When confronted with those who sought to (out of respect) test his orthodoxy as a first-century Jew, Jesus faced a jugular question: “What is the greatest commandment?”
His answer wasn’t revolutionary. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).
That was the orthodox answer for any God-fearing Jew, and no one expected to hear differently. For Jesus, and those who would later call themselves followers of Jesus (i.e., “Christians”), their entire worldview was shaped by the deep conviction that “what mattered most” could be distilled into a few words:
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Love God: Heart, Soul, Mind, Strength.
Basic stuff right? This is one of the lessons we learned early on if we grew up in the church, or surely learned within weeks of becoming a new believer in Christ. It’s recognized by every Christian tradition as the foundational command for Christian life and practice.
However, my engagement with this command of Jesus recently has deepened. My undergraduate training at Redeemer University College in psychology prepared me to mull over this command from a perspective of “types.” Typologies (classifying people based on patterns) are common within psychology, and I began to wonder if contained within this simple command were four ways—four typologies—that could deepen my own vocation to love God more fully.
Of course Jesus didn’t think in “types,” nor did he intend to highlight four “parts” of us and encourage their development. Jesus was a Jew situated in a non-Western cultural setting 2,000 years removed from ours. His worldview, including his anthropology, was thoroughly holistic and unified. His command was not designed to challenge us to bring the “parts” together in order to form a whole, but was designed to emphasize the overriding passion that must bleed through our entire lives must be the passion to love, honor, and worship God through all we do and all we are.
To that end, the reflections that follow are not based on an exegetical (or even strictly theological) analysis of the Mark 12 text. I am coming at the passage from a decidedly psychological point of view. That shouldn’t automatically invalidate any ideas or applications arising from this exploration, but neither should the reader assume I am forwarding ideas Jesus intended to teach through these words.
That means this article isn’t biblical in the strictest sense of the word. Being biblical would imply this article conveys a direct teaching of Scripture. However, ideas that are not biblical are not automatically unbiblical either. Unbiblical would imply the ideas and applications that are offered cannot be reconciled to Scriptural themes, values, principles, teachings, etc., which I do not believe to be the case regarding my ruminations on Jesus’ words in Mark 12.