The Resurrection of Right-brained Christianity

Whether you're aware of it, there is a dramatic re-wiring of the human brain - at least in the Western world.  For the first time in 500 years, we in the West are experiencing a shift in the way we do reality.   An excellent article to acquaint yourself with is called The Revenge of the Right Side of the Brain, by Daniel H. Pink(click here to read the article).  Also, a powerful video resource is by Jill Bolte, entitled  "My Stroke of Insight."  Jill, a brain scientist, experiences what few brain scientists ever do.  Here account is gripping, and in it, gives a wonderful account of how the two halves of our brains function (or don't in come cases).  It's called  My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey.

This is not to say that reality is changing.  It's just that we are undergoing a kind-of balancing or re-balancing of how we value our sources of knowledge and perception.  What's happening is that we are witnessing a revival in prominence of, and value for the right side of the brain.  Let me explain.

In the illustration above, we see a picture of a man with his whole brain exposed.  On the left side of his brain we see a monochromatic landscape of endless office cubicles, with workers sitting at their desks, conforming to their space busily going about their business.  On the right side of the brain the landscape is strewn with people participating in various and random activities: playing guitars, flying kites, gazing through telescopes, or laying on the grass, reading a book.  

This is a more-or-less true working model of the human brain.  We have brains that are divided into two halves.  The halves do not work against each other but work in concert and harmony with each other.  However, the two halves work for us in different ways:  the left half primarily functions to process reality with regard to logic, linear thought, sequence, numbers, mathematics, literalness, etc.  The right half of the brain helps us process life with regard to language, artistic, abstract, emotions, etc.  By mentioning this, I do not intend to oversimplify what is still the most complex organ in the known universe.  But one can safely generalize the functions of the two sides of the brain.

Pink contents that the human brain has, for five hundred years, been a right-brain dominant brain.  When Thomas Gutenberg invented the printing press, and with the subsequent explosion of a literate society, it caused the brain, for the first time to undergo a revolution than manifested in a left-brain, logical, linear, sequentially oriented way of doing knowledge.   With the rise and renaissanceof the right side of the brain in doing life, and with a rising population of right brained approach to learning and working, Pink contends that the brain is, once again, undergoing a re-wiring, necessitating the use of, and value for, the right side of the brain.

The 'so what' of this for me was the realization that, in the face of this re-wiring, Christianity is going to experience a renaissance in a right-brained approach to doing God and expressing God's life in our world.  Let me give just a couple examples.

Gutenberg touched off the shift to a right-brained dominance.  How?  By giving the masses access, for the first time in human history, to reading.  Specifically, we were, all of us, all of a sudden, given mass access to the Word of God.  In other words, since reading became more common, individuals of all walks of life and all classes now had individual access to the Words of Scripture(given, of course, the acquisition of reading skills necessary to read scripture).  Prior to this people still had ready access to the Word of God.  However, 99% of the people had to access scripture through having it read to them.  Reading was an auditory experience only.  The only people who could read were priests, lawyers and the upper class.  Churches chained their Bibles to the altar because a book was something precious and valuable, not because people were lining up to read it.  Prior to Gutenberg, the primary organ of access to scripture was the ear, and this kind of learning relied on the right side of the brain.  

But, with the availability of Luther's Bible, written in the common language of the reader, and not Latin, the primary organ of access to the Word of God became the eye, which relies on the left side of the brain.  Reading became more democratic, and yet, ironically more privatized.  In other words, 'doing' Christianity began to be processed from the other side of the brain.  And as an unintended consequence, it began to be more private than corporate.  Five hundred years later, and it's not too difficult to observe that Christianity has largely become a 'just me and Jesus' expression, where it's an exercise of intentionality to think of oneself in the larger corporate reality of believing Jesus.  Prior to this, it was very difficult to think of oneself as an individual person, let alone an individual believer.   

That's one consequence of this historic shift to the left side of the brain.  Another consequence is related to it.  One way to phrase it is that this shift affected the way we did theology. Because the left side of the brain only has value for linear, logical, rational, analytical, sequential, systematic thinking and processing, and since reading became the primary method of knowing, theological reflection itself became dominated by rationality.  I realize that's a massive generalization, to compress hundreds of years of intellectual development into a few sentences, but the observation is true.  We 'do' Jesus largely with our left brains.  Consequently we have substituted knowledge about God to substitute knowledge of God.  Knowing a fact about someone is left-brain.  Knowing someone by personal acquaintance is right-brained.  We now define belief as something we know instead of something we do.  In truth we do what we believe; we only believe what we do.  There is no such divorce in a biblical reality.  

