to a matter of power and identity politics. Even the notion that human beings have a real and definitive nature or that ordinary empirical perceptions about social and biological reality are valid have been assaulted at almost every level of cultural life.

The noted English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton has discussed the character of this sustained attack on Judeo-Christian culture (Western civilization) since the mid twentieth century:

The left-wing enthusiasm that swept through institutions of learning in the 1960s was one of the most efficacious intellectual revolutions in recent history and commanded a support among those affected by it that has seldom been matched by any revolution in the world of politics.[7]

Although the roots of this intellectual revolution predate the 1960s, it was during this period that its principles came to a prominent and influential flowering in cultural life – ideas that have only developed and grown in power since. The goal of this movement was not simply the creation of a new opaque academic discourse to entertain bohemian intellectuals living in echo chambers insulated from popular culture. Rather, it was nothing short of a social subversion and cultural transformation of the Western world, carried out under the noses of the so-called bourgeois (property-owning middle class) they attacked, and funded by bourgeois taxes and naïve donations. The justification for this revolutionary action centres around a reimagined concept of liberty:

Two attributes of the new order justify the pursuit of it: liberation and social justice. These correspond roughly to the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution.… It means emancipation from the structures, from the institutions, customs and conventions that shaped the bourgeois order, and which established a shared system of norms and values at the heart of Western society.… Much of their literature is devoted to deconstructing such institutions as the family, the school, law and the nation state through which the inheritance of Western civilization has been passed down to us.[8]

What most of us, having been raised in a broadly Christian social context, see as the normal and necessary structures of society and social order, these new thinkers regard as ‘structures of domination’ that must be subverted and destroyed. These ideas have forcefully made their way, not just into journals, abstract art galleries, universities and academic libraries, but into our courts, hospitals, parliaments and senates, in fact into the classrooms of our youngest children. What Christians are facing today is a radical desire for a clean sweep of history – an agenda that has always motivated humanistic revolutionaries. As such, fraudulent and often unintelligible theories of language, identity and social order are passed off as the key to renewal and liberation within human society. There is no understanding modern Western culture without grasping this basic revolutionary motive.

The essential idea of the revolution is that meaning is no longer something objective or transcendent – that is, something that transcends human signification (language), culturally conditioned perceptions and customs. One should not look for objective meaning as such in the thinking and use of language of the revolutionaries, because that would presuppose that reality has a pre-established givenness. The meaning is simply in the use – the way they use and manipulate language to reimagine reality. Language becomes a tool to subvert established meaning, because established meaning is oppression. Meaning as something ontologically real or given is a Christian conspiracy. So, by the conjuring of the revolutionaries, new language spells will alter social reality.

Scruton has creatively called this assault on meaning and truth the nonsense machine. By a linguistic emancipation from reality and real knowledge, one eliminates real argument and reasoned engagement so that every question simply becomes one of power and politics. “No need to ask what the revolution means or what you might achieve by means of it. Nothing means anything and that is the revolution, namely the machine to annihilate meaning.”[9]

One influential user of the nonsense machine is Judith Butler. Cultivating an obscure style (a necessity for sounding profound as a possessor of a hidden knowledge), this leading lesbian and feminist scholar influenced a whole generation of social theorists to regard the very idea of man and woman as mythical creations of language repetition. What most people in every culture through all of history have taken to be a real condition – that of being a man or woman – are for Butler and those like her an imaginary formation. What people generally believe to be a physical and direct perception is just a sophisticated illusion generated by language. It is important to notice immediately the reductionism here and the new ‘explainer’ (divinity concept) for everything; reality is generated by human intellect and the signs (language) they use and repeat!

Because the reality-denying theories of radical feminists like Butler are now taught as facts in Western classrooms to small children, we should not pass over what appears radical and bizarre too quickly – for the radical and bizarre is becoming a legally-enforced norm. Interacting favorably with the writings of another feminist scholar, Monique Wittig, Butler writes:

There is no reason to divide up human bodies into male and female sexes except that such a division suits the economic needs of heterosexuality and lends a naturalistic gloss to the institution of heterosexuality.… A lesbian…transcends the binary opposition between woman and man; a lesbian is neither a woman nor a man. But further, a lesbian has no sex; she is beyond the categories of sex…; one is not born female, one becomes female, but even more radically, one can, if one chooses, become neither male nor female, woman nor man.[10]

One can see straight away the thought presently saturating popular culture, a direction that overtly contradicts the foundational teaching of Scripture. Notice also the thinly veiled Marxist root of this radical re-creation of being human. The claim is that the only reason we historically recognise a distinction between male and female is that it suits the capitalist desires of heterosexual men, to pretend that this distinction and relation is natural (according to a givenness of nature which is an illusion).

