The Christian Mind by Harry Blamires

For the fall session of teacher development, I was asked to read and discuss The Christian Mind by Harry Blamires with the entire faculty. The teachers were given one of six chapters to read on their own. My job was to explicate how that chapter fits into the whole, how it fits into the classical, Christian model of education, and how teachers might incorporate the work. In 45 minutes. 

Let’s go.

First off, Blamires makes the case in this 1963 book that the “Christian Mind” is greatly wanting in the significant conversations of the day. In the forward he says that he considered updating some of the material for the more recent publications, but found that since nothing had changed, the book remained cogent. 

While Christians might practice their religion with diligence and integrity, Blamires points out: 

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 sets all earthly issues within the context of the eternal, the view which relates all human 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 and earth’s transitoriness, in terms of Heaven and Hell. (3-4)

The Christian has given up the entire battlefield of ideas over to secular assumptions and secular ways of arguing. In fact Blamires asks the reader to attempt to think “christianly” on any issue, apart from preconceived biases or political positions, and then argue the point with fellow Christians. It will soon become apparent how lonely this place is. No one talks that way. In fact it can seem dangerous to cede ground as it might benefit a political opponent. Christians must “re-establish the status of objective truth as distinct from personal opinion.” (40) Only then can we hope to recover “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.” (43)

Blamires contrasts the secular way of thinking to this christianly way: 

To think secularly is to think within a frame of referenced bounded by the limits of our life on earth: it is to keep one’s calculations rooted in this-worldly criteria. 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 chose child of God. (44)

Blamires goes onto state, “There is nothing in our experience, however trivial or worldly, or even evil, which cannot be thought about christianly.” (45)

But exactly what it means to “think christianly” can evade us. Blamires starts with the notion that to think christianly is to this with a supernational orientation. “The Christian mind sees human life and human. history held in the hands of God. It sees the whole universe sustained by his power and his love. It sees the natural order as dependent upon the supernatural order, time as contained within eternity.” (67) I think this can be termed, “gospel-colored glasses.” That is, and granted this sounds very foreign, the Christian should approach every topic with an eye to the eternal and God’s sovereignty. “What is God doing in this circumstance, and how can I align myself with it?” is a question we should have at the top of our minds as we think through and contribute to the conversation. That world, God’s world, is the real world. Do we live like this?

Next the Christian mind is aware of evil:

The notion that this world, and the powers of it, are in the grip of evil, is too well established in Christian teaching to be lightly disregarded, yet Christians have grown accustomed to shrug off the more somber implications of this truth. (86)

At the same time, we must avoid the trap of pride. It is easy to see the evil committed by the other. Blamires says we must approach or fellow travelers in this life with a sense of “What have we done?” (103) The world our Lord entered into was rotten to the core. Yet he entered in. He did not shy away from calling evil, evil, but he knew his place was in this world, with we fallen beings.

The Christian mind must also have a firm grasp of the conception of truth:

One may say without exaggeration that failure to distinguish clearly between the Christian conception of truth and the conception of truth popularly cherished in the secular mind has been one of the most unfortunate neglects of our age. (106) 

Our society today likes to talk about “my truth” and “your truth.” The Christian must understand that truth “is supernaturally grounded, not developed within nature; that it is objective and not subjective; that it is a revelation and not a construction; that it is discovered by inquiry and not elected by a majority vote; that it is authoritative and not a matter of personal choice.” (107) The Christian must be willing to say, “Don’t ask me what I like or what I approve of. Ask me what I think is true. The truth isn’t always nice. It isn’t always likeable. But I believe you’ve got to cling to it.” (121) But knowledge of the truth requires a deep understanding the theology presented in Scripture. We must never resort to an uninformed opinion prefaced with, “Well I believe...”

The Christian mind accepts authority. The world does not and never can. The world does not tolerate authority or even understand it. We live under the authority of the Father, “benign yet authoritative, loving yet powerful, merciful yet wrathful.” (140) As Christians, the gospel message should lead to “that sense of personal inadequacy, human dependence, utter lowliness and lostness, which brings the Christian to his knees and throws him into the hands of our Lord.” We must avoid the “self-satisfaction of the pharisaical kind with which our Lord himself never came to terms.” (146) The vehicle the Father uses is the Church and therefore the world must adapt itself to the Church. This is heretical thinking in our times. Blamires spends a lot of time decrying the common refrain that the Church is in trouble in the modern age. Impossible. The Church cannot be destroyed. This was proven 2,000 years ago. The Church, as the body of Christ, will continue to exert its authority until Christ returns.

