Jesus the Logician

WHAT DOES JESUS SHOW US ABOUT LOVING GOD WITH ALL OUR MINDS?

What’s the role of the mind in the Christian life?

I’ve been thinking about this question lately because I recently preached on the gospel passage (Mark 12:30) where Jesus admonishes us to love God with all our minds. The context for the passage is this: In response to a question from a lawyer, Jesus speaks these classic words, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).
On a first read, there isn’t much in Jesus’ words to trip us up. This seems like a pretty straightforward commandment: Love God with everything you’ve got! But a little bit of digging reveals more under the surface than we might first realize. In Mark, Jesus expands on Deuteronomy 6:4 to explicitly include the mind, where the OT passage mentions only heart, soul and strength.

Partly, Jesus inclusion of mind here can be taken as an authoritative interpretation of the Hebrew understanding of heart, which would include a sense of the will and mind. But the explicit inclusion of mind in this chapter is especially appropriate because Jesus is beset again and again in the preceding verses by opposition from the religious establishment of his day, who pose clever questions intended to trip Jesus up intellectually.

In three separate instances, Jesus faces intellectual opposition from his opponents, who fail to outwit him.

Working through this text, it struck me more than ever that Jesus is not only a great moral teacher (as we would expect from the sinless Son of God), but is also a great logician. Instead of sweating as carpenter, it seems Jesus probably could have scored a job teaching logic at The University of Jerusalem’s Galilee extension campus.

In Mark 12, Jesus has at least three opportunities to show us the importance of critical thinking, by using his mind to defend God’s truth.

First, the Pharisees come to Jesus with a Catch-22. “Should we pay taxes to Caesar or not?” they ask. On the surface, this might seem like an honest question, but its actually a question to which there is really no correct answer. If Jesus says, “No”, then he’ll look like a political revolutionary, but if he answers “Yes” then he’ll look like a collaborator with the Roman oppressors.

In logic, questions like this are often called “Fallacies of Interrogation”, which build into the question a rhetorical trap. There is an old joke which goes, “Is it true that you no longer beat your wife?” To answer either yes or no is an admission of guilt. The Pharisee’s question is much like the question about wife-beating. There isn’t a right answer. Jesus knows this, of course, and his answer is equally clever. He avoids their trap and gives us a bit of teaching which remains with us today: “Give to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

Second, Jesus has a showdown the Sadducees where he uses not only Bible memorization skills, but also powerful critical thinking to disarm his opponents.
The Sadducees, disbelievers in the resurrection, throw a tricky question at Jesus. They ask about a hypothetical woman, whose husband dies while they are still childless, and therefore (under the law of Moses) is taken in marriage by her husband’s brother. Seven times this happens to this unlucky woman (and her unlucky husbands), and thus the Sadducees ask, “To which husband will the woman be married after the resurrection?”

The reason the Sadducees ask is not out of curiosity, but to advance their own disbelief in the resurrection. Again, Jesus is caught between two unpleasant alternatives. You could map out their argument like this:

(1) Moses says that a widow without children should be taken in marriage by her husband’s brother.

(2) If a woman married seven husbands by this law, she would have seven husbands after the resurrection.
(3) Having seven husbands after the resurrection is ridiculous.

(4) Therefore, either Moses’ law is wrong, or there is no resurrection.

Understandably, Jesus doesn’t take very kindly to the scheming quality of their question. Rebuking them, he denounces the question as erroneous.

First, he attacks premise (2) by appealing to “insider information”, Jesus tells them there won’t be marriage in heaven. Second, he undermines their underlying disbelief by supporting the resurrection, citing Exodus as proof. As Exodus 3 says, if God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and, as Jesus says, if God is the God of the Living and not the Dead, then Abraham, Isaac and Jacob cannot be dead in the ultimate sense, and thus there must be a life after the grave.

Whether or not we perfectly follow all of Jesus’ arguments doesn’t matter in the short run. Since there aren’t any Pharisees or Saduccees running around today, it seems unlikely we will have to duplicate Jesus’ arguments with equal success. What’s important for us to notice is that Jesus is using his intellect to critically respond to his accusers. Not only does he rebuke their intentions, but he goes after their arguments with intellectual discernment.

Following this discussion, Jesus turns the tables on all the teachers of the law by pressing them with questions which they cannot answer. After being asked so many questions by these bad logicians, the Logos himself decides to have his turn. Matthew 22 says:

While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?”
“The son of David,” they replied.
He said to them, “How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’? For he says, “ ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.” ‘If then David calls him ‘Lord,’ how can he be his son?” [Mt 22:41-46]

To get what Jesus is saying here, its again helpful to map out his argument. In essence, Jesus’ logic goes like this:
1) The Messiah is the “Son of David”

(2) But David calls the Messiah “Lord”

(3) It would be wrong for any human father to call a natural son “Lord”

(4) Therefore, how can David rightly call his ‘son’ Lord?

Here, again, Jesus understands the laws of logic as he proposes a seemingly logical contradiction to lead the Pharisees to a deeper understanding of who he is.

Though scripture notes that “No one could say a word in reply, and from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions” it seems like Jesus is doing more here than getting his opponents to shut up. He’s won the intellectual skirmish, to be sure, but his goal in asking this question still fits with his ultimate mission.

The Pharisees’ and the Sadducees’ questions were aggressive, and shed no light on any deeper understanding of God. But if they could just but answer Jesus’ question, all who were listening would be one step closer to understanding the incarnation. David can call his son “Lord”, because his progeny is more than a mere man, he is also the son of God.

Even still, Jesus is not out to get glory for himself, but to give people the possibility to understanding, if they want it. Dallas Willard says it well, when he writes:

Jesus’ aim in utilizing logic is not to win battles, but to achieve understanding or insight in his hearers…He presents matters in such a way that those who wish to know can find their way to, can come to, the appropriate conclusion as something they have discovered…

If the teachers of the law really were loving God with all their minds, then maybe they would have worked to understand what Jesus was saying. As it is, it seems like if the Pharisees can’t look clever, then they would rather not say anything at all.

What is most compelling about Jesus example is that he never lets us think that if the mind can be misused, it is better off not being used at all. Jesus answers bad thinking with good thinking, and calls us all to love God with everything he’s given us, including our minds.

[Philip Tallon]

Comment

Commenting is closed for this article.