“Should a Christian have an open mind?” When a student raised that question in class, I did not know how to answer at first—I felt caught between two competing convictions.
On one hand, “open-mindedness” seems to run contrary to the Christian doctrine of the narrow road. Shouldn’t Christians be characterized by our unchanging, unshakeable faith? The letters of Paul repeatedly remind us to “stand firm,” holding tightly to truth amid doubt and confusion. Isn’t open-mindedness just another name for weak faith?
On the other hand, the Bible has a lot to say about humility. Our understanding is so small, and the ways of God and his creation are so vast. Should this not demand that we hold our views loosely? Isn’t closed-mindedness just another name for intellectual pride?
Making matters more complicated is the fact that well-intentioned and thoughtful Christians give very different answers to my student’s question.
Religion professor James Spiegel describes open-mindedness as “a midpoint between two intellectual vices, a sort of apex between the valleys of dogma and doubt,” and calls it “an especially important virtue at this time in history.”
On the other hand, Burk Parsons of Ligonier Ministries writes confidently, “As the closed-minded, Christ-minded faithful we must join arms against the satanic pluralism of our day.” This attitude is not uncommon among biblically faithful Christians.
O Ye of Overconfident Faith
What do we make of this? Should Christians be regarded for our intellectual openness or renowned for our resolute resolve?
Then again, what if there is no contradiction between unshakeable faith and intellectual humility? In the Bible, we see a compelling picture of life characterized by faith in the person of God and an openness to correction in our finite understanding of the world.
Too often, Christians are known for rampant stubbornness and intellectual pride. In our well-intentioned pursuit of faithfulness, we have left behind something essential to the Christian life: deep humility, which requires a certain kind of open-mindedness. In our praise and pursuit of a firm faith, we must not neglect the virtue of biblical epistemic humility.
In order to do so, we must first draw a clear distinction between two kinds of curiosity.
For much of church history, curiosity has been considered a dangerous vice. Often associated with pride and vanity, curiosity has been blamed for some of humanity’s greatest sins. In a certain sense, even the first sin of Adam and Eve could be blamed on curiosity. After all, the Serpent tempted Eve with the promise that her eyes would be “opened” and that she will “be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). Was it not an illicit longing for forbidden knowledge which doomed humanity?
This theme is echoed elsewhere in Scripture. Paul warns Timothy against the inevitable temptation for people to “turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths” (2 Tim. 4:4) and cautions the Ephesians against being “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching” (Eph. 4:14).
In light of these biblical warnings, influential Christians have likewise denounced the dangers of curiosity. Augustine writes in his Confessions that “curiosity makes semblance of a desire of knowledge” and identifies his own struggle with lust as a manifestation of sinful curiosity.
In The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis speaks of those who are “led by curiosity and pride … whilst they neglect themselves and their salvation.” Such people, he warns, are likely to “fall into great temptations.”
There is great wisdom in these warnings. Given the corruption of the human heart, curiosity can lead us to places we ought not go. As Joseph Samuel Exell and Thomas Henry Leale put it in their commentary on Genesis, “It is dangerous to the interests of the soul to indulge in the vain curiosity of knowing the evil ways of the world.”
Insofar as curiosity is an expression of pride and a vessel for temptation, it is certainly right for Christians to caution against this kind of open-mindedness. There is much evil against which we should resolutely close our hearts and minds.
There is, however, another kind of curiosity: the kind of open-mindedness that exists as an expression of humility and an acknowledgment of our own limitations. Scripture praises this posture, while warning against the arrogance of stubbornness and intellectual pride.
As the Bible attests, God’s people are not known for our responsiveness to input, receptivity to change, or willingness to listen. In fact, if anything can be called our most consistent trait across the millennia, it is probably our hard hearts and stubborn minds.
“I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people” (Ex. 32:9, ESV). So says the Lord to Moses when the people of Israel make for themselves a golden calf to worship in place of the God who brought them out of Egypt.
“All the house of Israel have a hard forehead and a stubborn heart” (Ezek. 3:7, ESV). Here, the Lord warns Ezekiel that the people will not listen or change their ways.
“Because I know that you are obstinate, and your neck is an iron sinew and your forehead brass” (Isa. 48:4, ESV). With these words through the mouth of Isaiah, the Lord further illustrates the hardheartedness of his people.
In ancient Hebrew thought, the heart and mind are not siloed off from one another as the centers of emotional and intellectual faculties. The heart is understood as the center of a whole person, including the intellect. As Puritan theologian John Owen puts it, “Generally, [the heart] denotes the whole soul of man and all the faculties of it … as they all concur in our doing of good and evil.”