The concern for the person must also consume the Christian mind. The Incarnation is proof enough that the human being is an exalted life form. Blamires spends most of this chapter decrying the mechanization of our society. Technology and its all-consuming effects have served to dehumanize that which is made in the image of God. And this before the internet. “We have to ask ourselves what degree of dependence upon the technological artifacts that are drugging the bodies and minds of our contemporaries is appropriate in those who are trying to live the Christian life.” (160) Now he’s getting right up in our business! He posits that Christians everywhere should be up in arms about the materialism and dehumanization being fostered by technology. In 1963. We serve our technological innovations, not the God in heaven. 

To those not convinced, Blamires is clear:

Powerful influences of government and commerce nourish the concept of man as a packet of diverse functions. There is lavish expenditure on numerous devices which appeal to man as the creature of one function only—propaganda, advertisement, entertainment, and indoctrination designed wholly to capture the undiscerning eye and the unthinking heart of man the conditioned consumer, the conditioned voter, the conditioned producer. Every effort is made to debase man by dehumanizing him; to condemn him to an existence in which he functions, not as a person, but as a thing; not as a thinking, choosing, creature, but as a cog in a piece of machinery. To function in a machine is to function sub-humanly—to act in a preordained, automatic pattern which precludes the exercise of purpose, creativeness, choice, and reason. (165)

Finally, the Christian mind has a sacramental cast. He beautifully states:

The Christian Faith presents a sacramental view of life. It shows life’s positive richnesses as derivative from the supernatural. It teaches us that to create beauty or to experience beauty, to recognize truth or to discover truth, to receive love or to give love, is to come into contact with realities which express the Divine Nature. (173) 

He uses society’s focus on all things sensual as ripe ground for the Christian mind. The Church has not recognized the extent to which today’s youth are seeking the transcendent when they lean into sexually-themed culture. Blamires makes clear that “the religion of the Incarnation must be presented to modern youth as something more exciting than a lot of prohibitions aimed at disinfecting life of its torrential delights, and something more positive than a plan to substitute a sterility of body and mind for that contemporary fleshly abandonment which, if no longer glad, is at least perversely affirmative of existence.” (174). Adolescents crave more than we are offering them. They will turn to the psychologist or the poet, but they will have their passions met. 

Blamires suggests a Christian Romanticism as an answer to the youth. Once we recognize that the longings felt by the youth as expressed in their music, culture, clothing, relationships, stories, etc. is never going to be fulfilled in this life, we can point to them to the reality that it is not supposed to be. We are not of this world. Our hope lies outside it. As C.S. Lewis said, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” He paints a beautiful picture of a heart flung to the stars, of longing never fulfilled, of dreams remaining dreams becausethat is the reality. We must engage our young people where they are, full of hope and longing and dreams. We must tell them those are wonderful markers of a world in which all can be fulfilled:

Because they lose their intrinsic joy, we know our early dreams and longings for what they are, the pointers to fulfillment and reality; not ends in themselves, but significant disturbers of our peace. Unsatisfied longings must be nourished in us, and the elusive dream of fulfillment dangled before us, or we should never know that we are not here, on earth, in our proper resting-place. Utterly divested of this disturbing inheritance, men’s hearts would never desire the ultimate peace and joy offered by God.

The Christian mind makes sense of passionate youthful longings and dissatisfactions as pointers to the divine creation of man and the fact that he is called to glory. (179-180)

The instinct to envelop itself with passionate, sensual adventures is fundamentally healthy.

What?

This runs so counter to everything we communicate to young people. We bombard them with do’s and don’ts. We never tell them that their desires are good, true, and beautiful. We tell them those worldly attractions will not fulfill, but we never tell them it is right to long for more. We tell them Jesus is enough. He is. But not until we see him face-to-face. 

