Time to think like kids

"So the Lord changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people." -- Exodus 32:14

I've been privileged to teach the Old Testament for the last six years at SEMO. I enjoy exposing my students to texts, like the epigram above, that they never knew existed. God's mind can be changed. What? Whoa, Nelly! Doesn't that fly in the face of the image of an immutable God, made known in Christ, whom the New Testament tells us is the "same yesterday, today, and forever"? (Hebrews 13:8)

Parsing the difference between those texts is above my pay grade, I'm afraid. I await further light, which I imagine will not come until I, with apologies to Shakespeare's Hamlet, shuffle off this mortal coil.

The whole notion of changing minds has piqued my curiosity. Jesus talked frequently about the people's need to repent, to literally "turn around," or "change one's mind." I recently read a compelling article that seems to make clear that absent a personal crisis, we don't change our minds. Sorry, Lord, this repentance business seems a very tall hill to climb indeed.

A Nobel scientist, a co-creator of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, suggests that people are not predictably rational, nor are they likely to change their minds even when proven wrong. How can that be, though? Easy. Kahneman says there is no longer any downside to holding an incorrect belief. Social media -- e.g., Facebook and Twitter principally -- are not visited to glean knowledge or to foster understanding, but we go there to visit our own personal echo chambers. Our Facebook news feeds, made up largely of people who think much the way we do, reinforce our opinions, whatever they may be. This makes it even more difficult to change anybody's mind.

Consider any major issue in American life today: guns, immigration, global warming, abortion -- heck, the designated hitter rule in baseball. We can discuss and debate but at the end of the day, minds don't change.

The chief learning officer, whatever that is, of the Educational Testing Service -- the people who administer the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to rising collegians -- laughs at the idea that people's opinions can be changed by marshaling potent arguments and facts. "Changing anyone's mind about anything once it is firmly made up is very difficult and in many cases impossible," says T.J. Elliott.

So how does repentance, changing one's mind, happen -- given all the natural obstacles?

I once knew a family raised with Calvinist sensibilities which was dead set against divorce. Saw divorce as a personal failing. That family no longer has that bias. Not since one of their children married a deadbeat, a man who refused to work, a man who subjected his spouse to abuse. The family did a complete turnaround on divorce but it wasn't logical argument that did the trick. It was deep feeling that altered perceptions. Emotion, not evidence, changes minds.

There is another way to repentance; there is another way past my stubborn clinging to ideas and attitudes. We find this way from the lips of Jesus himself, who once was quoted as saying, "Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:3)

Holy smokes. There it is. A place where Jesus and neuroscience meet. Little kids, in the words of writer Joe Queenan, don't draw lines in the sand. Children are continually challenging the world, figuring out what is true by trial and error. Kids encounter something unexpected or confusing all the time. Unlike adults, little kids don't appear devastated by new or contradictory information. They update what they believe based on what they experience. But as we grow, we stop doing that.

Come as a child. Those words have never made more sense to me as they do now.

Jeff Long, D.Min, lives in Jackson and teaches Old Testament at Southeast Missouri State University.