Harry Blamires’ “The Christian Mind,” a modern classic on Christian thought, remains an amazingly relevant and profound work today even in an increasingly flooded field of books on this topic. Originally written in 1963, Blamires’ work has gone through many printings, and while some of his illustrations are quite dated, the ideas in the book engender a certain timelessness.
The book is divided into two parts. Part one, “The Lack of a Christian Mind,” laments the lack of Christian thinking which has resulted in an abdication of the public sphere to ever-pervasive secularization. In his chapter called “The Surrender to Secularism,” Blamires eloquently captures the pathos of the modern, thinking Christian. In lamenting the fact that the best works of literature in the Twentieth Century were written by secular writers, he is worth quoting at length:
“What then, is the position of the thinking Christian, face to face with the cultural situation I have described? As he reads the things worth reading, whether imaginative or polemical, he is continually meeting with accounts of the human condition…which make him sit up and say: This is profound and penetrating…It is so crucial that it cannot be overlooked. It touches me pre-eminently as a Christian. Yet this writer is not a Christian…the only way I can pursue this vital current of thought further is by more reading of non-Christian literature written by skeptics, and by discussion of it within the intellectual frame of reference which these skeptics have manufactured. In short, there is no current Christian dialogue on this topic.” (Seabury Press edition, 10-11, emphasis his)
Fortunately, this situation is beginning to change, with an increasing number of thoughtful Christians entering the secular academy. Nevertheless, evangelicals have a disturbingly long road ahead regarding recapturing the Christian mind, and the loneliness of the Christian surrounded by a sea of secularism in the Academy is as real today as it was in the 1960’s.
The second part, and larger portion of the book attempts to sketch a positive framework for the Christian mind. Each chapter in this section is an explanation of a Christian commitment, followed by concrete examples of how the Christian mind might integrate with the secular in various areas of discourse touched by that commitment. For example, is his chapter on the “awareness of evil,” Blamires describes the Christian’s belief that there is a battle between good and evil going on behind the scenes in the universe. Such thinking has implications, he says, and one of them is that we cannot say that another nation, “the enemy,” so to speak, (here he may have in mind Soviet Russia), is more evil than our own nation, when both have left God behind. This is not to say, of course, that judgments about which political systems are better than others are out of bounds, as much as it is to say that the materialism of the West is an evil, as is the institutionalized atheism of other states, for example.
In other chapters, Blamires eloquently describes other Christian commitments, such as the “acceptance of authority” and the “sacramental cast” of the Christian mind. By authority, he means not only the authority of the Church and the traditions which it has handed down, but the submissive posture of a Christian towards God’s power and sovereignty, the overwhelming sense of a Christian that he has come face to face with God and been humbled. This is not to be confused, Blamires says, with the intellectual acknowledgment that there may be a God behind the universe, and that this would explain certain mysteries about the Cosmos. “A mere intellectual demand for a God to fill up the picture is essentially secularist in spirit and motive, in that it claims a God only to enrich and complete a finite situation,” he says. In other words, such a posture is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for a Christian mind.
The “sacramental cast,” of which Blamires speaks is not, as one would assume, a view of the essential nature of the sacraments in Church life. It is rather, a call to what he calls “Christian Romanticism,” an acknowledgment that beauty, nature, sex, the passions of youth, are good creations of God and point to an eternity beyond this world. There are shades of C.S. Lewis’ “Weight of Glory,” here, although Blamires mentions Charles Williams as his main source for his thinking. This chapter is an excellent introduction to the topic. In addition, Blamires’ chapter on “the concern for the person,” in which he discusses the modern technological society and its dehumanizing aspects, is well-thought and articulated.
All in all, a profound book with many hours of pondering in store is a good thing, and Blamires’ work does not disappoint. His is an essential tome for the Christian who wants to think deeply about these issues and tread the challenging paths of academic integration.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART ONE: The Lack of a Christian Mind
1. The Surrender to Secularism
2. Thinking Christianly and Thinking Secularly
PART TWO: The Marks of a Christian Mind
3. Its Supernatural Orientation
4. Its Awareness of Evil
5. Its Conception of Truth
6. Its Acceptance of Authority
7. Its Concern for the Person
8. Its Sacramental Cast
Reviewed by: Mark Hansard