But it’s not enough to promise them a time in the sweet by-and-by. We must help them own these desires and cherish them for what they are: glimpses of heaven. 

Blamires turns to the poetry of Coventry Patmore, with whom I admit unfamiliarity, as an example of “the God who woos the soul of man through the self-transcending grab of grateful love.” (182) Blamires reminds us that the “pull of beauty in love, or art, or Nature” are all instance of:

the voice of God which calls, and the grace of God which urges us to listen. Youth’s romanticism before the potent glamour of sex, music, dancing, and the like, must be a Christian romanticism which recognizes the divine Voice. Unless youth’s stirring urges and visions are seen to point beyond time, they will be worshipped as ends in themselves. (182)

Blamires also enlists the writing of Charles Williams, of whom I’m also unfamiliar, to point the way romantic love relates to Christian Romanticism. The way the lover envisions his beloved is how we are to understand how God sees us. In addition, we are to understand that when that which is perfect is come, we will see our fellow man in the same light, with a “rapture of emotion, which seems to blend humility with exultation, self-giving with grateful receiving, in a joyful interchange of laughter and courtesy.” (185) This kind of love, whether glimpsed through romantic love or the beauty of nature demands immortality. All other human activities will cease, but Blamires asserts, “Death is incompatible with love.” (186) Only the Christian theology of eternal life promises love fulfilled. 

Blamires then ends with this powerful statement: 

Sexual love is one of the most powerful openers of the human mind to the reality of the eternal, one of the most potent disturbers of human willingness to come to terms with materialistic secularism, For nothing in natural experience more universally touches the soul of man with the call to worship, to serve, to adore, that which is outside himself, with the hunger for an immortality spent in love and self-giving, As a lever to prise open the heart of man to the awareness of mystery and to the glimpse of glory, both rooted in eternity, sexual love is one of God’s most efficient instruments. (188) 

The Christian Mind thinks supernaturally, aware of evil and grounded in the truth; it accepts authority and is centered on humans; it makes all things sacramental. This kind of think is sadly limited today. Even very intelligent Christians can lapse into secular thinking with the thought, “No one will accept arguments based on theology.” While this view holds some merit, it is unacceptable. If we cannot offer the world a Christian way of thinking about the issue facing society, we risk becoming just another clanging gong in a very noisy world.

Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution by Myron Magnet

Justice Thomas is one of my heroes. Not only is his one of those only-in-America type tale of rising from the very bottom to the very top, he has maintained a consistent ethos is the face of withering criticism. So when I heard about the book Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution by Myron Magnet, I immediately put it on my book "gift" list. Thankfully I received it one Christmas (or birthday). 

Myron Magnet uses the jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas to show the ways the Supreme Court has misinterpreted the Constitution and how Justice Thomas believes the errors should be rectified. Magnet identifies three specific items which endanger our republic: the misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, the rise of the administrative state, and the doctrine of a "living" Constitution. 

Magnet spends time on the iconic background of Thomas, recounting his chaotic childhood and his subsequent life with his grandparents. Thomas' grandfather, in particular, looms large. Although Thomas rebelled for a short time against his grandfathers strict structure of integrity and hard work, and fell, himself, into grievance politics, today Thomas reflects the basic standards of fairness and decency, the love for and protection of liberty, as embodied in that man.

Magnet then asks the question, "Who killed the Constitution?" (33) It begins with the 14th Amendment. Originally passed to force states to recognize the rights of citizens previously only recognized by the federal government, the Supreme Court quickly began denigrating the very foundation of the law. In the 1873 Slaughter House cases, the Court rightfully asserted that the 14th Amendment gave the rights of citizens to blacks, but as far as the "privileges an immunities" guaranteed, those were highly limited. Rather than restate the clear meaning of the text written to address a clear problem of states not respecting the rights of black people, the Court held that the 14th Amendment only extended the rights of what was to be found exclusively in the federal domain: right to travel on interstate waterways and not be subject to ex post facto laws. This original misreading bears fruit to this day. Subsequent cases continued to let states off the hook for failing to protect the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, leading inexorably to Plessy v. Ferguson and the "separate but equal" doctrine.