When the Hebrew Scriptures describe humanity’s perennial hardness of heart, they describe not merely an emotional or spiritual reality. This describes the deep intellectual stubbornness of the holistic human condition. We insist on believing that we know what is true, real, and good, and we constantly resist all attempts to change our hearts and minds.
In other words, we are all inclined to be closed-minded people.
This stubbornness is precisely what God promises to deal with in the new covenant promised in Ezekiel 36: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (v. 26).
This is the hope found in the new covenant: that in place of our hard hearts, we will be given soft, responsive ones. The good news of the gospel is that we can be transformed, reborn, and renewed—and in our renewal, we can become a people marked by humility, obedience, and readiness to listen and to be changed.
Yet we have found plenty of ways to continue the time-honored tradition of obstinacy and hardheartedness which defined the people of Israel. To make matters worse, we can convince ourselves that this stubbornness is a fruit of the Spirit rather than a weakness of the flesh. We do this whenever we confuse intellectual stubbornness for firmness of faith.
In his essay “On Obstinacy in Belief,” C. S. Lewis describes the difference. Christian faith is a matter of relational fidelity: deep trust in the goodness of God that is rooted in intimate familiarity with his character through the ages. When we learn to lean on this trust, we are not displaying closed-minded obstinacy. We are merely trusting, in much the same way that a child trusts a parent despite having limited understanding.
This kind of virtuous trust is not the same thing as intellectual stubbornness. A refusal to consider the possibility of error in one’s own judgment is not an admirable expression of faith but a dangerous expression of arrogance. In other words, there is a clear difference between epistemic arrogance and relational trust.
What does this mean for our inquiry into open-mindedness? It means that the Christian call to unwavering faith is by no means contrary to a spirit of intellectual humility. As the author of Hebrews instructs us, we can “hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful” (Heb. 10:23, emphasis added).
The firmness of my faith ought not be rooted in my immovability or the stubbornness of my worldview but in the undying faithfulness of the one who loved me and gave himself for me. Gazing in full trust at Christ, we can be entirely consistent with the biblical definition of firm faith while also embracing the kind of soft-hearted humility commended in Scripture.
In his book The Intolerance of Tolerance, D. A. Carson points out that Christians have better cause than anyone to regard our intellects with suspicion and anticipate that we are likely to get things wrong. “We who are Christians have the most powerful reasons for living the self-examined life. We have little credibility when we urge a certain epistemic humility on the part of secularists if we ourselves are not characterized by humility.”
If we are to be characterized by epistemic humility, we must start with how we approach our own theology.
Over 20 years ago, Al Mohler challenged Christians to practice “theological triage” as an expression of spiritual and intellectual maturity. By this he meant wisely ranking various doctrines and ideas according to their relative importance and our level of certainty. Not every doctrine is of “first-rank” importance, and not every interpretation needs to be grasped with white-knuckled ferocity. Gavin Ortlund has also written about this.
Let me be very clear: The Christian faith is built on a set of specific historical and theological propositions. Without confessing the articles of faith and believing absolutely in the real life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, there is no Christianity. The call for humility is not a call to abandon the pillars of our faith and embrace postmodern skepticism.
Instead, a thoroughly biblical understanding of epistemic humility means rejoicing in a relationship with the eternal God and trusting that his vast and timeless knowledge far exceeds our own. I may not be certain about many things, but I have decided to follow Jesus, the only begotten Son of God, because he has given me good cause to trust him. In fact, I would do well to trust him more than I trust myself.
Jesus himself presents a remarkable example of this kind of humility. He alone had every right to approach life with absolute unmitigated certainty in the fullness of his knowledge, and yet he sought the will of his Father and submitted to the uncertainties of life in human form. Luke tells us that he “grew in wisdom,” listening to the priests and asking questions as a boy (2:52). He taught with divine authority but openly confessed that there were things he did not know which he left in the capable hands of the Father (Matt. 24:36).
If our Lord Jesus possessed and expressed this kind of humility, what excuse do we have?
In light of all this, I feel I can answer my student’s question with a bit more confidence. Yes, a Christian should have an open mind, if the term is rightly understood.
To be an “open-minded” Christian is to allow God to do what he promised: to replace my heart of stone with a heart of flesh—alive, responsive, and growing. It is to commit myself to seeking the truth, even if that means changing my mind when I turn out to be wrong.
By the grace of God, our hard and stubborn hearts can be brought to life. Let us not resist the humbling work of the Spirit in our lives. We must approach the throne of God with hearts softened and heads bowed, in imitation of Christ’s own humility.
Benjamin Vincent is a bivocational pastor and teacher in Southern California. He serves as assistant pastor at Journey of Faith Bellflower and as the department chair of history and theology at Pacifica Christian High School in Newport Beach, California.