The argument here is that the very linguistic use of the terms male (man) and female (woman) is productive of a culture that privileges heterosexuality and endorses marriage and family – which is oppression. This is why we are in the midst of cultural conflict now over the use of pronouns. For such theorists, the term female should not need to imply an opposite (male) and vice-versa.

On this view, “sex” is simply a political and cultural interpretation of the body. Human body parts are just a discontinuous set of attributes upon which the language of “sex” imposes an artificial unity. This synthetic unity then becomes a language ‘regime,’ forming perceptions and forcibly shaping relationships through which our bodies are then perceived. Butler thus quite seriously asks the question, “Is there a ‘physical’ body prior to the perceptually perceived body? An impossible question to decide.”[11] In other words, the body is just a perception, and perceptions are formed by linguistic signs. The body is therefore less than fully real.

To those not acquainted with this school of deconstruction, it sounds like nonsense – which in fact it is, in that it bears no resemblance to reality. But it is a sophisticated gibberish that makes the uninitiated think that, in their ignorance, they must be missing a profound insight into reality hidden in the obscure assertions of these radical intellectuals. But like the gnostic pretenders in the early church who professed a secret knowledge as the key to reality, the new gnostic claim, wrapped in technical academic verbiage, is in fact very simple. The naming of normative sex (and sexual relations) is an act of oppression and domination that must be rejected for humanity to be free.

Whatever a human being is (and they cannot tell us), language makes reality – words are magic!

The cultural and political task is thus clear to Wittig and Butler: “to overthrow the entire discourse on sex, indeed, to overthrow the very grammar that institutes ‘gender’ – or ‘fictive sex’ – as an essential attribute of humans and objects alike.”[12] The repetition of words like man and woman, rigid codes of ‘hierarchical binarisms,’ must be altered – that is freedom. Only then can a subversive repetition of human identity become possible. In Butler’s judgment, prior to the creation of identity through use of language, there is no integral self, “there is only a taking up of the [language] tools where they lie.”[13] Butler predicted thirty years ago that “the loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations, destabilizing substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: ‘man’ and ‘woman.’”[14]

This could only be done by extending the idea of the political to questions not traditionally seen as political. For Butler and the numerous theorists that have followed in her footsteps, the political is the very signifying practices that establish, regulate and deregulate identity, which is why some of the most foundational theological and philosophical questions have now become matters of politics, for politicians and courts to rule on!

The implications of this for thinking about the body are far-reaching. Gender is not written in the body – the binary of male and female is mythical and ‘unnatural’ – there is no ‘real’ ontology of gender, ontology is not a foundation but a political creation. A number of social theorists took a phrase from the surrealist playwright Antonin Artaud, ‘body without organs,’ and deployed it to interpret the body as merely a biological receptacle in which the self-creating intellect is contained. The body awaits an identity which the individual must forge for themselves or assume from the ‘differences’ around them.

The body without organs is one’s body before being actualized in relationships; it is the image of what is left when all the supposedly cultural impositions are left behind – it has no nature. Butler thus demands a “reconsideration of the figure of the body as mute, prior to culture, awaiting signification.”[15]

The body then is nothing; it is not real before culturally conditioned perceptions of it and it is malleable in terms of one’s desire – intellect and language can recreate the body and reality to conform to personal desires. To accomplish this magical transformation requires an extension and new configuration of politics to enforce a new language repetition, taking the dust of my desires, the idol of my organ-less body and breathing life into the person by a linguistic incantation. The parody of biblical creation is striking.

