Created in God’s image, we are creatures full of complexity—souls and bodies; quarks, atoms, and purpose; language and destiny; intellect, emotion, desire, and action; heads and hearts. The Christian mindset includes all of who we are. It begins with the condition of our hearts and then works out in our thoughts, our intellect, our emotions, and our decisions. There is a temptation to relegate the Christian mindset to the head, a mistake of worldviewism in which the Christian worldview is just a standard subscription to a certain list of propositions. But that’s not all that Paul means by putting on the mind of Christ.

We can find some help here from Ephesians. Paul offers us the theological framework for this command to take up the Christian mindset. Ephesians is pregnant with the concept of union with Christ. Theologians and commentators point out the prepositions “in” and “with” Christ as shorthand for a mind-bending, soul-redeeming, Spirit-wrought legal and relational connection that followers of Jesus have with the ascended Jesus Himself. That means, in short, that we believers in Christ already have everything we need to put on a Christian mindset. Thus, Reformed spirituality is basically this: becoming who we already are in Christ, taking up the riches and resources that have been legally and relationally granted to us. Paul says that God “has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing” (Eph. 1:3). Notice the past tense: “has blessed.” And notice the holistic term: “every.” We already have what we need, totally. Paul’s prayer for the church is that we would “know” (1:18–19) this reality in our lives, work it out, and take hold of the riches that we’ve been given. To know includes the intellect, but it begins in the heart.

What is it that prevents us from taking up the treasures we already have? Why do we lack? Why do we consistently fail to put on the mind of Christ? I think we can answer this pivotal and life-changing question by considering our lacks as concentric circles. There are the most outward problems, and the easiest to deal with, but then there is the center, the central lack—that which takes away our Christian mindset most fundamentally. Let’s consider three rings, drilling down to the center so that we work our way to the depths of the soul to come back up ready to fight for the mind of Christ as our mind. Our lack comes from (1) enculturation, (2) prayerlessness, and (3) pride. There are more problems than these. But these three rings take us to the heart, and the heart is often the problem with the mind.

Enculturation

Enculturation can be defined as being saturated with the godless culture of the surrounding world. When our hearts are not full of God, they become susceptible to worldly ways of thinking. We can enculturate in two directions: (1) unconsciously taking on the subtle and not-so-subtle idols of the cultures in which we reside as kingdom exiles; (2) allowing moralism and legalism to squeeze out the gospel. Here, we are primarily thinking about the first of these two, though the latter is one manifestation of the former.

In everyone who follows Jesus, two principles are at work. Robert Louis Stevenson captured this well in his story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll allowed Mr. Hyde, a representation of his depraved inner life, to take over. Dr. Jekyll calls it the “perennial war among my members” and the possibility of a “dreadful shipwreck”—the fact that “man is not truly one, but truly two.”  The Bible shows us that for us as followers of Christ, the old self has been crucified with Christ; we have been given a new self, being born again, and that can never be taken away. And yet all of us know the struggle to put to death the Mr. Hyde within.