The Head & the Heart

The Head & the Heart

12 Orthodox and Pious: Johann Gerhard’s Marriage of Doctrine and Devotion | by Dan van Voorhis

12 Orthodox and Pious: Johann Gerhard’s Marriage of Doctrine and Devotion

by Dan van Voorhis

20 Integrating Intellect and Emotions for the Sake of the Church: A Conversation with Joseph Byamukama | by Adam Smith

20 Integrating Intellect and Emotions for the Sake of the Church: A Conversation with Joseph Byamukama | by Adam Smith

30 Heady Thoughts about Your Heart

30 Heady Thoughts about Your Heart

by A. Craig Troxel

48

by A. Craig Troxel

48

by Phillip Cary

by Phillip Cary

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Modern Reformation

March/April 2024

Vol. 33, No. 2

05

EDITOR

I.

RETRIEVE 08 REFORMATION OUTTAKES | Shipments and Mis-shipments from the Dutch Golden Age

| by Zachary Purvis

12 ESSAY | Orthodox and Pious: Johann Gerhard’s Marriage of Doctrine and Devotion

| by Dan van Voorhis

II. CONVERSE 20 INTERVIEW | Integrating Intellect and Emotions for the Sake of the Church: A Conversation with Joseph Byamukama | by Adam Smith

III. PERSUADE 30 ESSAY | Heady Thoughts about Your Heart

| by A. Craig Troxel

38 ESSAY | Divine Story | by Zephram Foster

IV. ENGAGE 48 ESSAY | The Thoughts of the Heart

| by Phillip Cary

52 BOOK REVIEWS

Heart and Head: A Brief Bibliography

POETRY

16 The Road of Roses

|

Liberation: A Poem

for

by

A

Endsheet illustration by Raxenne Maniquiz

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IMAGINE YOU’RE asking two friends for counsel in making a difficult decision. “Now, carefully think this through,” one friend cautions with a wagging finger, while the other jabs you in the ribs and winks. “Nah, just go with your gut!”

This scene reflects an all-too-common false choice between considering humans as basically either thinking beings (a stereotypically modern sensibility) or feeling beings (a more postmodern sensibility). People who prioritize intellect privilege reason and argumentation; others who prioritize feelings put the emphasis on passion and experience. Our two friends become an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other— while we endlessly debate which one is giving us better advice.

Often, we assume that the best way to break the stalemate between our heads and our hearts is to somehow relate these wholly separate realities properly within ourselves. In order to get the angel and the devil to play well together, one of them has to be in charge. Should cool heads prevail, or shall we follow our hearts?

Well, biblically speaking, we’ve already asked the wrong question because the Bible doesn’t ask us to choose between the head and the heart, or even ask us to properly relate them. The Bible simply doesn’t separate the head and the heart like we do. Indeed, we’ve titled this issue “The Head and the Heart” intentionally to put our finger on the crux of the matter: if you come to this issue thinking they’re separate and leave feeling the same way, then we haven’t done our job.

In the Bible, the intellect, will, and emotions are all capacities that belong to the whole, integrated person. The thinking, desiring, feeling center of who we are is simply called our “heart” (and sometimes spirit or soul or mind).

When Jesus perceived their thoughts, he answered them, “Why do you question in your hearts?” (Luke 5:22)

Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Ps. 37:4)

A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones. (Prov. 15:13)

So, if we want to speak like the Bible does, we shouldn’t force thinking and feeling to compete for centrality in our lives or assume they belong to separate domains until we bring them together. Human thinking and feeling operate in concert, for good or ill. At their worst, they drive us into unreasonable outbursts or self-justifying indifference. At their best, they perform in beautiful harmony, as we see supremely in Jesus. He thought everything through with utmost passion, and he reasoned skillfully in pursuing holy zeal. His thinking, feeling, and willing were perfectly aligned for our salvation and as our example—his heart beating in unison with his Father’s and with ours.

Brannon Ellis Executive Editor

I.

Retrieve Learning from the wisdom of the past

Shipments and Mis-shipments from the Dutch Golden Age

by Zachary Purvis

SHIPS THAT FAIL TO REACH their destination cause trouble. For six days in March 2021, the container ship Ever Given—more “sideways skyscraper than boat”—got stuck in the Suez Canal, scotched the global movement of goods, and froze nearly $10 billion in trade daily. We know this lesson well, not least because we all saw the memes.1 But sometimes ships that reach port successfully also cause trouble. Throughout the early modern period, Dutch Reformed missionaries in Brazil learned that lesson well, because they experienced it not through memes but up close and first hand. And repeatedly.

It was 1636, and Jodocus van Stetten could have pulled his hair out. Originally from the German-Polish borderlands near the Baltic Sea, Stetten was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church who labored with the Reformed mission in northwest Brazil. After years of fighting the Portuguese for land and sugar in Brazil, the Dutch Republic had, through the powerful trading arm of the Dutch West India Company (WIC), set up in the region a large colony known as “Little Holland,” which lasted formally from 1630 to 1654. More than once, Stetten watched trading ships arrive and sailors unload their cargo, piling up highly anticipated barrels crammed with books in busy dockyard warehouses. In the spring of 1636, the board of the WIC sent him John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion in Dutch and the Acts of the Synod of Dort (1618–1619) in Latin.2 For missionaries who usually had to make do with little, the scene pleased greatly. Only one fly disturbed the ointment—but it was large and buzzed loudly. The latest books, intended specifically for use in schools and churches, arrived in Spanish, not Portuguese!3

