Christianity and Open-Mindedness

00:00 - James Spencer (Host) If we think about Christian discipleship as teaching us constraint. In other words, we are to learn to live according to all that Christ did, we're learning to imitate Christ, and so Christ becomes sort of this constraint for us. And as we learn to do that through discipleship, we come to live under the authority of Christ. 00:19 - Speaker 2 (None) Welcome to PREPPED, the podcast that equips you to live out God's story, not the world's story. Hosted by James Spencer, PhD, each episode bridges the gap between academic insights and everyday life, preparing you to understand the Word of God and put it into practice. Whether you're diving into biblical studies, looking for ministry guidance or aiming to deepen your faith, PREPPED empowers you to think biblically and theologically in a world that encourages you not to Ready to get PREPPED. Subscribe now and transform the way you bring God's story into the world. 00:54 - James Spencer (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to this episode to PREPPED. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about a trait that's, I think, often misunderstood in Christian circles, and that's open-mindedness. Is being open-minded a virtue or does it signal some sort of theological compromise? I think the world often tells us to keep an open mind, but it isn't always clear what that looks like, and when we're trying to follow Jesus, we really need to have a good understanding of what it means to be open, how it is that we can keep an open mind while still remaining faithful to Christ. And so today I want to suggest that true Christian open-mindedness really isn't about being receptive to everything. It's about being open to reality, specifically the reality revealed in the triune God, and closed to falsehood. And no matter how attractive or reasonable that falsehood may seem, we're still closed off to it. And I think there's some interesting research out there that would suggest that when we're thinking about open-mindedness, most people would think that open-mindedness occurs just without constraints total freedom to look at anything. Nothing is off bounds. We can entertain any option, and that in entertaining any option, we're going to come up with better ideas. If you close off certain aspects of life or certain observations or certain ways of thinking that what we're going to find is that we're going to have fewer good ideas, but I actually think that's not quite the case, and so we'll talk a little bit about that as well. 02:27 So this first part that I want to address is really what is it? Is being open minded, really just being unanchored. So, in other words, if we're open to everything, we have all of these choices coming in. Think about the Internet, think about how much information is on the internet. If you didn't have some sort of a filter like a search engine, a Google, you know some sort of AI model but sort of managing the information that you can take in, you're going to be inundated with a lot of information. You're just going to be so open to all of it, with no real criteria to understand what you're trying to find, how you're trying to find it, what's going on there, that it's going to be very difficult for you to, number one, process all that information, but, number two, to understand any of it or make any sort of real decisions. 03:20 And so I just want to start with a really basic observation, and that is open and closed-mindedness are relational categories. The key question isn't just are you open-minded it's what are you open to? So when we think about being open-minded, it implies that we are open to something. So what are we open to? And I would say the inverse of that is what are you closing yourself off from? And I think the world often equates sort of open-mindedness with being unmoored from convictions, ready to change your mind about anything at any time. But that's not really openness, that's instability. And I think as Christians we're not called to be open to everything. We're called to be open to reality, and the kind of reality that starts with God's self-revelation. So when we're open to that, it closes off to us certain fictions and distortions about who we are, what the world is and what it means to be free, open-minded. You name it, and I'd turn to something like Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 04:30 He was giving a commencement address to Harvard in 1978. It's really great speech. It's out there on the internet. You can search for it and find it. 04:38 But he warned about the West's obsession with individual rights and he felt that these rights were becoming detached from any real moral responsibility. And so he said that our version of freedom, the West's version of freedom, had become destructive and irresponsible. Why it's? Because it wasn't bound by obligation, particularly obligation to anything beyond ourselves, particularly obligation to anything beyond ourselves, and I think his point is sort of prophetic but incomplete. He didn't root our obligations in the triune god, and that's the key difference between generic moralism and christian discipleship. We're not just trying to be responsible citizens, we're not just trying to work out some sort of moral framework that we've developed apart from God, or maybe just, you know, really God adjacent, but God isn't exactly central to our morality. We're actually trying to live in response to a holy God who lays claim to every part of our lives. 05:39 And so, as we think about this idea of openness, one of the things that we're going to find is that we, to be open-minded and I would say this for anyone, anyone to be open-minded they have to close off certain things. Many people would close off, for instance, the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ. They would say well, I'm going to close that off. He can't be the way, the truth and the life. There have to be other ways. And so they're closing themselves off to this exclusive claim of Jesus. Christians are doing the opposite. They're saying no, if Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, he is the way, the truth and the life, then that observation, that conviction, that claim that has to now shape everything else that I see in the world. It has to change the way that I look at things and it actually can help open me up to the reality of God and the reality. It has to change the way that I look at things and it actually can help open me up to the reality of God and the reality that he has created, as opposed to keeping me closed off to the reality of God and the way that he has created the world. So that sort of claim I am the way, the truth and the life. It is a sort of constraint, and so restraints are actually really helpful for us. They don't just restrict yes, they limit possibilities, they limit alternatives, but as they do so, they're also opening up alternatives. 