Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 143:569 (Jan 1986)
Article: Thinking like a Christian Part 1: The Starting Point
Author: D. Bruce Lockerbie

BSac 143:569 (Jan 86) p. 3

Thinking like a Christian
Part 1:
The Starting Point

D. Bruce Lockerbie

[D. Bruce Lockerbie, Staley Scholar-in-Residence, The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York]

[Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of four articles delivered by the author as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, November 5–8, 1985.]

The Egocentric Predicament

The title of this series, “Thinking like a Christian,” denotes both a topic and its context; it also points to what ought to be the consequences of a Christian education. In the modern era, “thinking” has been equated with the human state of existence by both philosopher and medical ethicist. René Descartes declared, “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). In elevating sheer “thinking” to the acme of all argument for existence, Descartes and his followers diminish all qualitative measures of human experience. Why “I think”? Why not “I love, I serve, I give”? Cartesian rationalism gives fuel to the so-called Enlightenment, empiricism, the scientific method, the primacy of logic, the objectivity of reason, the preeminence of mechanical and managerial efficiency. By extension, Descartes’ maxim results in mechanistic reductionism. Thus in hospitals today where patients are being sustained by life-prolonging technology, decisions to pull the plug and terminate artificial means of support will be made on the basis of whether the patient is “brain-dead”—no longer capable of transmitting brainwave evidence of life.

According to William Temple, late Archbishop of Canterbury, the moment of Descartes’ Cogito, ergo sum may have been “the most disastrous moment in the history of Europe”—the birth of scientism.1 For as Jacques Maritain points out in The Dream of Descartes, the French mathematician was not interested in what

BSac 143:569 (Jan 86) p. 4

he thinks, why he thinks, or the moral obligation on the thinker. The goal of Cartesian reasoning is not really to know, says Maritain, but “to subjugate the object.” Thus “rationalism is the death of spirituality” because, Maritain notes, Descartes’ aphorism leads straight to self-worship: “Here is man, then, the center of the world.”2 Baillie agrees in speaking of “the egocentric predicament” brought about by the exaltation of rationalism.3

Today people have learned to express Descartes’ slogan with an emphasis on the first-person pronouns: “I think, therefore I am.” People h...