Stetten responded by asking the WIC directors to load the next ship bound for Recife, the colonial capital, with more books. In gentle terms, he explained to his superiors that few Brazilians used “Castilian” (that is, Spanish). He had been learning to speak Portuguese himself, but good theology books remained hard to obtain. The greatest need, he wrote, was twofold: a Portuguese Bible, like the kind currently being printed in Lisbon, and copies of the Heidelberg Catechism. The letter concluded with words he must have hoped would remove all doubt: “I am speaking of Portuguese, not Castilian, as you gentlemen had the other [catechisms] translated, all of which are useless here.” 4 Still, language debacles continued to occur.5

During the height of the Dutch Golden Age, which ran roughly from 1588 to 1672, global missions took on remarkable significance. The WIC played an outsized role in the Atlantic world. So too did its geographical counterpart, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the Asian world. The relationship between evangelism and empire was complex. 6 The WIC and VOC sponsored ministers to provide spiritual oversight to employees and their families. The trading companies had interests in commerce and empire building at heart. Some of their personnel left trails of coercion, predation, enslavement, and entangling efforts to convert pagans, Moors, Jews, and Catholics. But others displayed unusual understanding and respect.7 Even so, notes Charles Parker, the “Dutch ministers traveling into overseas territories were first and foremost pastors.”

The leading Dutch universities of Leiden and Utrecht (intellectual powerhouses of both learning generally and Reformed theology particularly) devoted substantial resources to getting the gospel right and getting the gospel out. In 1622 to 1623, Antonius Walaeus, a theologian at Leiden, opened a seminary to train ministers for overseas service with aid from the VOC.8 In 1634, Gisbertus Voetius joined the faculty at Utrecht and took a leading academic role in supporting the global spread of Calvinism. A delegate at the Synod of Dort, Voetius called on his fellow members there to formally declare their commitment to “the propagation of the gospel in the East Indies and other places.” 9 Voetius had read early missionary stories from Southeast Asia and Brazil. Mindful of the Ottoman Empire on Europe’s eastern frontier, he learned Arabic and began to lecture on Islam and paganism. He conferred with overseas ministers about beneficial strategies to spread the gospel and plant churches, all while consistently opposing slavery. Other Calvinist theologians and intellectuals—including Johannes Hoornbeeck, Johannes Cocceius, Georgius Hornius, and Adriaan Reland—also equipped their students for service in overseas assignments.10

Ships sent out by the WIC and VOC became floating industries, villages, churches, families. Like an early modern Noah’s ark, each ship was crowded with up to two hundred crew, myriad goods and supplies, and an indeterminate number of passengers. They carried sailors and merchants and cargo, of course, but also ordained ministers and nonordained “comforters of the sick”—some to stay with the vessel, some to travel onwards. Even as they sailed, those on board continued to gather to worship God and to keep the Lord’s Day as best as they could. And as we’ve seen, the ships carried books. In fact, far more than either foreign or domestic products—imported sugar, paintings by Rembrandt or Vermeer— books captured the public imagination and came to represent the marvel that was the Dutch Republic.11

The most popular book to travel the hemispheres was the “States Bible” (Statenvertaling) of 1637, the first translation of the Bible into Dutch directly from the original languages, which had been commissioned by the Synod of Dort and financed by the government. Trade company directors quickly ordered batches of new Bibles to use onboard and to deliver to overseas missionaries. Just as quickly, they received complaints that the text was too small to read from pulpits. So, the

Special title page of the first Statenvertaling (1637).

On a typical VOC ship, less than half of the crew could realistically expect to ever see home again.

frugal Dutch traders reluctantly purchased larger, more expensive, folio editions. They also furnished every ship with enough copies to go around of a psalter for sailors and a catechism—usually the Heidelberg, often in a multilingual edition. On a typical VOC ship, less than half of the crew could realistically expect to ever see home again. The Bible, the psalter, and the catechism would be their regular, and final, consolation. Comforters of the sick likewise had a checklist of typical titles they were given before they traveled to the Americas. The list included the Bible in Dutch and Spanish, Calvin’s Institutes in Dutch, an introduction to the Heidelberg Catechism in Dutch, Heinrich Bullinger’s Decades (a collection of fifty sermons in five books) in Dutch, Theodore Beza’s Complete Summary of Christianity in Dutch, William Perkins’ Reformed Catholic in Dutch, and William Bucanus’s Commonplaces in Dutch.12 The ships themselves would become naval lending libraries. When Dutch missionaries in various forts and colonies complained about the lack of books in local outposts, trade company directors told them to visit the harbor, board the vessels, and borrow what they needed.13

From my perspective, this is one of the most fascinating scenes from the early modern period. Picture it: Dutch ships with anchors weighed, somewhere in the middle of the ocean. For a few odd moments each Lord’s Day, ministers and parishioners aboard—whatever else they might be doing as part of Dutch empire building—laid all else aside to express the global communion of saints and the catholicity of the faith. The same ecumenical creeds confessed on one side of the globe echoing on the other, the same psalms sung as praise to God on one continent finding antiphonal response on another.

Zachary Purvis (DPhil, University of Oxford; MAHT, Westminster Seminary California) teaches church history and theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/world/middleeast/ suez-canal-stuck-ship-ever-given.html; https://fortune. com/2021/03/25/ever-given-suez-ship-stuck-internet-memes/.

2. Michiel van Groesen, Imagining the Americas in Print: Books, Maps, and Encounters in the Atlantic World (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 169.

3. D. L. Noorlander, “The Reformed Church and the Regulation of Religious Literature in the Early Dutch Atlantic World,” Itineratio 42, no. 3 (2018): 375–402.

4. Jodocus â Stetten to Chamber Zeeland, 16 July 1636, cited in Michiel van Groesen, Imagining the Americas in Print: Books, Maps, and Encounters in the Atlantic World (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 172: “Ic sprecke van Portuges, niet Castiliaens gelic u E.E. de anderen hebt late translateren, de welcke alle sonder profit alhier seijn.”

5. Noorlander, “The Reformed Church,” 383.

6. Charles H. Parker, Global Calvinism: Conversion and Commerce in the Dutch Empire, 1600–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 6.

7. See, e.g., D. L. Noorlander, Heaven’s Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); Jonathan Israel and Stuart B. Schwartz, The Expansion of Tolerance: Religion in Dutch Brazil (1624–1654) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007); Benjamin Schmidt,

Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Frans Schalkwijk, The Reformed Church in Dutch Brazil, 1630–1654 (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1998).

8. Parker, Global Calvinism, 127.

9. According to H. A. van Andel, the synod ratified Voetius’s resolution, though the resolution never appeared in the official version of the act. Van Andel, De zendingsleer van Gisbertus Voetius (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1912), 16. On “missions” here, see W. J. van Asselt, Voetius (Kampen: De Groot Goudriaan, 2007); Jan A. B. Jongeneel, “Voetius’ zendingstheologie, de eerste comprehensieve Protestantse zendingstheologie,” in De onbekende Voetius: voordrachten wetenschappelijk symposium Utrecht 3 maart 1989, ed. J. van Oort (Kampen: Kok, 1989), 117–47.

10. Parker, Global Calvinism, 31, 107, 201, 236–73.

11. For a masterful survey, see Andrew Pettegree and Arthur van Weduwen, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

12. See, e.g., Willem Frijhoff, Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 324–25.

13. Noorlander, “The Reformed Church,” 379.

JOHANN GERHARD’S Marriage OF DOCTRINE AND DEVOTION

by DAN

VAN VOORHIS

WHAT IS A PIETIST? I’ve been searching for a good answer to this question since my graduate student days when I was studying this remarkable seventeenth-century movement and its subsequent influence.1 One common perception I found is that a Pietist is simply a Lutheran version of a Puritan. But then, what is a Puritan? We might affix cultural critic H. L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism to Pietism: the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy.” Or we might go in the opposite, appreciative direction, as many of the contemporary Reformed have done: like Puritans, Pietists “were great souls serving a great God. In them clear-headed passion and warm-hearted compassion combined.”2 In my personal experience among Saxon Lutherans, the Pietist label is as much an epithet as it is a term of affection among Scandinavian Lutherans. So, which is it?

Confessional or Pious? A False Distinction

One common theme in research and popular understanding is that Pietism needs the foil of confessional orthodoxy to make any sense. Among reformational Christians, Lutherans boast the most straightforward definition of what it means to be confessional. Since 1580, Lutherans have had one collection of texts—the Book of Concord—as our lodestar of orthodoxy. It contains the 1530 Augsburg Confession, Luther’s Catechisms, and other texts. Historically, to be a Lutheran meant fidelity to this single set of confessions. To what extent, then, does being a confessional Lutheran oppose being a Pietist?

Those who balk at Christian spirituality and morality see Pietists and Puritans as hard legalists; those who emphasize Christian spirituality and morality often see Pietism (and sometimes even Puritanism) as opposed to the sterile and academic confessional orthodoxy that fossilized Protestantism after the warm faith of the Reformation had cooled. My early research on Pietism ultimately led me to see each of these approaches as a false choice. In studying the “Proto-Pietist” Johann Arndt (1555–1621), what I found most remarkable is his emphasis on the interior life of the Christian while conscientiously remaining an orthodox, confessional Lutheran.3

In the narrowest possible sense, a Pietist is one who pays attention to the interior spiritual life. Many would further define Pietism as involving regular small group meetings known as “conventicles,” as well as holding to some form of optimistic eschatology.4 I focus in this essay on the narrowest, most basic sense, but it’s important to note that none of these things are forbidden in the Book of Concord. 5 And while many Lutherans have painted Lutheran Pietism and the Age of

In the narrowest possible sense, a Pietist is one who pays attention to the interior spiritual life.

Orthodoxy as opposites, the most outstanding representative of both movements in the seventeenth century might be the same person: Johann Gerhard.

The Life of Gerhard

Johann Gerhard was born in 1582 in Quedlinburg into a family of seven children. 6 His pastor in Quedlinburg was the yet-unknown Johann Arndt. Arndt’s spiritual care for Johann left a profound impression, especially after an illness that almost killed him at fifteen. He swore then that if he survived, he would follow Arndt into the ministry.

Gerhard studied theology at the University of Wittenberg and then at the University of Jena, a hotbed of Lutheran orthodoxy. Around the time of another life-threatening illness in 1603, he remembered his promise and entered the ministry. In 1604, he left Jena for Marburg, where he studied under orthodox stalwart Balthazar Mentzer.7 When Marburg and the university came under the control of the Calvinists (it was common for the ruling magistrate to determine the confession for the city), Gerhard returned to Jena. While studying there, he was courted both by Arndt, who wanted him to pursue a call in Saxony, and Mentzer, who wanted him to teach at his new university in Giessen. Gerhard chose to stay at Jena, where he earned his doctorate in sacred theology in 1606. The same year, he published Sacred Meditations, perhaps his most popular work, combining deep theological conviction with rich devotional reflection well beyond his twenty-two years.

Two years later, his reputation had grown such that he was called to be the superintendent of Heldburg (basically, a bishop). Duke Johann Casimir promoted Gerhard to the role of general superintendent of the whole region of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, where he served in administrative roles while occasionally teaching and publishing a church order (a book for worship and discipline). By 1616, Gerhard took up a senior professorship at the University of Jena. Though he often received calls from across Europe to teach or preach, Gerhard stayed at Jena for life.

Most of the next two decades of Gerhard’s ministry paralleled the Thirty Years War. While he attended to the suffering of his congregation, he dealt with sorrows of his own. His most personal and moving correspondence with Arndt surrounds the death of his wife and child from smallpox. Through his time at the university, his life as a churchman and a professor, a believer and an academic, Gerhard held in harmony what later theologians would pitch as opposing forces: confessional orthodoxy and piety—that is, attention to the personal life of faith and devotion.

After Sacred Meditations , he published Manual of Comfort in 1611 and Daily Exercise of Piety in 1612. Gerhard’s desire to provide practical literature to his parishioners is also exemplified in his work Harmony of the Gospels and his contributions to the Weimar Bible—a German-language Bible with Lutheran explanations and notes. In his 1620 tract on the proper study of theology, he includes a

Johann Gerhard (1582–1637)

proposed course of study, citing Luther’s famous call to the theologian as “praying, meditating, and suffering” and adding his own three requirements: right intentions, sincere piety, and devout prayer.8 In 1624, Gerhard published School of Piety, whose structure and content echoed Arndt’s famous “Pietist” work True Christianity (completed 1610). Yet throughout these years, Gerhard simultaneously labored to complete his Loci communes, an extensive academic theological work that eventually spanned nine volumes by 1625.

Orthodoxy and Piety in Gerhard

Gerhard’s stature as a giant of Lutheran orthodoxy is beyond question. Robert Preus, a renowned scholar of early modern Lutheranism, considered Gerhard the third great Lutheran theologian after Luther and Martin Chemnitz.9 Any historically nuanced approach to Pietism (and we might add Puritanism here) must account for Gerhard and other theologians like him who emphasized the necessity of an internal and affective faith—not to the detriment of orthodoxy, but in inseparable union with it. Gerhard calls us to find assurance of faith in Christ alone (outside ourselves). Yet he finds no disconnect in urging a life of faith and devotion that flows from that external reality. Indeed, he focuses on the Lord’s Supper as uniting the external and internal at the heart of the Christian life: in the Supper, Christ’s very body and blood is “given for you” and received into your very body by faith.

Gerhard is a shining example of the refusal to separate thinking and feeling, doctrine and piety, head and heart. While radical Pietists indeed developed distinctives that align more closely with Anabaptists and others outside the confessional reformational mainstream, radical Pietism is a far cry from Christian piety. Gerhard shows us that confessional Christians can (and should) be pious Christians. Piety is not the enemy of orthodoxy.

Dan van Voorhis (PhD, University of St. Andrews) served as professor and chair of the Department of History at Concordia University, Irvine. He is currently a scholar-in-residence with 1517 and is the host of the daily podcast The Christian History Almanac.

Gerhard is a shining example of the refusal to separate thinking and feeling, doctrine and piety, head and heart.

1. Douglas Shantz surveys a few historians’ use of the term, from Johannes Wallman distinguishing between a broad and narrow movement to Hartmut Lehmann’s expansive definition that is “broad and flexible enough so that pietism research can unfold as freely and creatively as possible.” In An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 5.

2. J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1990), 22. This is from ch. 2, “Why We Need the Puritans,” which is widely available online.

3. Daniel van Voorhis, Johann Arndt: A Prophet of Lutheran Pietism (Irvine, CA: 1517 Press, 2017).

4. Johannes Wallman, Der Pietismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 26.

5. While the Book of Concord says relatively little about

eschatology, it does condemn radically optimistic or thisworldly eschatology in the guise of “certain Jewish opinions” that Christians “will take possession of the kingdom of this world, the ungodly being everywhere suppressed.” Theodore G. Tappert, The Book of Concord (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1959), 38–39.

6. Erdmann Fischer, The Life of Johann Gerhard, trans. Richard Dinda and Elmer Hohle (Malone, TX: Repristination Press, 2000).

7. Robert Preus, The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1970), 52.

8. Glen K. Fluegge, “Pastoral Care During the Age of Orthodoxy,” in Christoph Barnbrock, ed., Fides, Confessio and Pietatis (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt GmbH, 2021), 69.

9. Preus, The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 52.

POEM

The Road of Roses

by Ryan Post

Where the trail, young traveler, divides, Thy fate, unlike thyself, Has long already taken sides, And waits but for thyself.

There seems a certain reticence

All sudden in thy step—

Ah! Subtle is the evidence Of fear to now misstep.

To the left, ere long, the land reposes, In a plain you plainly see, But to the right, a road of roses, Whose end you cannot see.

Ah, would thou not, young man, traverse Where thou might pluck in passion

The flower of the thorny curse, And make that rose thy ration?

