The Supremacy of God in the Life of the Mind

In this address given at Northwestern College (here excerpted; full text here), John Piper exhorts the students and faculty of the college to make God and His glory the active and chief end of academics and the center and focus of all the pursuits of their minds.

I come to you today with a burden for the supremacy of God in the life of the mind. I speak to you as people who are called for a season of your life to engage in the work of the mind. I speak to students and faculty and administration concerning this tremendously crucial matter, because I believe it's your calling in this community to cultivate in each other the ability and the habit and the desire to read with understanding, and think with accuracy, and observe with discernment, and research with thoroughness, and evaluate with fairness, and memorize with discipline, and write with clarity, and speak with cogency, and perform with excellence, and hate what is evil, and love what is good, and feel with fitting passions all the beauty and goodness and truth of our great God and his amazing world.


I sense that in the humanities and the natural sciences and social sciences and the arts God and his Word are often taken for granted. If someone queries why concrete Biblical truth is not more explicitly wrestled with in relation to the tenets of literature or sociology or history or economics or psychology or speech or math or chemistry or physics or theater or physical education or political science—if someone queries why the Biblical vision of reality has such a low profile, the answer is too often, “We take that for granted. That’s our working assumption while we deal with the world of contemporary thought and practice. That’s the foundation on which we build.”


What I want to say this morning is that God does not like to be taken for granted. God does not want to be a silent assumption. Speaking of God as the foundation for the life of the mind is a wholly inadequate metaphor. That he is! O, yes, and a great and deep and unshakable foundation he is. But foundations are invisible, and are seldom thought about in the daily life of the house. They are taken for granted. They are silently assumed.


But God wills not only to be the massive, silent, unseen foundation beneath the walls of our academic lives; he also wills to be the visible cap stone adorning the top and the brightness of the glory that fills the house for all to see.


I want to plead with you this morning--students and faculty and administration—that you not imprison God in the silent basement of your busy academic houses by taking him for granted and calling him merely the Foundation for your labor.


There is a more radical, more pervasive way that God wills to be honored in your academic work. I call it the supremacy of God in the life of the mind.


[Piper considers the confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh in Exodus 8–10]


So we can see that God wills for his power to be known and marveled at not just in Israel and not just among the Egyptians, but in all the earth. God is jealous for his reputation in all the universe—that he be known and celebrated as central and supreme everywhere.


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God wants the to world know not only his power, but also his Creator rights over all the earth—over every discipline in the academy and over every sphere of culture: he owns everything. This is not a doctrine he wants tucked away in a book, not a silent assumption, but a daily conscious sense that controls the way we handle all things and all truth.


God does not like to be taken for granted. God wills to be central and supreme and celebrated in all of life, including the life of the mind.


I think what I am pleading for here is very hard for people to grasp because our age is so utterly and thoroughly God-ignoring, which is probably worse than God-despising. We get all worked up when Hugh Downs puts people like James Dobson in the same category with Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan because they all claimed Christian sanction for their “family values” crusades. But we swallow hook line and sinker the utter absence of God as normal. Aggression against God offends us: but omission of God escapes us.


We get anesthetized to the unspeakable and appalling insult rendered to God day in and day out by his being ignored. It starts to feel normal—the way its normal not to think about air or a solid earth under our feet.


But I fear that we preachers are a great part of the problem. The absence of God’s supremacy is not unique to academia or the media. Albert Einstein gave a devastating indictment of preaching fifty years ago that may be more true today. Charles Misner, a scientific specialist in general relativity theory, was quoted like this:

[The design of the universe] is very magnificent and shouldn’t be taken for granted. In fact, I believe that is why Einstein had so little use for organized religion, although he strikes me as a basically very religious man. He must have looked at what the preachers said about God and felt that they were blaspheming. He had seen much more majesty than they had ever imagined, and they were just not talking about the real thing.

When God is taken for granted, and functions as a silent assumption, while we talk about other good things, his majesty is abased and his glory is obscured and his supremacy in the life of the mind vanishes. And people may well say, “I wonder if they have seen the real thing.”


May it not be said of any course at Northwestern College, that the students and the faculty in state universities have seen more mystery, or more wonder, or more majesty than we have seen—we who know the One from whom and through whom and for whom all things exist and hold together.


I am not pleading for anything superficial—just another prayer at the beginning of class, just another Bible verse quoted. I am pleading for the deep, earnest, thorough engagement with God and his Word and his Ways at every level of research and analysis and interpretation and reflection and creation. All things—every academic discipline—were made by God and for God. His fingerprints are everywhere. The main meaning of all things derives from their relation to God. Not to seek that meaning with all our heart and mind and soul is to be superficial, no matter what grades we make, no matter what articles we publish.


My closing prayer: may the supremacy of God in the life of the mind be the title over this academic chapter of your life.