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Christ is the Start of All Inquiry

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, June 2, 2024

Think Christianly, friends. When you do, you’ll find that the world is not just an arrow pointing to the heavens but a gift from the hand of the God who loves you. Delight in it, explore it, discover it, conquer it, and exercise dominion over it. When you know how to look you’ll find that written through the core of everything is Jesus’ smile, beckoning you in love to die and rise again.

We have an intellectual problem in the modern West. We’ve forgotten the intellectual underpinnings of all knowledge.

That’s Jesus by the way.

The resurrection of Jesus is the central beating fact of all existence. Our response to it is the core of our lives. Christians whose lives look the same as their neighbours are a deep sadness, a withered tree.

Anderson, who my writing has been meandering with for a little while now, states it like this:

God’s love in Jesus Christ is the open secret of the cosmos.

Called into Questions, 111

Our intellectual inquiry is supposed to start here. All our thinking is to start here. All our lives are to start here. Whatever you do for a living is dramatically shifted and changed by Jesus, as is everything else in your life.

This is what it is to think Christianly: to start with the revelation of God in Christ and then move outwards towards other disciplines.

How is Mathematics different? Or tax law? Or plumbing?

I suspect most of us want to say that I’m over-spiritualising things and that honestly most of life continues on unabated. I simply don’t think that can be true. The way we view the world has to start with Jesus.

There is no such thing as being ‘unbiased.’ You cannot start your thinking, or your doing, from a neutral place. That standpoint doesn’t exist. This all sounds very critical theory, but that isn’t what I mean. What I mean is that we are never formless and void, we are given as children a way of looking at the world. We are, as Anderson puts it, ‘indoctrinated into a way of seeing things.’

Everyone is. We all have it. This is what some people call ‘worldview.’ I’m not sure that’s the best framing, but the lens that we look at everything through is what we mean. You see life through lenses you’ve been given. I’m saying we should see life through Jesus lenses. We should also think through Jesus lenses.

This all sounds very academic, I appreciate. That is my propensity. What difference does it make to the average person? Well, everyone is thinking about their lives all the time. Everyone needs to learn to think Christianly.

How do you decide who to marry? Or what house to rent or buy?

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