It will bruise thy heel, young man, thy heel, For the kiss thy soul proposes, But thou had chosen such to feel— To know the road of roses.

Converse II.

Exploring perspectives from the present

Integrating Intellect and Emotions for the Sake of the Church: A Conversation with Joseph Byamukama

by Adam Smith

Joseph Byamukama is founder and team leader of Veracity Fount, who resides in Kampala, Uganda. Mr. Byamukama earned his MDiv from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and is currently working on a PhD in New Testament intertextuality from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia. He was a participant and presenter at Theo Global East Africa in 2023.

Joseph, as a churchman and a scholar who has studied on three continents, have you observed any differences in the church in the United States and in Uganda when it comes to prioritizing either thinking or feeling?

At the risk of overgeneralization, let me say that Ugandan Christians who are passionate about their faith tend to stress emotions over the life of the mind. It is not uncommon to hear a faithful Ugandan preacher or lay Christian say, “The things of God are to be believed, not reasoned.” Reason, many feel, puts God in a box. Our Sunday services in Uganda tend to display a level of emotional engagement absent from typical faithful American church gatherings.

Faithful, gospel-centered churches in America, perhaps overly influenced by rationalism, tend to focus more on reason and explanatory power than on the affections. Churches with excellent three-point sermons and solid doctrinal statements can feel cold and distant. In many places, raising your hands can raise eyebrows; saying a hearty amen to the preacher’s words might draw unwanted attention to you instead.

As I said, this might be an oversimplification—and there are certainly faithful, beautiful communities of faith in both contexts. But the tendencies in either direction are there. We all know that, biologically speaking, we cannot remove our hearts or our heads and remain alive. God has made us integral beings, and death ensues whenever we sever what God has united. I propose that this biological fact should point us to a similarly vital unity between our intellect and our affections for spiritual flourishing.

What are the practical results in life, faith, or worship from placing an improper emphasis on feeling or thinking?

In the Ugandan context (and the African church at large), a focus on the emotions tends to bear the consequences of a lack of discipleship and an inadequate

Joseph Byamukama

response to challenges to the Christian faith in our cultural context. First, this disregard for the life of the mind explains why close to 90 percent of Ugandan pastors have no formal theological training and why they don’t think they need any. I remember a conversation with a well-meaning friend when I was preparing to start my Master of Divinity training at Gordon-Conwell. This friend (now gone to be with the Lord) expressed his “worry [that] the text will overcome the Spirit.” He felt that theological training is a case of the “letter that kills” versus “the Spirit that gives life,” as Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 3:6. For my friend and many others like him in Uganda, developing the life of the mind represents the dead letter—even for Christians studying theology—while the living Spirit is found in (emotive) experience.

Second, poorly equipped church leaders and pastors fail to equip their congregations, leaving them prey to cults, false teachings, and postmodern notions undermining the reality of truth and the meaningfulness of life. Young believers find it challenging to respond to objections posed to their floundering faith in this fast-changing world because they don’t reflect on the reasons for the hope that is in them (1 Pet. 3:15). Meanwhile, competing theories about life’s origins, morality, destiny, and truth invade our thoughts through pocket-sized screens at fast wireless speeds. In the days between two Sundays, many young Ugandans and Africans listen to countless influences of which their pastors are unaware. Under these pastors without theological training, believers become malnourished, religiously filling pews Sunday after Sunday but starved of the rich nutrients that come from gospel clarity. Without the theological calcium that strengthens spiritual bones, many Ugandans and other Africans are too weak to distinguish the gospel from the various forms of Gnosticism, prosperity messages, New Age spirituality, or baptized forms of African traditional religion that run rampant in our communities. Without intending or knowing it, the pastor who neglects the life of the mind positions his people as prey to pouncing wolves—and pounce they do!

On the other hand, a purely intellectual faith without transformed affections lacks power for obedience and makes one’s heart cold toward God and neighbor. This is how, as the adage goes, a seminary can become a cemetery for living faith. Our affections must be aligned to and transformed by the gospel because our affections shape our choices. The theology of sixteenth-century Anglican archbishop Thomas Cranmer is so helpful here, because he recognized how deeply our hearts direct our choices and thoughts. As Dr. Ashley Null notes,

According to Cranmer’s anthropology, what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies. The mind doesn’t direct the will. The mind is actually captive to what the will wants, and the will itself, in turn, is captive to what the heart wants.1

This means that we should strive for the transformation of our affections as the gospel constantly renews our minds and guides our choices. A cold heart employs a sharp mind to produce cynical choices that destroy the soul. I have stud-

Without intending or knowing it, the pastor who neglects the life of the mind positions his people as prey to pouncing wolves—and pounce they do!

A cold heart employs a sharp mind to produce cynical choices that destroy the soul.

ied with students (in the West) whose minds are so surgically sharp that they split biblical texts with precision, but their hearts are as cold as steel toward God. They study the text, not as those in submission to its authority, but as a scientist dissects a cockroach on a laboratory tray. Such scenarios are what scared my friend when he thought about theology as the letter that kills. An appropriate biblical emphasis on the integration of the intellect and emotions would go a long way in persuading my Ugandan and other African friends that the life of the mind doesn’t necessarily have to be cultivated at the expense of affectionate devotion to God.

What biblical passages and themes help guide your understanding of the integration between these thinking and feeling aspects of who we are as human beings and as Christians?