I'm looking for the right side to blossom profusely in this season of the Kingdom.  Artists, storytellers, cinematographers, dancers, sculptors are going to express, in a powerful and explosive way, the Word of God.  Spiritual gifts which, which manifest in and from the right side of the brain are going to dominate the exercise of evangelism.  As the apostle Paul says, and what's going to be true again, is that  God's kingdom isn't just a lot of words. It is power. (1 Corinthians 4:20)

Lest we forget, the Word of God is a Person, not a text.  In our right-brained Christian world we have mistaken and substituted the written word for the Living Word.  I am always mindful of the final movements of John's Revelation of Jesus Christ:  

I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. (Revelation 19:11-13)

By musing about all this shifting and this right-brain-left-brain dominance, I'm not advocating some kind of overthrow of one side for the other.  Rather I want to telecast a coming balance to the way do Jesus - with both halves acting in symphony-holistically.  I'll finish with two examples. The first is St. Francis' maxim for spreading the gospel, which has made a recent comeback, judging from the number of times I see it quoted nowadays:  Preach the Gospel at all times; and, if you have to, use words.  That's not just being clever; rather Francis pointing to a way of articulating the grace of God that cannot be expressed effectively from the left side.  The second is what Augustine called proclamation of the Gospel through visible words.  Things like a cup of wine and bread, things like meal shared by believers are symbols that proclaim something that words can't.  Visible words are essential and crucial "because human communication is more than the transmission of propositions.  The gospel is not by stating propositions.  Forgiveness is not promised by sentences, but by sentences joined to a bath." (Christian Liturgy: Catholic and Evangelical  Frank C. Senn, Page 31) 

Kingdom Triangle

J.P. Moreland has written a kind of manifesto, entitled Kingdom Triangle declaring the desperate need for the Body of Christ to be equipped if we are going to be effective and relevant in our culture. The heading on the inside of the jacket reads “Prescription for A Culture in Crisis” and begins this way:  

“Crisis is an overused word, but it is not too strong a description of contemporary Western society. Moral drift and confusion. Disintegration of the family and sexual mores. Rampant loneliness, depression, and boredom with life. Vapid and shrill political discourse. Preoccupation with the trite and trivial. Obsession with personal happiness. All this is the result, says J.P. Moreland, of our culture’s embrace of two influential worldviews: scientific naturalism and postmodernism. At the same time, the biblical worldview, the hope for the world, has been pushed to the margins.”

Kingdom Triangle lays out a blueprint for a 3-pronged approach to equipping the Saints. The first two seem fairly innocuous: developing the Christian mind and renovating the heart through spiritual formation. There’s hardly anyone who would object up to this point. What really distinguishes this book is the emphasis on the third prong: the restoration of the power of the Holy Spirit at the center of the Christian life. Here are my observations on the proposed Triangle

1. The Nurture of the Christian Mind. Jesus said that we must love God with all of our minds. Sadly, there is a decline in the value for an intelligent and articulate expression of the faith. We must clearly equip believers to ‘rightly handle the word of truth’. Churches should create venues that clearly explain the Bible, the teachings of the church and topics that are presently relevant in our culture, so that everyone can “always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear.”(1 Peter 3:15)

2. The Renovation of the Heart and Spiritual Formation. We are continually being transformed into a greater likeness of Jesus. Paul referred to his Galatian apprentices his desire for them to become more like Jesus: My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you (Galatians 4:18 – 19) This is not something that happens overnight, but is a process that accompanies the believer his or her whole life. Christian character formation is a natural consequence of following Jesus, and is pursued by engaging in the various Biblical disciplines that grow us into Christlikeness, such as Bible reading, prayer, fasting, giving, serving, etc. Authentic equipping churches are ones that create and sustain multiple venues that acquaint the disciple with time-honored and ancient forms of engaging God and bring our bodies, minds and emotions into line with what we know to be true of our great God.

3. The Restoration of the Power of the Holy Spirit at the center of the Christian Life. For too long the American church has lived in either ignorance or neglect of the Pneumatic realities of the Kingdom of God. We have become a two-dimensional church that is designed to be 3-dimensional. Therefore we must constantly and repeatedly learn to interface with the Living God and become functionally competent in the gifts of the Father (Romans 12), the gifts of Jesus (Ephesians 4) and the gifts of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12). To that end we will create venues for the practical training in how to operate in the way Jesus taught his first apprentices to operate. In the words of John Wimber, we will learn to “do the stuff.”