Roger Scruton identifies this as a revolution accomplished by the literature and language of spells. He summarises the effect of it all very well:

The resulting nonsense, although it cannot be easily deciphered intellectually, can be deciphered politically. It is directed nonsense and it is directed at the enemy. We are to discard the old hierarchies, the binary structures, the trees of the bourgeois family and the capitalist machine and reform ourselves as…grassroots communities of underground activists.… The assault is aimed primarily at the language through which the enemy lays claim to the world.[16]

Scruton identifies their enemy as rational argument and truth. But behind the assault on meaning and truth, the real enemy is clear – God Himself and the gospel of Jesus Christ which lays claim to all the world. The contrast between the Word of man as magic with the power to remake the world and the Word of God as that which governs all things could not be clearer. Can any believer be in any doubt that there is a Christian view of everything, and that we must recover the Christian mind?

Rethinking the Task

Developing a Christian mind is part of the task given to God’s people, though it has been long-neglected and we are paying the cultural price for our negligence.

Forging truly Christian thinking about everything is a fundamental part of the mission assigned to us in God’s covenant. It is part of the cultural mandate given at creation which has never been abrogated. Scripture tells us that all of reality is ordered and structured in complete dependence on the Word of God, and that this is the framework for Christian thought and action. The origin and destiny of all creation is in Christ and nothing exists of itself or for itself. This confession is our faith foundation. As the apostle Paul declares, “For from him and through him and to him are all things to him be glory forever” (Rom. 11:36).

This truth implies that as creatures of God we are at home in creation, in the body, embedded within created reality and attuned inescapably to the Word of God. Our historical task is to both become and make willing citizens of the Kingdom of God as creation is turned into a God-glorifying culture by faithfulness and obedience. Through Christ, the kingdom becomes a redirecting force in history.

This glorious task involves our whole person, in every aspect of life. This obviously includes our bodies. In 1 Corinthians 6:15, Paul writes “the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. God raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power. Don’t you know that your bodies are part of Christ’s body?” The entirety of our earthly existence must therefore become members of Christ – not just the ‘soul,’ as though that is the “real” part of us, but our humanity in its integral fullness and unity. In short, we belong to the covenant, “with all our heart and our life, with our soul and body and with everything we have and do. Our hopes, and our goals, our past, present and our future all belong to the covenant.”[17] This is why Paul writes in a manner that rebukes and brings into judgment apostate humanistic culture which hates and denies the body, while challenging believers to forge a Christian mind:

Therefore brothers, by the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this age but be transformed by the renewing of your mind (Rom. 12:1-2).

Note that presenting our bodies to God is our spiritual act of worship. There is no dualism here.

As Christians we must not be conformed to the apostasy of this age regarding human identity and sexuality but must be transformed and renewed in mind. We may well feel ill-equipped to stand for truth and provide a Christian alternative for the redirection of culture, but this will only be true if we surrender the Word of God and rely on ourselves and our own understanding. The late Canadian philosopher Bernard Zylstra wrote that we have lost the strength of the Word because of a reliance on

…visions foreign to the scriptures. All these foreign visions generally have the same effect: the redemption of Jesus Christ is severed from the given condition of life in this world: the Father’s good creation. Hence our hesitance in understanding the Bible’s kingdom vision. But this is our Father’s world, claimed by the new Lord, Jesus Christ. Our task is to regain the biblical vision…[18]

This can be done by faith. The transformation of our minds and the manifest kingdom life of Christ will come to pass by obedience and reliance on the Word and omnipotent working of the Holy Spirit.

 


[1] Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should A Christian Think? (Michigan: Vine Books, 1963), 3-4.

[2] Blamires, The Christian Mind, 43.

[3] Roy Clouser, ‘Is there a Christian View of Everything from Soup to Nuts’? Pro Rege, Vol. 31 (June 2003): 1.

[4] Blamires, The Christian Mind, 45-46.

[5] Clouser, ‘Is there a Christian View?’, 2.

[6] Clouse, ‘Is there a Christian View?’, 6.

[7] Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 159.

[8] Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, 3.

[9] Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, 174.

[10] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York, Routledge, 1990), 153.

[11] Butler, Gender Trouble, 155.

[12] Butler, Gender Trouble, 154.

[13] Butler, Gender Trouble, 199.

[14] Butler, Gender Trouble, 200.

[15] Butler, Gender Trouble, 202.

[16] Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, 189.

[17] J.M. Spier, An Introduction to Christian Philosophy (New Jersey: Craig Press, 1966), 5.

[18] Bernard Zylstra, ‘The Kingdom of God: Its Foundations and Implications,’ Originally published as a mimeograph by the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto.