Richard Rohr – Leaving the Garden – 3. Splitting the Mind from the Body and Soul

The third split is when you split your mind from your body and soul and make your mind the engineer, the control tower. You make your mind “you.” Almost all people do! As Descartes said during the Enlightenment, “I think, therefore I am.” This is considered the low point of Western philosophy, but actually he was being very honest and observant! Moreover, when you say, “I think,” you largely mean only with the left brain, which has overtaken the Western World since the sixteenth century. Before that, the right brain was often dominant in most of the world. The right brain receives reality in a holistic way, in a symbolic and metaphorical way. It receives the whole without eliminating anything.

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This might be of interest for you to read,

Rachel Held Evans – The Scandal of the Evangelical… Heart

Rachel published yesterday on her blog a very soul searching text, which I wanted to share with you, but it was too late to do so. So, here it is.

For Rachel, unlike Noll, what is troublesome is not not so much the ‘evangelical mind’ (not that is not a problem, itself), but rather the ‘evangelical… heart’.

What she wrote resonated a lot with my own experience. That is why I have decided to invite you too to explore her claims and judge for yourselves.

Here are some fragments from her text.

* * *

It’s strange to think that doubt has been a part of my life for more than ten years now.
…

A lot of people, when they catch pieces of my story, assume my doubts are of the intellectual variety. They assume I’m just a smart girl stuck in the Bible Belt asking pesky questions about science, history and politics that my conservative evangelical culture, with a bent toward anti-intellectualism, simply cannot answer.

This is true to an extent.
…

But the questions that have weighed most heavily on me these past ten years have been questions not of the mind but of the heart, questions of conscience and empathy. It was not the so-called “scandal of the evangelical mind” that rocked my faith; it was the scandal of the evangelical heart.

Richard Rohr – The Ego’s Four Splits 3

The Third Split: Body from Mind

The Third Split is that we separate our body from our mind. The mind is given pre‑eminence in almost all people. It might take different cultural forms, but this little machine called the mind starts steering and judging, analyzing and fixing, controlling and dominating. Most people think they are their thinking. That’s what contemplation aims to resolve; to let you find the deeper self that exists previous to your thinking about it. The self prior to the judgments you make, the preferences you have. It doesn’t matter what you think; your thinking doesn’t make it so. You are part of something bigger than your thinking can even hint at. Perhaps it’s easier for us to see this in our children with mental handicaps or Down’s syndrome. We can see the divine image in them so easily, almost because they’re not their minds.

I’m sure that so many of the problems we have—addiction, obesity, anorexia—they’re all this rejection of the body; a result of feeling the body is not good, not holy. I’m sure sexual addiction also is just a body trying to compensate; feeling so unloved, so disconnected, it tries to connect in False Self ways that don’t really work.

There’s no point in hating this—which Jesus never does. Jesus shows tremendous compassion for what we later called “the sins of the flesh.” Jesus is only hard on what we call “the sins of the spirit”: arrogance, pride, hypocrisy; these are the sins that really destroy the soul. Jesus is not localizing sin in the material universe (sins of the flesh or sins of weakness). Sins of the spirit and the mind—these are the sins that really separate you from God. So the alternative orthodoxy that’s emerging is orthopraxy instead of verbal orthodoxy: adopting an orthodox, gospel-based way of life instead of just saying the right words and thinking the right thoughts.

David Neff – An Interview with Mark Noll on the Foundation of the Evangelical Mind

In 1994, Wheaton College historian Mark Noll published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind—”an epistle from a wounded lover” that decried the anti-intellectualism of evangelical religious culture. Noll’s newest book, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Eerdmans, released in August), devotes far less space to criticism and offers instead a foundational vision: The basic truths of Christian faith are the key to Christian scholarship. Christianity Today editor in chief David Neff recently spoke with Noll (now teaching at the University of Notre Dame) about the book.

Although it’s not the main subject of Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, most people will want to know: Are you more optimistic today about the state of the evangelical mind than you were 17 years ago?

I am more optimistic, though not overwhelmingly so. The problems endemic to modern Western culture undercut Christian thinking the same way they undercut every other kind of serious intellectual life. The tendencies among evangelicals that undercut serious reflection are also still pretty strong—for example, the populism and the immediatism, the idea that if there is a problem, we have to solve it right away.