Reason and the Mind of Christ

Obedience to Christ is based in the atonement. I would hold that the expatiation and moral models of the cross, both important emphases in their own right, are subsumed under the Patristic emphasis on Christ as victorious conqueror. He literally rules from the cross over the powers of the cosmos. The Epistle to the Colossians puts it this way:

And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it. (2:13-15)

It should be clear by now that Christian pedagogy is never just cognitive, even if that element is at the forefront for most of us (musical performance, dance, visual art, and kinesiology excepted, of course.) We are engaging the already conquered principalities, "the cosmic powers of this present darkness" with weapons that are not flesh and blood (Eph 6:12). Having the mind of Christ means recognizing the wisdom and foolishness of the cross, an epistemic and responsive set of actions that stand as judgment on our own divided communities (and institutions) of faith. Christ has come and "proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near" (Eph 2:17). His mind is life and peace to us when we dwell on his established victory and when we then act upon it accordingly. This truth founds the necessary larger place for Christian teaching and doctrine in our university curriculum.

Unfortunately, this locale has also been too often a source of great divisions among us. Paul's appeal to the Corinthians, "that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you," called for unity "in the same mind and the same purpose" (1 Cor 1:10). Indeed, Paul's appeal to the foolishness of the cross was meant to counter this miserable failure of proud claims to special wisdom among the church there: "Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?" (1:20) Of course, too easily such teaching can play back into the anti-intellectualism that Mark Noll has called "the scandal of the evangelical mind." But at the same time, it should call us to humbled and weaned hearts upon our mother's breast (Ps 131) when we focus our cognitive, embodied selves in community on the work of the reigning Christ. The mystic Richard Rolle offers this observation:

I counsel you this: never forget the name of Jesus, but keep it in your heart day and night, as our most special and precious treasure. Love it more than your own life, and root it in your mind. Love Jesus, for He it is who made you, and who bought you back again at so expensive a price. Give your heart to Him, for it belongs to Him. And set your affection on his name, Jesus, which means "health."

No evil thing can hold sway in the heart of one who keeps Jesus faithfully in mind. For his name chases away devils and destroys temptations, puts away wicked fears and vices, and cleanses the thought-life. Whoever loves this name truly is full of God's grace and spiritual virtues, enjoying spiritual comfort in this life, and when such persons die they are taken up into the orders of angels, there to look upon Him whom they have loved in joy that has no end.

The mind of Christ conquers us when we make him the center of our contemplation, a contemplation which radiates out into the whole academy of our investigations, teaching, and learning. This holy radiant center is the energy that fuels a politics and ecclesiology of forgiveness, which we need so desperately in the academy.

A politics and economics of forgiveness affirms us each individually precisely as you or I sacrifice our pride for the other: "If compassion is knowingly to put oneself at risk for the sake of the other, then self-disposessive virtue is predicated upon a prior state of self-possession" (Oliver Davies). The cross's kenosis in us affirms our own true identities, ones which we need not hold on to in academic battles, battles fought so hard because they are over so little, as the saying goes. Instead, recognizing even the justice of our hatreds at times, we transcend them in the hospitality and demand of the gospel.

In this sense, the biblical vision is inclusive. Miroslav Volf has written on the particular "Catholic" (or universal) personality that Christianity affords its followers. The Church, as the biblical revelation teaches, will be made up of every ethnoi, every identity group. In this sense, Christianity practices what Volf calls "exclusion and embrace." It has its own particular identity, yet it also is inclusive of all -- "whosoever will, may come."