Loving not Thinking
I've been reading James Smith's 'Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation'. Very insightful. He takes what I have long thought the right approach that sees our desires as more fundamental than our thoughts. In other words we are driven more by our loves than our ideas, our hearts rather than our heads, our feelings rather than our principles. It is of course Augustine's anthropology reproduced in Pascal and others. At the end of the day we do what we want to do, because that is the way we are made. We are loving, desiring animals before we are thinking beings, and our ideas are shaped more by our loves and desires than we care to admit. So the key to Christian life and growth is not suppressing our desires but changing them. It is no use trying to get people to change by feeding them information, or just by 'teaching' them truth (even biblical truth!). First they have to learn to love truth. Smith puts it well - we are primarily lovers