06:58 So if we think about language, for instance, you know I'm talking on this podcast, I'm using English grammar rules, I'm using English syntax, and I'm doing so in a way that hopefully it makes a little bit of sense. But if I were just to, you know, start talking gibberish, start using words that I decided to make up, or changing the word order of things, or I'm going to mix. You know Hebrew, which begins with a verb and then moves to a subject and an object most of the time, versus the way we do it in English a subject, a verb and then an object. If I started, you know, sort of combining all these different rules from all these different languages, or just started speaking in speaking words that are completely made up, you're not going to hear anything from me, really. You're just going to, you're going to translate it in your own brain as gibberish, you're just going to hear noise. It's not really communication, because what I'm saying is so out of the box, it's so unrestricted, it is without constraint. We can't really understand each other. Now, as we think about that, what do those constraints of language then do? Well, they close off alternatives. Right, there are certain ways of putting together the structure of a sentence. There are certain ways of speaking and the words that we use and what they mean that we have to share. That's a constraint on the way that we can communicate, and yet, by reducing the alternatives, it actually expands the alternatives. 08:42 You could say something similar about driving on the road. Right, in the United States, we drive on the right side of the road, and so if everybody drives on the right side of the road, there's a level of coordination that can happen and people can get there with a relative safety. You're not constantly looking ahead and wondering if the guy in the left lane is going to start driving in the right lane and coming towards you in your lane. You're not really thinking that because everybody's decided okay, if I'm going, you know I'll drive in the right lane, cars will pass me going the other direction in the left lane, and that level of coordination allows us to avoid chaos on the roads. But if we reframe that and we think of it, driving on the right side of the road is a constraint, it's a rule, it's a law that all of us follow, and so as we follow it, we actually open up alternatives for ourselves, we open up opportunities for ourselves, we open up opportunities to drive and get places relatively quickly, we open ourselves up to relatively safe driving conditions. 09:51 And so these rules, these constraints, they not only restrict our behaviors, they restrict the way we think and act, but then in that restriction they're opening up new possibilities, because the reality is that we don't exist on our own. It's not just me in the world, it's not just me driving my car in a completely empty road. We have other people that we are coordinating with in these bigger and smaller ways, and so we have to learn to work within systems that have real constraints, rules, laws and other sorts of constraints that allow us to relate to those other people in ways that are beneficial for everyone. And so I think the constraints of language they make communication possible. The constraints, the legal constraints of, you know, driving, they make driving possible. 10:50 And Alicia Jouero, who is a scholar of complex systems, she describes this really beautifully. She says that some constraints really do reduce chaos and create new possibilities. They allow for complexity to flourish without actually collapsing into randomness, and that's not a bad description of what God's word does for us. It sets boundaries that actually lead us toward life. In this chaotic, complex world that we live in, with all of the different things that can go wrong and often do, what we find in God's word is a set of understandings, a set of constraints, and oftentimes we can look at those and say, oh, I don't want to be limited by these constraints, I don't want to be restricted. Restriction is bad, but it's really not. A lot of times when we allow ourselves to be constrained, we open ourselves up to new vision. And so this is the way I think. At times, I think about God's word in this way. What God's word is doing is it's giving me something to index against and to true myself to, and it says go this far and no farther, because when you go farther, chaos ensues. And so it gives me the constraints within which I can open myself up to reality, and open myself up specifically to the triune God. 12:18 And I think this is where Christian discipleship becomes absolutely critical, because discipleship is about learning these constraints. You know, in the Great Commission, christ says you know, I've been given authority over all, everything in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to observe all that I've commanded. So we have a couple of exclusionary pieces there. Number one the baptism. The baptism is we can think of it as a commitment of loyalty, a pledge of allegiance, we might say. But that pledge of allegiance even is limited. It's not. You're being baptized into the name of whomever happens to be immersing you in the water, or in the name of in our day, maybe a denomination of some sort. No, you're being baptized into the name of the triune God, into the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. 