The Renewed Mind

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of the mind, that you may discern what God wants, what is good, pleasing, and perfect."

-- Romans 12:2

At this point in the letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul turns from theology to ethics, from the description of what God has done for us to the question of what we should do for God. Given what God in Christ has done for us, how shall we lead our lives, how must we behave? Clearly, we shall not live as we have lived before, when all we knew was what Paul calls “this world (or “this age”),” but rather we shall live as those who can discern the will of God, and thus know what is the good, pleasing and perfect way of life. We shall no longer continue to be conformed to this world but rather we shall be transformed by the knowledge of God. Let us spend our time today with this passage from Romans and especially with the possibility of a renewed mind.

Paul proceeds by means of contrasts: conformity and transformation, this world and that world, old and new. He holds out the possibility of radical change for all of us who believe in Jesus. Today it is a truism that people never really change. How many of us have experienced or know someone who has experienced the costly failure of trying to change the person they married. One glamorous young woman in a recent New Yorker cartoon says to the other, “He was the man I most wanted to change.” Such foolishness already has the status of humor in our culture. Or recall the old “light bulb” joke about therapists: How many does it take to change the light bulb? Only one, but the bulb has really got to want to change. Most people do not want to change, but to those of us who really do Paul offers the opportunity to be transformed by the knowledge of God’s will in a renewed mind.

Only God can change us, and that by means of the mighty labor that Paul describes in the chapters of the letter to the Romans up to this point. God’s work through the death and resurrection of Christ removes the burden of sin from those who believe by replacing it with the gift of His own presence, called by the Apostle, “grace.” This grace renews us by restoring the relationship with God that our sin once broke and thus freeing us from the chains with which sin binds us in estrangement to this world. Estrangement from God and bondage to this world is how Paul describes our spiritual state, and for our ethical state he uses the term “reprobate mind (Romans 1:28).” Estrangement from God is remedied by faith that accepts the blood of Christ to cleanse the stain of sin, moral depravity is remedied by the renewal of the reprobate mind through the daily offering of the self to God as a living sacrifice. Faith in the blood of Christ is a once and for all thing that sets us free, renewal of the mind is a daily labor that uses freedom from the guilt and power of sin to renew the mind day by day.

Paul is deliberately playing point and counterpoint between the first and the twelfth chapters of Romans. In 1:28 those who do not care to have true knowledge of God fall to the misfortune of a reprobate mind. In 12:2 the renewed mind comes to those who, because they accept what God in Christ has done to restore the relationship and set them free from the reprobate mind, are able again to discern the true will of God, and thus to build, brick by brick, day by day, the life that is “…good, pleasing and perfect (12:2).”

In chapter 1 Paul lists the well-known horrors of the corrupt mind: “…full of every kind of injustice, evil, excess, and malice…envy, murder, strife, fraud and malignity…gossips, slanderers, haters of God…insolent, haughty, boastful …inventors of evil, disobedient to parents…foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless (1:29-31).” These are the salient scars of the reprobate mind. In Chapters 12-13 Paul describes the beautiful fruits of the renewed and consecrated mind: a humble and sober self esteem (12:3), a love that is genuine (12:9) “aglow with the Spirit, serving the Lord (12:13),” “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, constant in prayer (12:12),” hospitable, blessing those who persecute us, rendering good in return for evil, living in harmony with others, never haughty but associating with the lowly, always leaving revenge to God (12:13-20). The summary of this all is “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (12:21),” and “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law (of Moses) (13:8).” These are the salient marks of a renewed mind.

So we see that the Christian life is an integral part of the Christian faith, that what we believe and how we live are mutually entailed. To believe in Jesus Christ is to live in a certain way, or rather, since a Christian life in fact is the work of a lifetime, to try every day to allow oneself to be transformed into the good, pleasing and perfect person God wants us to be. This is an enormous challenge and a great work, and God calls us to undertake it. It is the reason why God created us, and the real thing we get up for every morning. No matter what our age or work status, God wants us to present ourselves every day to Him as living sacrifices, “never flagging in zeal, aglow with the Spirit, serving the Lord.” There can be no retirement from this work; it is the real work of our lifetime, the work of sanctification, and from it no one ever retires.

Let us conclude by trying to identify the practical steps that we might take to achieve a new mind. To begin with we note that Paul uses the term “mind,” and not “heart.” In Greek “mind” is “nous,” from which our word “noetic” comes, and it represents what we might broadly call the intellectual dimension of experience. “Intellectual” must be taken in a broad sense here, to describe a knowing that overflows the boundaries of what we can see, smell, taste, hear and touch, nevertheless mind denotes the activity of knowing whose core is simple information. If this is true then the process Paul describes as a renewing of the mind must include a large element of study. I have long admired the Jewish religion for its emphasis on study. We gentiles are too much in love with feeling, would rather feel fuzzy and warm than see clearly and accurately. We prefer to hear moving stories than read demanding texts. So I suggest that you take the 12th and 13th chapters of Romans and study them. Write out the virtues that Paul teaches there, reflect on them, try to imagine them at work in your life. Join a Bible study; do some intellectual work to enter more deeply into the faith. Study renews the mind, especially the study of the Bible.

A renewed mind studies not only the sacred texts but also the world. When one is no longer conformed to it the world appears as something demanding and challenging. Once free of its suffocating embrace one can see it for what it really is, full of death and destruction, but fuller still of life and creativity. We cannot know one without knowing the other, and to the extent that we know only one we don’t know anything at all. So study the world to which we have been conformed for so long and from which Christ has set us free to be transformed.

One of the best ways I know to study the world is to imagine what it might be like to be the other person. In the past year I have tried to imagine how the USA appears to people like the terrorists who hate us and people like the Europeans who doubt our judgment. This is an act of imagination whose premise is that the reason for their attitude has a basis in reality.  In the same vein, when other individuals are hostile to me, - much to my shock and surprise! - I try to allow that they have good reason, try to imagine what it is, and try to change my behavior as far as possible. I think this might fall under Romans 12:9 “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with brotherly affection; outdo one another in showing honor.” To do this one must know the world imaginatively, be able to put oneself in the place of the other and thus know how best to show love and honor. The renewed mind studies the world and the other.

Finally, for today at least, full faith in Jesus Christ is the foundation of the possibility of the renewal of mind at all. That is why we always put theology before ethics. Before Paul begins to exhort us to live with a new mind he tells us how God has achieved a new creation through Jesus Christ, how we might share the power of that recreation by believing in and entrusting ourselves to Jesus Christ, and thus how we are now free from bondage to estrangement, re-united with God our one true love, and open to the transformation of the mind which is His precious gift to us and our bounden duty to Him.