“There is no longer a Christian mind. There is still, of course, a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality. But as a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization.”

Harry Blamires is convinced that Christians don’t know how to think because they’ve allowed themselves to become inoculated by the secular culture in which they live. One could say that Blamires believes that Christians have stopped seeking truth. They’ve stopped questioning the mysterious. They’ve stopped pursuing marvelous revelations. They’ve stopped being amazed by the power of God that comes with true faith. They’ve stopped finding answers to questions, since they’ve relinquished their minds to the laziness of society.

Because Christians have surrendered their minds to secularization, Blamires’s book is an alarm to those in the Evangelical Christian community to “redeem the time” and recover their minds. The author wants Christians to recognize that there should be differences between the Christian and the secular mind. In fact, this is the second premise of the book:

To think secularly is to think within a frame of reference 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 chosen child of God.

Blamires wants Christians to honestly examine the worldviews widely held in society today. It’s not enough to say, “Oh, she’s a feminist, and he’s a Marxist, I don’t have to listen to them.” One of the primary reasons many Christians do not want to think outside the box of Christianity is that they are afraid their faith will be shaken. But the reality is that in order to grow in the faith, one will at times doubt, question, and struggle to find answers, seeking to reaffirm what it means to truly think like a Christian in every aspect of life.

As Christians, we are placed on this earth to make a difference – to be the change we want to see in the world. We’ve been given the opportunity to use our minds to affect that change, if only we will embrace what Blamires calls “the marks of the Christian mind.” They are as follows: 1) the cultivation of an eternal perspective - a mind that looks forward to the life to come. 2) Living with the awareness that good and evil exist, and that the world in which we live is a battlefield. 3) An understanding and belief in the supernatural truths of God as absolute, divine revelation. 4) Accepting the authority of the Church and Scripture as vehicles pointing to the realization that God actively dwells in the world. 5) Lastly, realizing that one who understands absolute truths with an illumined mind is called to live as a servant before God and the secular world.

Blamires concludes his book just as powerfully as he began, with a call to Christians everywhere to start thinking from a Christian perspective as it pertains to all of life. “It is better to define, establish, and nourish a Christian mind in freedom now, as a positive last effort to bring light and hope to our culture and our civilization, than to try to gather together the miserable fragments of Christian consciousness after triumphant secularism has finally bulldozed its way through the Church.”

After reading The Christian Mind, I realized just how easy it is to be sucked into secular culture, and just how easy it is to evade thinking like a Christian. This is not to say that Christians can’t learn from secular culture; it is quite the contrary. But we must be aware of a fact that T.S. Eliot describes in his Religion and Literature:

We must remember that the greater part of our current reading matter is written for us by people who have no real belief in a supernatural order . . . And the greater part . . . is coming to be written by people who not only have no such belief, but are even ignorant of the fact that there are still people in the world so “backward” or so “eccentric” as to continue to believe. So long as we are conscious of the gulf fixed between ourselves and the greater part of contemporary literature, we are more or less protected from being harmed by it, and are in a position to extract from it what good it has to offer us.

The secular world has much to offer the evangelical Christian community, but as Harry Blamires points out, we must remember that in order to reclaim and recover the Christian mind, we must be willing to think as Christians.

The Christian Mind reminded me of my call as a child of God to be proactive in my daily thought processes. In order for me to make a difference in the world for Jesus Christ, I must surrender myself to thinking christianly, while abandoning the secular diversions of this present world.

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