This judicial mockery of the clear will of the people played right into President Wilson's doctrine of a "living" Constitution. Frustrated at the roadblocks presented by the "Newtonian" Constitution of the Founders' design with its checks and balances, Wilson appealed to a "Darwinian" Constitution: one that every grows and evolves. Franklin Delano Roosevelt elevated this idea into a full-blown administrative state designed to regulate and dictate all levels of society. Initially rebuffed by a Court committed to a more proper understanding of the division of power, the recalcitrant court was threatened with court-packing and the judges switched sides.  

The idea that the government was no longer one of limited and enumerated powers found its apex in the mid-20th century. It begins with the Warren court and Brown v. Board of Education. Under the Constitution, the federal government had no role in education, but Justice Earl Warren, using the 14th Amendment as a pretext, found that its "equal protection" clause demanded desecrated schools. While this result is highly laudable, it created a "right" with no prior recognition. Rather than appealing to the clear language of the "privileges and immunities" guaranteed to all citizens, Warren sidestepped overturning Plessy, and invoked "equal protection" instead. In an ironic turn of events, future courts would use this same language, designed to make the government color-blind in regards to race, to advance race-based policies like Affirmative Action. It also allowed future courts to find additional "rights," no where enumerated in the Constitution, as they saw fit. Eventually rights would be found in the "emanations" and "penumbras" of the Constitution, forming a right to privacy, which was then interpreted to include a right to abortion.

Enter Justice Thomas:

The Constitution means not what the Court says it does, but what the delegates at Philadelphia and at the state ratifying conventions understood it to mean... We as a nation adopted a written Constitution precisely because it has a fixed meaning that does not change. Otherwise we would have adopted the British approach of an unwritten, evolving constitution. (61)

Thomas believed the Constitution was the ultimate stare decisis, or prior decision. It made no sense, in his opinion, to honor prior wrongly decided cases. As C.S. Lewis points out, if you find yourself on the wrong road, the most progressive thing to do is to turn around and go back. 

[T]o describe [Thomas'] fully mature method of constitutional interpretation more precisely: he begins with the plain command of the constitutional text or amendment in question, locates it in all the concrete complexity of its historical context, traces the historical process by which the command got distorted from its original meaning, explains the real-world consequences of that distortion, and points out how the Court can repair the damage going forward. His goal is a return to the framers' vision, aimed at protecting the liberty he cherishes as dearly as they did. (72)

We see this in his attempts to rein in a bloated administrative state, to replace a "living" Constitution with an originalist and textual approach, and a desire to reestablish a correct understanding of the 14th Amendment.

On this last front, Thomas combats the idea of "substantive due process," a legal doctrine that has become a catch-all for "whatever a judge wants it to mean." Magnet calls this idea, "smoke and mirrors...a hokey dodge around an old but incorrect, blood-soaked, and disreputable reading of the Fourteenth Amendment." (75) This doctrine, as opposed to plain old "procedural due process," claims that some rights are so fundamental that no state can withdraw them. What are those rights? Well the justices claim to know them when they see them. This has resulted in rights to education, marriage, privacy, abortion, and criminal rights, wreaking havoc in society as the government at all levels seeks to enforce an ever-growing list of rights no matter the outcome. Students have a right to an Olympic-sized swimming pool, drug dealers have a right to government-financed housing, thieves have a right to steal up to $950 in merchandise. At the same time, the government has a right to take property for any reason, the government has a right to regulate political speech, the government has a right to regulate anything and everything. 

Thomas traces the roots of all of this to a time when Americans abandoned the ideas of virtue and role models. People are no longer held accountable for their actions; echoes of Thomas' grandfather resound. The New Deal marked a turning point in American history with FDR's "freedom from want." Suddenly the government's job was to provide whatever you wanted and the Supreme Court's job became to find that particular "right" in the Constitution. 

As Magnet so eloquently puts it:

as people lose their veneration for the unalienable rights of mankind and their reverence for the active, heroic virtues that sustain them, the rights themselves crumble, government looms larger, the people feel themselves all the more powerless and dependent, allowing government to arrogate ever more power to itself, and so on, in a vicious circle. (120)

Clarence Thomas is fighting to end that doom loop by faithfully interpreting the Constitution.