Evangelizing the Mind

For Christianity to bypass the mind in both culture and church is to diminish the gospel.

Jan 10, 2025

Evangelism is about the evangel. The evangel is the gospel. The gospel is the good news of salvation secured in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus died on the Cross and rose from the dead. If we trust in this Jesus and not in ourselves, God promises to save us. We’re sinners. We can’t save ourselves. God alone can save us by Jesus, in whom alone we must trust.

The word evangelism is directly related. When we evangelize, we preach the evangel, the gospel, to sinners. They need to hear the good news in order to believe the good news. “How shall they hear,” Paul, the apostle, asks, “without a preacher” (Rom. 10:14)?

Many reading these lines are evangelicals. I am in a theological (not sociological) sense. We get our name from the evangel. That means we’re gospel people. It means we believe the gospel. But it also means that we preach the gospel — we evangelize. At least we should. Evangelicals evangelize.

The expression “evangelizing the mind” might be foreign and odd to us. If evangelism is about trusting in Jesus, we might be convinced that in evangelizing, we appeal to the will, not the mind or intellect. We know that sinners must decide for Jesus Christ (no matter what we may believe about God’s electing us from eternity). God calls all of us sinners to make a decision for his crucified and risen Son (Rom. 10:9). The mind, apart from being the medium by which we get information to sinners, might seem not to play too much of a role in the gospel.

But this assumption is wrong. I intend to show how we evangelicals have often been very wrong (at least too narrow) in our evangelism.

When we think of evangelism, we generally think first of sinners out in the world who need the gospel — our relatives and friends and colleagues and neighbors and people with whom we come into contact every day. Many are dying and going to hell. We want to get the gospel to them. Let’s talk about this kind of evangelism first. Then we’ll talk about evangelizing the mind within the church (as strange as that, too, might sound at first).

Evangelizing the Mind in the World

Sinners are depraved in every part of their being. There is perhaps no clearer statement of this fact than Romans 3:10–18, where we find that sinners (both Jew and Gentile) are depraved from head to toe, inside and outside, in every way. This depravity includes the mind. We read, for example, in Colossians 1:19–22:

For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross. And you, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight — (emphasis supplied)

Sinners are depraved in their mind. This doesn’t just mean that they think immoral and cruel and faithless and covetous and lustful thoughts. It means, even more fatally, that sinners’ entire way of thinking is oriented in rebellion against God. In the words of Paul, they don’t like to retain God in all their thoughts (Rom. 1:28). Sinners want to live a life without God, and this rebellious desire begins, as all desires begin, in the mind.

Intellectual Rebellion

This intellectual rebellion started in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3). The serpent reasoned with Eve. He slandered God’s motive (“God doesn’t want you to enjoy the best things of life”). He questioned God’s Word (“When God said you’d die if you eat the forbidden fruit, he was lying”). Underlying these temptations was the one great, ultimate temptation: “You don’t need to take God into your calculations — you may think thoughts and undertake actions apart from God.” Eve’s sinful choice to eat the forbidden fruit began with the choice to think independently of God’s revelation and will. At the root of original sin is intellectual rebellion.

This rebellion is passed down to Adam’s entire race. We’re all born with this intellectual rebellion, and Jesus died to save us from it, just like he died to save us from our moral and emotional and physical rebellion. In fact, I want to say that our intellectual rebellion is the root of all of our rebellion.

If this is the case, and if the gospel confronts sinners in their rebellion, it must confront their intellectual rebellion. This is the intellectual challenge of the gospel (Cornelius Van Til’s language; full bibliographical information appears at the end). We need to repent of rebellious ways of thinking, not just for lying and fornication and theft and greed and slandering and so forth, which are evidence of that rebellion.

Rationalism?

At this point we immediately confront a criticism. Those of us who talk about the intellectual challenge of the gospel are accused of being rationalists — of turning salvation into a new and higher knowledge (Gnosticism!). Our critics might say we put doctrine before faith. If this criticism is true, it’s devastating. The Bible does teach salvation by faith, not by knowledge, even sound doctrine. We are saved by simple faith in Jesus Christ. It might seem as though doctrine and knowledge counted for little. Mustn’t we receive the kingdom as a little child (Lk. 18:17)? Didn’t Paul write that God chose the foolish and base things to bring to nothing the wisdom of man (1 Cor. 1:27–28)? The answer is an emphatic yes. The smallest child and the most unlettered adult can be — and should be — saved.