13:13 The name of the triune God, into the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and that reference there is about who we're going to be representing Primarily. Who we represent, who we're pledging our allegiance to and we're committing ourselves to live toward, is God, and so we're not. Yes, when we go out and we're operating in the world, sure, we're representing other groups as well. We're representing, for instance, our local church, maybe, or our family, or what have you, our work, but primarily, what we're doing is we're representing God, and that representation of God takes center space. It doesn't lose out to any sort of other representation that we are committed to, and so this is a point that's very similar to one that I make in the podcast called Reordering Loves. This general idea is that loving God, being loyal to God, is to have every other sort of love immersed within it, and so you never have a love that doesn't also love God operating within your life. 14:21 Now, if we think about Christian discipleship as teaching us, constraint, this second movement, really the teaching, teaching to observe all Christ commanded, there's obviously a constraint there. In other words, we are to learn to live according to all that Christ did. We're learning to imitate Christ, and so Christ becomes sort of this constraint for us. If it isn't something that Jesus taught, if it isn't something that Jesus would do, it is not something commensurate with the Christian faith. We don't do it. 14:54 That's a constraint, and as we learn to do that through discipleship, we come to live under the authority of Christ. But that then frees us from other things. You know, paul in Romans 6 talks about being free from sin. You know, do you not know, that the one you obey is the one that you serve? So you can either be a slave to righteousness, you can be a slave from sin. Do you not know that the one you obey is the one that you serve? So you can either be a slave to righteousness, you can be a slave to sin. And as we imitate Christ, as we live under his authority, we are freed to do so. We're freed for obedience. And so we see that these constraints that are put on us are actually opening up new alternatives that we didn't have before. 15:34 So discipleship really does open us up to see reality clearly, who we are, who God is and how we're meant to live. It trains us to resist the illusion that we are independent, self-made or self-sufficient. It trains us to resist the illusion that we are independent of God rather than dependent on God. So Jesus isn't one option among many. He is the way, the truth and the life. That's John 14, 6. Following him doesn't close us off to possibilities. It opens us up to the only possibility that matters life with God, shaped by his purposes and aligned with his reality. So as we think about discipleship, we're thinking about discipleship as true openness, or what it really means to be open-minded as a Christian. So let's bring it back down to sort of brass tacks. What does this look like practically? 16:25 I think discipleship under Christ's authority allows us to be all things to all people for the sake of the gospel. That's the way Paul describes himself in 1 Corinthians 9, 19 through 23. And this idea of being all things to all people isn't about compromising our convictions. It's about adapting to the moment so that we continue to give God the glory we get to rejoice in suffering right. Romans 5, 1 through 5. James 1 talks about this. 16:53 1 Peter discusses suffering and in all of this what we find is that we're sharing in Christ's suffering, that we're learning and understanding him in a way that not suffering wouldn't allow us to. Now that's not to venerate suffering. It's not like, hey, go out and find some way to suffer for Jesus. Not at all. This is a word, I think, of comfort and an encouragement to persevere, because as we live and as we imitate Christ, what we're going to create is friction with the world. And when enough friction is created, it's going to start burning. And so that's the way I think about suffering that suffering is the friction that we create with the world because we're living for Christ so fully. 17:36 You know, we get to as I mentioned in Romans 6, we get to live in freedom from sin and shame, and then we get to let go of this sort of anxious grasping at the present form of the world, and that's probably 1 Corinthians 7.31 is a great place to go. I don't think that's small-mindedness, that's not closed-mindedness, that's a whole new way of being human. It opens us up to new opportunities because we are not now constrained just to staunchly be who we are. We can be all things to all people. We can adapt without compromise. We don't have to turn away from suffering. We don't have to make our choices just on the pragmatic idea of is this going to hurt? Am I going to be running up against other people? It's going to create too much friction. We don't have to think that way. We can live in that freedom from sin and shame because Christ has taken all that away. We're no longer serving sin, we're serving Christ, the we're serving Christ, and then we can let go of these sort of anxieties that often drive people. 18:40 The needs of the world. You know Christ talks about not worrying about what you will eat or where you'll stay, what you'll wear. Let God take care of those things, but seek first his kingdom and his righteousness. And so that's not to say that we never worry about what we wear and what we eat. You know I think about what I'm going to have for lunch every day, but at the same time what we eat. You know I think about what I'm going to have for lunch every day, but at the same time what we're talking about there is not allowing those appetites to drive us. What drives us is the kingdom of God and his righteousness and pursuing that. You know there's an interesting sort of. 19:08 He's a. He writes a little bit in the psychological range, but he's also a little bit of a philosopher, e McGilchrist. I've suggested, or I've mentioned him a few times, I think, over different podcasts, but he makes this sort of brilliant observation, I think, you know, we often confuse control with understanding. And so his observation is that just because we can the way he puts it push buttons and pull levers doesn't mean that we know or understand what the world is. So the fact that we can manipulate the world doesn't mean that we actually understand the world. And so what he's trying to suggest is that, as we come to understand the world, there are certain levers we won't pull and certain buttons we won't push. But we've often failed to recognize or acknowledge that there is this difference between controlling the world, manipulating the world, being able to, you know, make these minor changes in the world, and understanding the world. And so I think that's an interesting distinction, because this is where God's self-revelation really does