I could cite a couple of texts, but let me focus on Matthew 22:34–40. In this passage, a Pharisaic lawyer sought to test Jesus by asking him to identify the greatest commandment. Jesus, citing Deuteronomy 6:5, said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” There are a couple of things to observe from Jesus’ response.

First, the greatest commandment is to love God with everything we are, implying that failing to do so with any part of ourselves is the greatest sin. Second, Jesus does not separate the heart from the mind or prioritize one over the other. The two go together (more on this in a moment). Third, for Jesus, the law’s demand for a holistic love for God is not new. By citing Deuteronomy 6:5, Jesus insists that devotion to God has always been a call to love him with everything we are—heart and mind and soul. To not love God with all our being amounts to

Africa

Asia

Europe

Latin America

Northern America

Oceania

This graph from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary shows the percentage of the world’s professing Christian population in each region since 1900, with future projections (based on current trends) to 2100.

rejecting God. Indeed, Deuteronomy 6:5 comes in a section of Scripture warning Israel against idolatry.

The previous verse asserts the Lord’s uniqueness as exclusively the one true God, who is therefore exclusively worthy of our devotion in worship. In contrast, verses 10–15 insist that Israel’s impending prosperity will tempt God’s people to misdirect their affections to worthless things. The antidote to idolatry, the Lord says, lies in desires directed by the life of the mind devoted to learning and to teaching his life-giving and life-preserving word. Refusing to dwell on God reflectively and affectionately—in all his truth and beauty and redemptive goodness— amounts to breaking the greatest commandment.

It’s also important to note that the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 6:5 does not include two words for heart and mind. It has one word that stands for both. The Old Testament does not separate the mind from the heart but sees the two as inextricably intertwined. The heart “denotes a person’s center for both physical and emotional-intellectual-moral activities.”2 The heart is the source of human agency as regards affections, thinking, and willing or choosing, which is why we use expressions like “get to the heart of the matter.”

In biblical language, the intellect and the emotions are inseparable. Hence, for both the New and Old Testaments, we cannot properly love God with what we call our hearts without loving him with what we call our minds. Neither can we appropriately love the Lord with our minds without the affections that guide our choices. Deuteronomy 6 warns us that if we are to follow the Lord with sincerity and escape the idolatrous pursuit of earthly pleasures that lure our affections away from God, we must recover the Hebraic concept of the unity of heart and mind, which reorients our desires, thoughts, and choices to God who alone is wise and supremely beautiful. Only then can we heed the appeal to keep our “heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Prov. 4:23).

As you think about reaching Africans with the gospel, what opportunities and needs do you see pertaining to addressing people as integrated thinking and feeling beings?

I can think of several opportunities. First, Ugandans and Africans are still spiritually conscious and open to conversations about faith and salvation. We do not need much convincing about the supernatural world. We live in it; we are aware of it. The beauty of this is that there is a foundation we can easily build on as we help them appreciate that the Christian faith is not a blind faith. Faith in Christ not only fulfills the longings of the African heart for communion with God, victory over death, community, and identity, but it is also an intellectually robust and defensible faith that can stand up to arguments and doubts. Second, many Ugandans are young. Our median age in 2020 was 15.7 years, consistent with trends in many parts of Africa. This means we have an excellent opportunity to disciple this generation and the next at the same time—if we are strategic and well resourced. What is more, the literacy levels in Uganda and many parts

For both the New and Old Testaments, we cannot properly love God with what we call our hearts without loving him with what we call our minds. Neither can we appropriately love the Lord with our minds without the affections that guide our choices.

Faith in Christ not only fulfills the longings of the African heart for communion with God, victory over death, community, and identity, but it is also an intellectually robust and defensible faith that can stand up to arguments and doubts.

of Africa are increasing, meaning that people can more easily read and write, making it easier to foster foundational and much-needed theological training. The advance of technology means that we can access resources more easily than we used to, especially digital resources.

Having said that, let me mention the two significant challenges we must meet as gospel ministers in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa. Due in large part to the lack of trained pastors who can faithfully disciple their congregations, many of our churches are affected by the health-and-wealth message and deliverance theology, which is little more than a Christianized form of our African traditional worldview. There are many occasions when I have been unable to recommend a single healthy local church to those who asked me.

This lack of discipleship and the prevalence of the prosperity messages means that many Ugandans, despite identifying as Christians, have not been introduced to the gospel—indeed, they may be inoculated against it. I remember a chat I had with someone online who reached out to me in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic saying that he had given up on Christianity. When I asked him what sort of Christianity he was leaving, his explanation made it clear that he had become disillusioned with health-and-wealth teaching. In Uganda and other parts of Africa, many people have become atheists or agnostics after rejecting the manipulative stunts and greed of prosperity preachers, which they tend to mistake for Christianity because they have never encountered the preaching and teaching of the true gospel.

Our second obstacle concerns resources—human and material. Indeed, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few, and those few are under-resourced. Despite the challenge that atheism or ambivalence to Christianity might pose, our problem as gospel workers in Uganda or Africa is often not whether we will have people to equip and disciple but whether we have the resources to sustain such efforts. I imagine most Christians in the Western world might not appreciate this reality until they are on the ground in Africa and far away from the five-star hotels in our major cities. Theologically sound ministries confront the arduous task of fighting false teachings while building theological foundations for the church, and they have to do so mainly with part-time staff and volunteers. It is like Nehemiah’s call to rebuild the ruined walls of Jerusalem: It is an overwhelming and sometimes lonely task.