But in saying this, we haven’t said enough. The Bible doesn’t set faith against knowledge. We know this first of all because the gospel itself is a message with intellectual content (1 Cor. 15:1–4). It tells us that humans are sinners, that God still loves us, that he sent his Son to die for our sins and rise from the dead to defeat sin, and that we must trust in Jesus to save us. These are things you need to know in order to believe the gospel. Salvation isn’t just saying yes to Jesus. It’s also knowing why we must say yes to Jesus. You must believe certain truths to be saved.

At the root of original sin is intellectual rebellion.

In fact, not believing certain things can keep you out of heaven. John writes that those who teach that Jesus hasn’t come in the flesh are antichrists (1 Jn. 1:7). You can’t deny the humanity of Jesus Christ and be a Christian. You must believe in Jesus as the God-Man. And not only that. You must believe in God’s creation of the world. In your own sinfulness. In God’s grace in sending his Son to die for us sinners on the Cross. There’s no gospel if we deny these truths. In fact, you need to know them in their most basic form to trust in Jesus Christ.

So faith versus knowledge (in the way I’ve described it) is a false antithesis. In the Bible, faith is not just an act of the will — it’s an informed act of the will.

The Gospel Worldview

This fact introduces us to an arresting theme. The gospel presupposes a worldview. The fact that this idea sounds unsettling to us shows how far we’ve come from the Bible’s teaching. A worldview is a way of viewing the world. It’s a set of assumptions that everybody has by which we interpret what goes on around us and inside us. There is a Christian worldview and a Buddhist worldview and a Hindu worldview and a secular worldview and New Age worldview and Marxist worldview and variations and combinations of each. Whatever we experience in this world, you and I interpret through the grid of our instinctive assumptions. Those assumptions comprise our worldview. Worldviews are like pancreases: everybody has one, even if we don’t know it or think about it.

The gospel assumes we grasp certain truths, that we adopt a basic worldview. We don’t preach the gospel in an intellectual vacuum. The minute we say, “Jesus saves,” we must ask, “Who is Jesus? and “Saves us from what?” and then we must face the fact that the gospel presupposes a worldview. This is easy to prove.

Suppose you’re conversing with an unbelieving colleague whose spiritual condition you’re desperately concerned about. This is the first time you’ve ever really gotten into spiritual matters. You don’t specifically know where he or she stands. You start with, “I’m concerned with your eternal destiny. How do you stand with God?”

Let’s suppose your colleague replies, “I don’t know much about God, but sure, I’d like to be right with God.”

And you respond, “Do you know that you — like all of us — were born into sin and our sin separates from God and that we stand under God’s judgment?”

And your colleague, good postmodern that he is, says, “I like God but I don’t like that idea of God. God’s not judgmental. He accepts everybody as they are. Sure, we’ve all failed and done a few bad things, but the only ‘sins’ God cares about are racism and homophobia and multinational corporations and judgmentalism. I believe in God, but I don’t believe I’m much of a sinner and, at any rate, I don’t think he’d judge me because I’m not perfect.”

You wouldn’t say (would you?), “That’s OK. You can still trust Jesus. He’ll take you just as you are. You don’t need to admit you’re a sinner. You don’t need to acknowledge that you deserve God’s judgment. You don’t need to repent. Just trust Jesus.”

No, you’d say, “You’re a sinner. You can’t become a Christian until you admit you’ve sinned by breaking God’s law. You must see that you’re accountable to God and deserve his judgment. After all, that’s the reason Jesus had to die. If people aren’t sinners, there was no reason for the Cross.”

If you’d respond to your colleague that way, you’re admitting that the gospel presupposes a worldview. You’re saying (as you should) that certain beliefs are incompatible with the reception of the gospel. The gospel saves from sin, and if we don’t repent of sin, we can’t be saved.

This is why at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry John the Baptist laid the groundwork by preaching repentance (Mt. 3:1–2). His listeners who refused to repent of their sins would face God’s righteous judgment (vv. 7–12). Jesus continued that message of repentance as part of his gospel preaching (Mt. 4:17). This is why David Wells is correct to observe in The Courage to be Protestant that the gospel is understandable only in terms of a moral universe. The gospel doesn’t harmonize with a conceptual universe in which man is his own god, in which truth is relative, in which guilt is merely subjective, in which there is no final judgment, in which all religions lead to the same place, and in which Jesus is one great religious figure among many. The gospel is simply incompatible with these ideas. This is another way of saying that the gospel demands that sinners give up certain false ideas before they can be saved.

