the mind: a person's capacity to think, understand, and weigh things, together with the settled outlook and judgments that capacity produces
In the New Testament this word points to far more than the brain or a cool, detached intellect. It is the person as a thinking, judging creature: the part of us that sizes up a situation, forms a considered view, and steers the whole self. It can be clear or clouded, sound or corrupt, and it can be turned toward good or toward evil.
Its uses fan out along one line. First it is the equipment for understanding, the faculty that grasps and reasons. Second it is the direction that faculty is facing, a person's settled disposition or outlook. Third it is the verdict the faculty reaches, a firm opinion or purpose one holds. These are not separate words but one capacity seen at three moments: the ability to think, the bent of that thinking, and the conclusion it comes to.
What is striking in the letters of Paul especially is that this thinking center is treated as something that can go badly wrong. It is called futile, debased, and defiled, and it is exactly what God's Spirit is said to make new. The mind here is not a spark of the divine that only needs freeing; it is a fallen part of the person that needs remaking, so that a mind which once refused to acknowledge God can be renewed to discern and approve what God wants.
Nuances
Whether the summons to the one who has a mind, in the call to reckon the number of the beast, invokes spiritual and moral discernment or ordinary intellectual cleverness at solving a numerical riddle.
- contestedSpiritual and moral discernment: the mind here is sapiential insight and the reckoning is symbolic, not literal arithmetic.; G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (NIGTC) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 715-728
- contestedHellenistic riddle-language inviting numerical decoding (isopsephy), most likely yielding Nero Caesar.; David E. Aune, Revelation (WBC 52B) (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 770-773
- contestedA mediating reading: spiritual insight paired with real gematria, both intended together.; Craig R. Koester, Revelation (AYB 38A) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Grant R. Osborne, Revelation (BECNT) (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002)
Whose mind serves the law of God in Romans 7:25: the mind of the redeemed Christian, or the pre-Christian and generally human moral self that can assent to God's law but cannot keep it.
- contestedThe redeemed Christian's mind, which delights in and serves God's law.; C. E. B. Cranfield, Romans (ICC), vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 362-370; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (NICNT) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 464-467
- contestedThe pre-Christian or generically human moral self, able to approve God's law in theory yet powerless to perform it.; James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (WBC 38A) (Dallas: Word, 1988), 395; Robert Jewett, Romans (Hermeneia) (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 471-472; Ernst Kasemann, Commentary on Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 210-212
Disputed
Whether Paul's νοῦς denotes primarily the detached rational intellect of Greek philosophy or the whole person's practical, moral, and judging orientation, and thus how far it approximates the Hebraic "heart" (καρδία).
- majorityIt denotes the practical, moral-evaluative orientation of the whole person, a faculty capable of corruption and requiring eschatological renewal, distinct from the divine intellect of Greek philosophy and not a mere Greek equivalent of לֵב.; J. Behm, 'νοέω, νοῦς', TDNT IV.948-1022; Robert Jewett, Paul's Anthropological Terms (Leiden: Brill, 1971); James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 3.5
- minorityIt functions more formally as the knowing, understanding, judging self, closely assimilated to the Hebraic heart as an expression of the whole conscious person.; Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner, 1951), 211-227