New Warhorn Media post by Tim Bayly:
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Thank you Pastor Bayly. Excellent episode.
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Thank for this, brothers.
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I stumbled on this article about Blamires from Banner of Truth written by a Rev Geoff Thomas shortly after Blamires’ death in 2017 (he was 101!). Thomas has a bone to pick with Blamires:
Blamires made this claim:
“There is no longer a Christian mind. There is still, of course, the Christian ethic; a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality… But as a thinking being the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization. He accepts religion — its morality, its worship, its spiritual culture; but he rejects the religious view of life, the view which relates all earthly issues within the context of the eternal, the view which relates all human problems — social, political, cultural — to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian Faith.”
One supposes Blamires is thinking of the church attender, the nominal believer, the person who is not sitting under expository consecutive biblical preaching. One does not think that it is possible to maintain Christian morality, worship and spiritual culture when this is absent year after year — If the Christian mind is gone then those other facets of true religion are also absent. But in gospel churches and the disciples’ hearts, the mind that was in Christ Jesus is also active in them today. They set their minds on things that are above. Their minds are set in Jesus Christ who is at the right hand of God. Every regenerate person must have a Christian mind because each one is a new creation; old ways of thinking are passed away. All things, including the mind, have become new.
Thomas illustrates perfectly the problem with conservative reformed churches today. The elixir for all problems has become “sit under expository preaching.” Of course, it is good to sit under expository preaching, but Blamires is pointing out that if the preacher is not thinking beyond personal morality and spirituality then his preaching will not force his sheep to think beyond those things either. Which is exactly the state of conservative reformed churches today. Which was Blamires’ point.
As for his logic: “Real Christians do not need a Christian mind, they already have the mind of Christ.” Sure, but are they using it?
Thomas also takes issue that Blamires wasn’t an evangelical. I know nothing about Blamires’ doctrinal views, but so far in my reading his book he seems to understand something many Christians do not: the truth must not only be believed in but submitted to:
Your beliefs as a Christian, are not yours in the sense that you have rights over them, either to tamper with them or to throw them away. Of course the very fact that nowadays we look upon convictions as personal possessions is a symptom of the disappearance of the Christian mind. It is precisely in such odd and scarcely graspable notions that the full extent of the secularization of the modern mind is glimpsed. One of the crucial tasks in reconstituting the Christian mind will be to re-establish the status of objective truth as distinct from personal opinion; (Blamires, p40)
While reading Blamires, one thing keeps coming up in my mind: Evangel’s Abortion and the Church. Now there’s a good example of thinking like a Christian today (not to mention this podcast).
Blamires’ book has been very refreshing. Thank you for recommending it!
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Thomas is the quintessential Banner of Truth man. Spoke at a conference once with him and it’s my observation he and other Reformed baptist types in the UK have two unappealing characteristics: first, that they seem to pride themselves in the smallness of their tiny churches, which is, as I see it, a convenient way to escape self-criticism and doubt about one’s faith and pastoral work. Second, they seem to have no desire beyond curating their pristine museum of dead works and men. So yes, I think your observations apt.
Truthfully, at least in the matter of authors of the last half of the twentieth century up to the present, it has been orthodox Roman Catholics and the Neo-orthodox and liberals who have been most helpful to my thinking. Unless they are, like Iain Murray, recounting past victories, I find them mostly boring. Love,
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These observations are very much on point. Pastoring has been neglected in favour of pulpiteering (and a very anaemic form of it at that), and an antipathy for American church growth models has eclipsed a focus on the spiritual growth in the church so urged by scripture and emphasised by the Puritans.
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