So, when we preach the gospel to poor, hell-bound sinners, we’re preaching a gospel that demands they repent of their rebellious thinking, not just their rebellious emotions, their rebellious morals, their rebellious will, and their rebellious instincts.

The gospel presupposes a worldview. This is why the Bible starts with Genesis 1:1 and not John 3:16 (Wells, 45).

A Gospel Culture?

It may already have occurred to you that a society that’s been suffused with Christianity makes the gospel easier to preach, at least conceptually. If people already believe they are sinners and that they stand under God’s judgment, they’re ready to hear that Jesus alone can save them. An example of this is the Jews of the New Testament period. They already believed in sin. They believed in God’s judgment. They believed that the Messiah would save them. They knew what the Old Testament had taught about these truths. The only question was whether they would acknowledge that they needed to repent of their own sins and trust Jesus as the Messiah. No self-respecting Jew would have said, “Sin is just an idea somebody made up. A god is what man makes up. The only hell is here on earth. The only salvation is salvation you can make for yourself.”

Increasingly, that’s just how many people in the West would respond. Our world is increasingly humanistic (man is the measure of all things), relativistic (there is no absolute right and wrong), pluralistic (there are many paths to the good and right life), and hedonistic (life’s great goal is maximum pleasure). These ideas have been around for centuries in one form or another, but today they’ve become entrenched in the mind of Joe Six-Pack, not just among sociology professors, even if Joe Six-Pack can’t articulate those ideas as effectively as Professor Proudbrain.

Part of the job of evangelism is to rip away these rebellious ideas. So, how do we do that? How do we evangelize the mind of 21st century sinners in the postmodern West?

Pre-evangelism

First, we can be encouraged by the fact that no matter what people may say, there are certain facts they know deep in their hearts. They know that God is the Creator and Sustainer (Rom. 1:19–20). They know that they have sinned and that they stand under God’s judgment (Rom. 1:32). We don’t need to convince them of these truths; we only need to convince them (by the Holy Spirit’s power) to acknowledge these truths. This is what Francis Schaeffer calls “pre-evangelism.” That term is helpful, as long as we understand that evangelizing the mind is a part of evangelism, and not a prelude to it. You might think you can always start with “Jesus Saves,” but you can only do that in a moral universe. In a relativistic and pluralistic and hedonistic universe, you must lay the groundwork. This is pre-evangelism. In Schaeffer’s language, “Truth stands before conversion” (155). We’re not just converted to Jesus. We’re converted to truth about Jesus or, better yet, the true Jesus.

Don’t think you’re not doing genuine gospel work when you’re telling people about the sovereign God to whom we’re all accountable and about man’s sin and about God’s judgment on that sin and about the absoluteness of truth. The same is true of the church’s declarations. Every time the church prophetically declares the truth about sin, judgment, pornography, self-centeredness, easy divorce, abortion, greed, racism, radical feminism, machismo, premarital sex, prayerlessness, unbelief, homosexuality and on and on, it is preaching the gospel — evangelizing the mind. If this seems strange to us, it means we have a lot to learn about evangelism.

We evangelize the mind in the world by tearing down man’s rebellious pretensions at autonomy and by reminding sinners that Jesus came to save their mind, not just their body and emotions.

But we aren’t called to evangelize the mind only in the world. We’re also called to evangelize it in the church.

Evangelizing the Mind in the Church

Even if we understand how we need to evangelize the mind of the world, we might be downright flabbergasted to hear that we also need to evangelize the mind of the church. In the first place, the church (we think) doesn’t need to be evangelized at all. After all, isn’t the church composed of Christians? Christians are already evangelized. They’re the ones who need to be evangelizing the world, not the ones who themselves need to be evangelized!

This may be the way we think, but it’s not the way Paul thought. He wrote in Romans 12:1–2:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. (emphasis supplied)

He wrote this to a church. Paul did not assume the Roman church’s collective mind was spiritually normative. He was anxious that they still thought in worldly, unbelieving, unevangelized patterns. He exhorted them to allow their lives to be transformed by allowing their minds to be transformed. In other words, our minds aren’t fully evangelized merely because we become Christians. Why think they would be? We know full well that our will and our emotions and our ethics aren’t fully evangelized. We know, for example, that we don’t magically get rid of an acidic tongue or sexual lust or paralyzing anxiety right when we’re converted. Why would think that would immediately get rid of sinful thought patterns and an un-Christian world view? We believe in ethical and moral sanctification (by sanctification I mean our gradually being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ). Why don’t we believe in intellectual sanctification?