come in. 20:18 The covenant, god's relationship with his people tells us not just how to live, but what's real. Israel wasn't blessed because of military might or cultural savvy. They flourished when they obeyed the Lord, and that's the same for us. We're not blessed, we're not going to achieve success, we're not going to, you know. Find our way to eternity, find our way to the new heavens and the new earth. Through some crafty strategy that we come up with. God has given us the roadmap for this. He's put us in a position, given us constraints. We might say that if we're willing to live within those constraints, they will open up to the alternative lifestyle that comes in the new heavens and the new earth. And so I think, in Christ we see this perfect revelation of life lived in alignment with reality, and this is part of why we need to learn to follow him. 21:11 So, getting back to open-mindedness, hopefully that lays some groundwork and gives some frameworks for everybody to think through this. But what do we mean when we're thinking about being open versus not open to everything? So open-mindedness entails, in my mind, some level of closed-mindedness. So does that mean that we should dismiss any idea that isn't explicitly biblical? No, christians can and should, I think, learn from disciplines like science and history and psychology and art. I mean, even in the context of this podcast, I've listed a couple of scholars who are not Christian Alicia Uaro, at least that I know of, and Ian McGilchrist. 21:52 I don't believe either. One of those are Christians, but their work has insight into the world. They make good observations about the world. Now, they may not understand it fully, but good observations are good observations and so we don't have to reject those simply because they don't come to us. From a Christian perspective, human beings can perceive goodness, truth and beauty, even apart from the scriptures, even apart from Christ. But those insights are always going to be incomplete, apart from the triune God, who defines goodness, truth and beauty. They're always going to be a little bit off, a little bit anemic, a little bit less grounded, and it's going to be difficult for people to understand how they relate to goodness, truth and beauty, apart from the triune God. 22:40 So we're open to what is true. Christians should be open to what is true, even if it challenges us. But we're not open to everything. There are ideas that we should simply reject, not because we're narrow-minded, but because we've already said yes to the truth. In other words, there's no reason to be open to a patently false statement. There's just no reason to. I don't need to be open to that falsehood Now. Does that mean that I'm not open to the person saying it? No, I want to be open to the person saying it. I want to listen to them, I want to understand where they're coming from, not because I'm so interested in sort of adopting their wisdom as my own, but so that I can talk to them, converse with them in ways that maybe they'll come to understand that there are holes in their system and that Christ could fill those. So here's what discipleship, I think, helps us do. It teaches us to recognize the difference between the true, the partially true and the false and whatever other categories there may be in between there, and it reminds us that our openness should always be governed by our ultimate allegiance to Christ. So what's our key takeaway here? 23:50 I think Christians should absolutely pursue open-mindedness, but not the kind that flirts with everything and commits to nothing. We pursue theological open-mindedness, an openness rooted in God's authority, constrained by his word and aimed at knowing him more fully. Throw some of the church traditions in there. I think oftentimes it gets lost in Protestantism because we're a little gun shy about talking about tradition. But if I think of something like the Nicene Creed, the Nicene Creed is a wonderful encapsulation of Christian doctrine. It's full of things that everyday Protestants should just believe, and that's a tradition. It's drawn from scripture. It's sort of's a tradition. It's drawn from Scripture, it's sort of governed by Scripture, it's constructed from Scripture, but it's also part of our tradition, and so I wouldn't rule out some of those aspects of the tradition that we need to recognize and root ourselves within. 24:50 So we don't entertain ideas just for novelty's sake. We evaluate them in light of scripture and when they align with what's good and true and beautiful, we can receive them as gifts. But we never surrender the ground of discipleship. Christ has all authority in heaven and on earth. That's the anchor for our minds, our hearts and our lives. So as we engage in these thought processes, as we try to be open-minded to different ideas, what we're really trying to do is trying to discern okay, where does this idea exhibit the true, the good and the beautiful? Where can I acknowledge that, celebrate that, celebrate the fact that someone has discovered something that's true and good and beautiful, maybe that I didn't know before, while at the same time reminding them and the rest of the world that even these conceptions of the true, the good and the beautiful are incomplete and that the thing that completes them is Jesus Christ? 25:47 Thanks for listening to PREPPED. If this episode helped you think more clearly about discipleship, truth or open-mindedness. You know the shape of the Christian mind, share it with someone else. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe, rate and leave a review wherever you're listening. And until next time, stay faithful, stay grounded and stay PREPPED. Take care, everybody. We'll see you on the next episode. 26:08 - Speaker 2 (None) Thanks for tuning in to PREPPED. If today's episode helped you view the world through a God-centered lens, be sure to hit subscribe, so you're always prepared for what comes next. Don't forget to rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more believers eager to live out God's story. Share this episode with a friend, family member or loved one, and together let's keep challenging the world's narratives. Until next time, stay grounded, stay inspired and continue. Let's keep challenging the world's narratives Until next time. Stay grounded, stay inspired and continue living out God's plan. See you soon on our next episode of PREPPED.