“God wants us to be people, not puppets; real human beings who think things out and make actual decisions, not straws in the wind to be blown this way and that. You need to ‘figure out properly things that differ’, says Paul– and the word he uses for ‘figure out properly’ is our old friend dokimazein as in the dokimos root in Romans 5.4 and 12.2 Part of the problem in contemporary Christianity, I believe, is that talk about the freedom of the Spirit, about the grace that sweeps us off our feet and heals and transforms our lives, has been taken over surreptitiously by a kind of low grade romanticism, colluding with an anti-intellectual streak in our culture, generating the assumption that the more spiritual you are , the less you need to think. I cannot stress too strongly that this is a mistake. The more genuinely spiritual you are, according to Romans 12 and Philippians 1, the more clearly and accurately and carefully you will think, particularly about what the completed goal of your Christian journey will be and hence what steps you should be taking, what habits you should be acquiring, as part of the journey toward that goal, right now. Thinking clearly and Christianly is both a key element within the total rehumanizing process (you won’t be fully human, if you leave your thinking and reasoning behind) and a vital part of the motor which drives the rest of the process….All Christians are called to think things through—indeed to to think through the way in which thinking makes a radical difference to the life of the body of Christ.”— from After You Believe, pp. 157-59.
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