The Great Reduction

The gospel is designed to save us in every part of our being — including our minds. But why don’t we hear much talk about saving our minds? I suggest it’s because over the last 100 years or so the church has become deeply infected with pietism. Originally pietism was a sound reaction in the Lutheran church against a sterile orthodoxy, but by pietism today I mean something else. I mean the idea that the Christian life can be reduced largely to surrendering our will to the Lord and praying and reading the Bible and attending church. Pietism is mistaken not in what it includes but in what it excludes. It doesn’t take seriously the intellect as God’s gift that needs to be shaped by the gospel and cultivated for God’s glory.

Part of the problem is that we don’t understand that the mind actually is depraved. We understand that the gospel needs to reshape our morals and our tongue and our will and our sexuality and our affections. But we don’t see that our entire life orientation is twisted. The Bible says that the natural (i.e., unbelieving) mind is at war with God (Col. 1:19–22). We are born with a sinful mind — not just sinful in that it wants to say and do bad things, but in that its very orientation to life is rebellious. We saw that Eve was an intellectual rebel. The fact is that all of us are intellectual rebels, and Jesus came to die to save us from our intellectual rebellion, not just our ethical rebellion. In other words, Jesus didn’t die to save us and clean us up only from gossip and hatred and lust and unbelief and self-centeredness. He also came to save us from our entire life outlook — he came to save us from an evil worldview and instill in us a godly worldview. We evangelicals haven’t generally understood how wide-ranging depravity is, and therefore we haven’t understood how wide-ranging the gospel is. Thomas Torrance grasps this fact when he writes:

... [E]vangelical Christianity today ... on the whole still seems to work with what may be called an “unbaptized reason,” for it does not seem to have thought through sufficiently the transformation of human reason in the light of the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. Hence the mind of the church and the mind of society are not inwardly formed by the gospel — they remain basically unevangelized. (197)1

When the mind of the church isn’t “inwardly formed by the gospel” it perpetuates ideas and practices alien to the gospel all the while assuming they’re acceptable. The church usually assimilates popular notions from the surrounding culture and shrouds them in a Christian veneer. In other words, the unevangelized mind makes for a worldly church. Fundamentalist churches can be just as guilty as “liberal evangelical” churches. The fundamentalists think that because they don’t drink and smoke and dance, they’re unspotted from the world. But worldliness involves a lot more than worldly actions. The most fatal form of worldliness, in fact, is worldly reasoning — a worldly life orientation. The church in this way embraces what Francis Schaeffer called “forms of the world spirit” (ch. 5).

Every society and its culture and every historical era has its unique forms of the unevangelized mind. The unevangelized mind in today’s sub-Saharan villages isn’t identical to what it was in 14th century Spain or what it is in 21st century San Francisco.

I could enumerate examples of how the unevangelized mind works among individual Christians in today’s church. But I’d like to laser our attention on a single example of how the church as a corporate body has been operating in our time with an unevangelized mind — that is, the church hasn’t allowed the gospel to penetrate and reshape its thinking and, by consequence, its actions.

The Evangelized Mind and the Sacrificial Life

The Bible teaches that the gospel is all about sacrifice — Jesus gave up his life as a sacrifice on the Cross (Heb. 9:26). He suffered God’s judgment on the Cross so that we sinners wouldn’t have to suffer that awful judgment. He did this out of the great love of his heart for us undeserving sinners.

This sacrifice is reciprocal. Being Jesus-followers, we must be self-giving like our Lord. The gospel calls us to sacrifice ourselves both for our Lord and for one another. Let me touch on each of those quickly.

Jesus himself tells his audience in Mark 8:31–38 that if they don’t deny themselves and take up their Cross and sacrifice themselves for him, they can’t be his followers. In fact, they’ll forfeit their life and stand before the Lord at the final judgment in shame. In the Bible there’s no isolation of salvation from discipleship; the way of salvation is the way of the Cross — Jesus’ death on the Cross to atone for our sin and our daily death to self for him. Just as there can be no salvation apart from Jesus’ blood sacrifice that alone atones for our sins, so there can be no salvation without our daily sacrifice for him. That salvation is not meritorious. It is not good works by which we curry God’s favor. It’s the self-pouring of a disciple’s heart grateful to the One who bought him on the Cross (1 Pet. 1:14–21; 1 Jn. 4:19; Rev. 5:11–12). We sacrifice our lives to One who paid the ultimate sacrifice for us.