In the unofficial biography of the Vineyard movement, called The Quest for the Radical Middle, author Bill Jackson documents a statement made to the Vineyard by Moreland’s doctoral professor, the eminent USC professor of philosophy, Dallas Willard. It is in regard to Moreland’s third aspect of his Triangle:

“You must ensure that Vineyard churches maintain the visible signs of the Holy Spirit and the kingdom of God, or else vineyard churches will never maintain the faith for discipleship or evangelism of anything else. . . . I go to churches all the time where the people’s hunger for piety is enormously high, but they live in constant frustration because they don’t have the accompanying faith that God really could change who they are – because they never see signs of God doing things. If you want your pastors to have the faith for evangelism, if you want them to have the faith for changed lives, you have to maintain the visible signs of the Holy Spirit.”
----- Dallas Willard, as quoted in Bill Jackson, The Quest for the Radical Middle (Cape Town, South Africa: Vineyard International, 1999), 380-381

This is an excellent read. I personally disagree with the way he defines the soul, but heartily recommend this book.  

Tomorrow's Bread Today

  I have recently swerved into a deeper appreciation of the Prayer that Jesus taught his apprentices to pray, commonly known as "The Lord's Prayer."  It's the one that we can most-of-us can recite from memory.

  At the same time I have a acquired a new set of 'lenses' through which to view the prayer of Jesus.  Recently I heard a friend and teacher Bruce Friesen say that "We are always evaluating the world around us, but rarely evaluating the lense through which we see."  

George Ladd said that the Kingdom of God is The Presence of the Future.  So I keep coming to that phrase in the prayer that says, in most translations, "Give us this day our daily bread."  In the back of my mind it nags me that this phrase doesn't sound very 'kingdom.'  Recently it's caught my attention that there are alternative readings to that phrase that appear in the margins of many bibles.  For instance, in the New Living Translation, it gives an alternative reading:  or Give us today our food for tomorrow.   The English Standard version offers Or our bread for tomorrow  The Holmon Standard Bible gives this alternative: or our bread for tomorrow  The Greek word epiousios only occurs here and has been treated with some uncertainty.  But among the possibilities, the idea of praying for tomorrow's bread today is not only plausible but academically integrous.  

It also allows the prayer to take of more of a real kingdom dimension.  Anyone who has read multiple translations, and who is even an amateur theologian will readily admit that one's theology will influence how one translates the text.  If one translates through a kingdom lens, then it's plausible to make a case that our 'bread' comes from the future.  This is reinforced by the previous phrase, "on earth as it is in heaven."

When we think of daily bread, in a biblical sense, where do our minds go to find a context for such a phrase?  The answer is to the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.  As the story goes, the children of Israel were fed manna from heaven.  In Exodus 16:4-5 we read Then the LORD said to Moses, "I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days."  God instructed them to pick the bread up from the ground every day.   And this was the rule for 40 years.  So it's really easy to see the principle of daily provision in the scripture.

But we know that the wilderness economy was not a permanent one but a temporary one.  God's destiny was that they would occupy and enjoy the promised land, where they would enjoy a land flowing with milk and honey.  The later writers of scripture would develop this as a place of 'rest', which was theologically concurrent with the laws of the Sabbath.  

So the children received daily bread, BUT there was a caveat:  They received daily bread and gathered daily bread for only six days.  There was one day of the week where they did not gather daily bread.  This day was the day before the Sabbath.  On the sixth day, they gathered twice as much—two omers for each person—and the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses. He said to them, "This is what the LORD commanded: 'Tomorrow is to be a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the LORD. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save whatever is left and keep it until morning.' (Exodus 16:22-23)

So there actually was a day where they gathered 'tomorrow's bread today'.  The Sabbath was the day of rest for the people of God.  The entire third and fourth chapters of Hebrews describes the New Covenant meaning of rest as a restful confidence in Jesus, the apostle and high priest whom we confess. (Hebrews 3:1)  That state of rest is characterized by faith.  And faith, as defined in a later chapter of the same book, "is the assurance (the confirmation, the title deed) of the things [we] hope for, being the proof of things [we] do not see and the conviction of their reality [faith perceiving as real fact what is not revealed to the senses]."

It is not a question of whether God provides.  Neither is it a question of how.  Rather the question is from wher God's daily provision comes.  This is what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount:  So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.(Matthew 6:31-34)  What Jesus is saying here is that worry does not, nor will it ever, produce the kingdom.  Present faith will manifest the provision.  All provision is from the future and worry is the misuse of our God-given imagination to conjure the future, when in fact it destroy the object of that worry: supply.

So Father, thank you that you supply supply tomorrow's bread today.  Because it's Your kingdom, power and glory!  That's a prayer that makes me happy!