The mind is a great gift from God. It is a terrible thing to waste. Yet those who live entirely and exclusively a life of the mind, no matter how rich that may be, nor how powerful the mind, are themselves wasting that mind. A right faith moves in the direction of right worship. At various times in the history of the church there have been movements toward purely contemplative forms of Christianity. Eremite monks had themselves walled up in cells, cut off from human contact and sometimes for years at a time. They desired an undisturbed and untroubled opportunity to contemplate the divine gifts and even the essence of God. They attempted to rise into the presence of the Almighty God to fathom the depths of His substance. They even attempted to become entirely lost in Him. The great mystics, like Catherine of Siena, sought to love God perfectly and to be merged into Him, as Catherine thought, by a mystical marriage with Christ. Unfortunately, the mind so occupied with heaven is of no earthly good.

 

Christianity, by contrast, is a way of life quite different from that conceived by the mystics and those who want to proceed from their own minds into the mind of God. Instead, Christianity is a practical religion in which action arises and grows out of the seed bed of the divine revelation in Jesus Christ. The revelation of God in Christ to the world obviates the need for us humans to merge ourselves with God through our contemplations of Him. The mind is not capable of that ascent. Instead God condescends to come to us in the fleshly incarnation of his only begotten Son ( Jn 1:18). There is no going up. There is only God coming down.

 

God comes into the world to serve it. He does not expect the world to ascend to Him. The incarnation changes our relationship with the creation. It is not something to be escaped, but properly embraced. As a part of the creation, God enters the creation which He made. He sanctifies flesh and blood and its life in the world this way. We live lives of service in the flesh, through which our lives become a constant doxology. Our lives become lives of praise to the God who has taken our human flesh and lived in His creation with us and for us. Retreat into the mind and contemplation of the divine is then entirely impossible, for it is not the context in which God reveals himself or through which God's will is done on earth, as it is in heaven. We may not merely contemplate God in our Christian lives, but actively seek His praise in the world by sharing the mystery of the incarnation and our salvation with the world. Having clergy who know the faith is simply inadequate, if they are unable to express it and teach it. Being right in your own mind is of no benefit to the world. We must speak because we have believed ( 2Co 4:13).