Similarly, Christians are commanded to sacrifice for each other. In Philippians 2:1–11 Paul plainly sets out Jesus’ self-sacrificial incarnation and death as a paradigm for his followers. We read in 1 John 3:16 that our love for each other should be so great that just as Jesus laid down his life for us, so we should be willing to lay down our lives for one another. In other words, Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross is paradigmatic for Christian sacrifice in the church.

These two forms of sacrifice — sacrificing ourselves for Jesus Christ and for our brothers and sisters — are manifestations of the gospel as it takes root in our minds and entire lives. The gospel is all about sacrifice, so gospel people are by their very nature sacrificial people.

But sacrifice isn’t part of the unevangelized mind of the 21st century. Of course, refusal to sacrifice, self-absorption, radical individualism, is as old as the Garden of Eden, but it’s become virtually institutionalized in the last 300 years. Self-absorption has become an ideology in terms of which the culture lives — and is expected to live.

This self-absorption grew largely out of the Enlightenment of the 18th century and the Romanticism of the 19th century. Enlightenment stressed the priority of man’s reason; Romanticism stressed the priority of man’s emotion. Today’s postmodern society fuses the two. We have a highly technological age fueled by the most extraordinary successes of human reason, and we have, on the other hand, a radical self-absorption where the individual’s self-gratification is paramount — easy divorce (or the abandonment of marriage altogether), pornography, profligate sex, abortion on demand, human sperm and egg donations, cloning, virtual sex, and so on. The technology is the vehicle for the hedonism — both Enlightenment and Romanticism collaborating to erode the gospel.

This is the Me-First Generation, and it’s getting worse as years go by. “I’m spending my grandchildren’s inheritance” reads the bumper sticker on the $150,000.00 RV. We chuckle, but the self-absorption is no laughing matter.

The Internet has spawned a plethora or pornography, a nearly 100 billion-dollar-a-year global industry. The old hard copy pornographers like Playboy and Penthouse could have never dreamed of such a bonanza. Now, in the airtight privacy of handheld smart phones or i-Pads (notice the language — i-Phone, i-Pad, not our-Phone or our-Pad), men and boys can fuel illicit sexual desires without the God-ordained outlet in a loving, sacrificial marriage with a godly woman.

When the church configures itself to meet the carnal aspirations of as many self-absorbed people as possible, we know that she’s moving away from the gospel.

And then there’s men’s perpetual adolescence. Youth is, no doubt about it, a time of self-discovery and self-identification, but when we become men, we are to put away childish things (1 Cor. 13:11). Postmodern men, in sharp contrast, want to put off vocation and career and marriage and providing for a family for as long as they can. They can’t seem to break the adolescent phase. So we have 35-year-old single men who spend six hours a night and twenty-five hours a weekend on video games. They refuse to commit to anyone or anything besides their own personal gratification. They are absorbed in self.

Nor are women exempt from self-absorption. Modern feminism has degraded women. It has convinced them that they’re independent creatures, an end in themselves, in which self-gratification is life highest aspiration. Committing to a man and rearing children and leading their home are acceptable only to the extent that they contribute to this self-gratification. A woman may sleep with as many men as she likes — including other women’s husbands. A woman may demolish a marriage if it no longer meets her standards of self-gratification. A woman may abort a child in her womb if that child would threaten her career path. For too long males have kept her from her aspirations. Now is her time! She can be self-absorbed and feel good about it.

I could multiply these examples among contemporary youth and the elderly and employers and employees and the wealthy and middle class and poor and all races and groups. Western culture is the Culture of the Self. Gratification of the self. Accountability to the Self. Promotion of the Self.

Please understand that these repugnant actions aren’t just ethical lapses. They are the consequence of a particular worldview. Increasingly, as Christian culture has receded since the 18th century, the self has been elevated to the status of deity. Self-absorption is nothing new; it started in Eden. What is new is the global rationale for this self-absorption. It’s the way life is supposed to be.