How would you encourage churches and believers in other parts of the world to pray for Uganda in this regard?

Jesus’ statement in Matthew 9:37–38 is apt for the Ugandan church: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” Pray for more laborers—especially for well-equipped indigenous laborers who can prepare others to resource and revitalize existing local churches and raise theologically trained planters of churches who then go on to plant more churches. Pray that theological institutions may flourish both in enrollment and in

their equipping of those enrolled. Pray that these laborers are well resourced, spiritually and physically. Pray for endurance, too, that those in the trenches planting healthy churches and participating in theological and pastoral training overcome the discouragement of being in the minority and feeling the weight of responsibility.

What would be your encouragement to believers and churches in the United States as they consider the integration of our thinking and feelings as Christians? How would you pray for us?

My encouragement is that the West has historically done more fruitful theological reflection than most of the world. Though not without its challenges, there are good foundations on which the West can still build. You have done many things right, even though some of those foundations are being destroyed. My prayer is the recovery of those Christian foundations that shaped most of Western societal values. You have also been fruitful in seeking to see the gospel spread throughout the world. Mission-mindedness is something I admire about my brothers and sisters in the West. Long may your heart for world missions endure and even grow! Finally, I pray that theological institutions will grow closer to local churches in order to foster spiritual formation and discipleship rather than mere scholarly credentials or academic placement and tenure. May it be practically evident to those who train and those who study that the whole purpose of theological learning is not fame or self-actualization, but deeper trust in and conformity to Christ our faithful Savior.

1. “Dr. Ashley Null on Thomas Cranmer,” ACL News, September 2001, https://acl.asn.au/resources/dr-ashley-null-onthomas-cranmer/.

2. See Bruce Waltke’s entry for “Heart” in the Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology, ed. Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), https://biblestudytools.com.

Liberation: A Poem for Sufferers

by Joshua Pauling

There is a now and not yet, you see, let us not forget that we are counted as sheep. Be stoic? No, freely weep and cry, yet hold our only hope to be completely free. Sufferings and scars entail On this narrow bliss-bound trail.

Theodicy, the problem of evil: Why do bad things happen to good people? But since the Fall goodness isn’t in us. Turn the question around, Scripture tells us: Why do good things happen to bad people?

Now that is the real problem of evil. But curt answers won’t cut it when suff’ring, Scripture brings us a more merciful thing.

The bloodied God, and on a bloodied Cross. Into his real body comes evil, loss. While we can’t discern Providence’s hand We can see love in the suff’ring God-Man. Here is God’s answer to theodicy, Revealing scandalous love and mercy.

The mind of God is quite a thing to which advice we cannot bring. No, fully we don’t understand why this is what God has planned, and in his sovereign will he chose, to give you burdens more than most Under which many would’ve crumbled years ago. I grumbled,

“Liberation! When will it come?” All creation now groans for home.

As we yet still grumble as one for vindication of the Son remember the now and not yet. Now is the pain, do not forget. First Christ’s agony, then glory. Glory awaits us in our story, when God will take away the pain, and wipe away all crimson stain, redeem our bodies, heal our spines, unveil our eyes, and fix our minds.

Yes, God surely is working in you, Christ’s cross, resurrection proves it true. And though, through the furnace God does bring, May we yet praise him and truly sing with soft hearts and bodies not yet whole, “It is well, it is well with my soul.”

Persuade III.

Thinking theologically about all things

HEADY THOUGHTS ABOUT

Your Heart

by A. CRAIG TROXEL

LIFE IS FILLED WITH CHOICES. Some are as mundane as paper or plastic, while others are more serious, like the friend who insists, “You’re either with me or against me.” We are told that we must choose between success or happiness, hard work or a social life, science or art, being an extrovert or an introvert. It’s this or that. Some Christians would add that you must choose between your head and your heart. It reminds me of the Tin Man in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz who said to the Scarecrow, “But once I had brains, and a heart also; so, having tried them both, I should much rather have a heart.” The Tin Man apparently considered the head and the heart irreconcilable rivals. Perhaps you agree.

We moderns tend to associate the heart with feeling, not thinking. Naturally, this leads some to think that our knowledge of God and our love for God are two separate things. Or that it’s more spiritual to draw insight from inward intuition than theological reflection. Must a Christian, then, choose between a religion of the intellect and of the affections?

The Bible never asks us to choose between our heart and our thinking. It never encourages the impression that the heart’s mind is somehow less spiritual than the heart’s desires or will. The Bible holds these together, cordially. It might surprise many Christians to hear that according to Scripture, if your heart principally does one thing: it thinks. Let’s explore how Scripture regards the heart and its functions.

The Heart’s Unity and Its Complexity

The Bible uses the word heart more than any other word to describe our inner person (far more than words like soul and spirit). Summarizing the teaching of Scripture, we can say the heart governs the totality of our inner self—everything we think, desire, and choose flows from this one source. It is the fountainhead of every spiritual faculty within us—the spring of every motive, the seat of every passion, and the center of every thought. Your heart is the helm of your ship. The bearing it sets is the course your life will follow. That’s why the Bible interconnects your speech, repentance, faith, service, treasure, obedience, worship, walk, and love with “all your heart.” 1 Put simply, the Bible speaks of your capacity to think, desire, feel, and choose as centered in your heart.