Unfortunately, the church too often has been an unwitting partner in this self-absorption. It has conformed itself to this very worldview that’s antithetical to the gospel. For instance, when the church itself engages in self-absorption, it simply apes the culture. When the church configures itself to meet the carnal aspirations of as many self-absorbed people as possible, we know that she’s moving away from the gospel. When the pastor selects his sermons to appeal to narcissistic impulses, showing how Jesus came to earth to help us meet our greatest life aspirations; when the staff sees its main job as therapy, furnishing an emotional narcotic to feed the victimhood status of attendees; when the worship leaders craft their Sunday liturgy as religious entertainment, produced down to the last detail — we know we’re encountering not the gospel, but a profanation of the gospel.

We then wonder why the church can’t confront the depravities of our culture. But how can the church appeal to the self-absorption between eleven and noon every Sunday and then oppose the very same self-absorption when it permits from Monday morning through Saturday evening recreational sex, abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, and human egg harvesting?

If sacrifice is at the heart of the gospel, while self-absorption is at the heart of postmodern culture, how can the church avoid a head-on clash without compromising the gospel?

Gospel marriages are marriages in which spouses don’t insist on their own rights and needs but labor at all points to meet the needs of the other. Gospel friendships are friendships in which one puts his friend’s desires and needs before his own. A gospel church is a church whose members know they’re so intimately united that where one member rejoices or suffers, all rejoice or suffer (1 Cor. 12:26). The gospel is all about sacrifice, and without sacrifice, there can’t be the gospel.

I have just told you one of the most significant aspects of the gospel and, therefore, an evangelized mind — sacrifice: (1) Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross, by which he suffered in our place and secured salvation for all who place faith in him alone for salvation, apart from any merit or good works; (2) Our consequent sacrifice to Jesus, surrendering our own wishes and desires to follow him all our life’s days; and (3) Our related sacrifice for one another in the church, pouring out ourselves for our brothers and sisters because they too are part of us, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh (1 Cor. 10:17; Eph. 5:24). When we preach and teach this sacrifice, which is at the heart of the gospel, we evangelize the mind of the church, and a renewed gospel mind is gradually created in God’s people.

I could have mentioned a number of other examples of how the church must evangelize the mind of its own body. And we might inquire, “How can the church evangelize the mind of the world if it can’t live with a gospel-drenched mind of its own?” A. W. Tozer once wrote, “Our fruit will be what we are” (103–107). Churches with an unevangelized mind will produce converts with an unevangelized mind.

Conclusion

The gospel is designed for the entire person, because sin pollutes the entire person. A gospel that doesn’t evangelize the mind is a gospel that doesn’t really believe the mind is depraved. Christians and churches must confront the intellectual rebellion of unbelieving sinners in calling them to intellectual repentance. They need to repent of their rebellious ideas and accept God’s estimate of themselves and the world. This is the intellectual challenge of the gospel.

The church, likewise, must evangelize the minds of its members by working to root out ideas (like self-centeredness) alien to the gospel and replacing them with gospel ideas (like self-sacrifice). To be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ means to be conformed to the mind of Christ, not just his ethics and spirit. The gospel doesn’t end with regeneration; its work has only begun. The gospel’s work is a radical work, and we don’t allow it to do its radical work if we assume that the gospel is only about “getting saved.”

A gospel life necessitates an evangelized mind.

Select Bibliography and Further Reading

Frame, John M. The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God. Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1987.

Henry, Carl F. H. “Revelation as a Mental Act.” In God, Revelation and Authority: God Who Speaks and Shows. Waco, Texas: Word, 1979, 3:248–271.

McKnight, Scot. The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011.

Moreland, J. P. Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul. Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1997.

Morris, Leon. “The Answer to Selfishness.” In The Cross of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988, 100–113.

----- . The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955, 1960.

----- . “Sacrifice.” In The Atonement: Its Meaning & Significance. Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter-Varsity, 1983, 43–67.

Murray, John. “Progressive Sanctification.” In Collected Writings of John Murray. Edinburgh, Scotland: Banner of Truth, 1977, 2:294–304.

Perks, Stephen C. The Great Decommission. Taunton, England. Kuyper Foundation, 2011.

Schaeffer, Francis A. The God Who Is There. In The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer. Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1982, 1:1–197.

----- . The Great Evangelical Disaster. Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1984.

Torrance, Thomas F. “The Reconciliation of Mind: A Theological Meditation upon the Teaching of St. Paul.” In Theology in the Service of the Church, edited by Wallace M. Alston Jr. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000, 196–204.

Tozer, A. W. The Root of the Righteous. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Christian Publications, 1955.

Van Til, Cornelius, The Intellectual Challenge of the Gospel. Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1977.

Wells, David F. The Courage to be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers and Emergents in the Postmodern World. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.

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