Within this central unity of the heart, however, the Bible also describes a threefold complexity of functions: the mind, the desires, and the will. To put this another way, the heart includes what we know (our intellect, knowledge, thought, intentions, ideas, meditation, memory, imagination), what we love (what

Summarizing the teaching of Scripture, we can say the heart governs the totality of our inner self—everything we think, desire, and choose flows from this one source.

we desire, want, seek, crave, yearn for, feel), and what we choose (whether we will resist or submit, whether we will say “yes” or “no”).2

The biblical language of the heart, therefore, beautifully brings together this cooperative network of our intellect, affections, and will. This complex unity of the heart has been foundational to my own Reformed theological tradition in both its scholarly and popular forms. As a consistent biblical paradigm, it has also proven itself over time and has been confirmed by contemporary scholarship. Thus the word heart in Scripture is simple enough to reflect our inner unity and comprehensive enough to capture our inner threefold complexity.

The Heart’s Desires

Whether pursued righteously or sinfully, the heart desires companionship, security, encouragement, happiness, comfort, and satisfaction. The word used throughout the Bible for lust, fleshly passion, and worldly desire is the same word Jesus uses to express his desire to eat the Passover with his disciples.3 The term Paul uses for the desires of the flesh is the same one he uses for the desires of the Spirit (Gal. 5:16–17). Desires become sinful only when their object is out of bounds or the desire itself is out of balance.4 But all desires are strong cravings—hungry and thirsty spiritual appetites.5 We desire not simply what we like but what we love—what Christ calls our treasure (Matt. 6:21). We get emotional about our treasure. That is why Scripture associates the heart with feelings like anger, joy, envy, rage, anxiety, longing, sorrow, lovesickness, anguish, despair, and many other emotions (depending on whether our desires are satisfied, frustrated, or denied). Our hearts go out to what we love, and in this way our desires bring out what lies at the core of who we are.

The Heart’s Will

Often when the word heart appears in Scripture, its volitional function is in view: not only what we want but what we choose . The will decides whether we resist or submit to what we desire. Will my heart say yes or no? The battle for control of the heart is fought in the will. Which way the battle goes corresponds with the will’s strength or weakness, its callousness or brokenness, its being hardened by sin or made new by grace. The unbelieving heart’s sinful will is a stubborn, unyielding “heart of stone”—like Pharaoh’s hardened heart that resists God in rebellion. 6 At the same time, this will is weak, unable to resist temptation. It is enslaved, unstable, apathetic, and afraid. 7 The Christian’s heart made new by the Spirit, in direct contrast, enjoys a will that is both surrendered and strengthened. While always imperfect in this life, it nevertheless increasingly bows before God, grieves over sin, and serves Christ with humility. 8 That same renewed heart has resolved to obey the Lord and is

Desires become sinful only when their object is out of bounds or the desire itself is out of balance.

emboldened to die to sin, defy the world, and resist the devil.9 Your heart does not simply know or desire; it decides.

The Heart’s Mind

Finally, according to the Bible, the third function or capacity of the heart is to think. Let’s spend a little more time on this one, since we’re so used to thinking about thinking with our heads. You will not find biblical references to your head as the locale for your thinking. Human knowledge, wisdom, plans, ideas, meditation, imagination—along with confusion, ignorance, and folly—are all lodged in the heart. For example, Paul prays for the Ephesians, “May [God] give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened” (Eph. 1:17–18). The heart can receive the light of God’s truth just as it can be blind and suffer confusion or doubt.10 “Out of the heart come evil thoughts,” Jesus says (Matt. 15:19). The heart is where our knowledge resides: “I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord” (Jer. 24:7). Simeon prophesied that through Jesus’ birth the “thoughts from many hearts” would be revealed (Luke 2:35). The cynicism of the religious leaders sprang not from within their brains but from within their chests: “But Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, ‘Why do you think evil in your hearts?’” (Matt. 9:4; Mark 2:6). Psalm 139:23 and Proverbs 3:5 draw the parallel succinctly: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts !” and “Trust in the Lord with all your heart , and do not lean on your own understanding.”

In Genesis 6:5, the thoughts of the heart are on appalling display: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” The word of God speaks to the heart’s mind: “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). Our Lord assumed the same when he explained why he speaks in parables: “For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them’” (Matt. 13:15; cf. Isa. 6:9–10).

English versions of the Bible often translate “heart” with words like understanding, sense, or, most often, mind. 11 When the words heart and mind appear together in Scripture—as they often do—it shows that they are friends, not rivals. 12

You will not find biblical references to your head as the locale for your thinking. Human knowledge, wisdom, plans, ideas, meditation, imagination— along with confusion, ignorance, and folly—are all lodged in the heart.

When you read the phrase “lacks sense” in the book of Proverbs, the literal phrase is “lacks heart.”13 It should not surprise us, then, that the Bible’s wisdom literature (especially the book of Proverbs) contains the highest concentration of occurrences of the word heart. These examples are only a small sample of the many places and ways that prove what Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield observed: that “the heart is the cognitive faculty in Scripture.” 14

The Heart’s Complex Unity in Action

To appreciate how the heart thinks, we need to remember that the mind, desires, and will form a unity. What we know, desire, and choose are not independent but in league. For example, our desires relate to what we know; we are capable of careful reasoning but not capable of dispassionate reasoning. We study most diligently what we love most dearly—whether good or bad. Healthy thinking is likewise connected to healthy desires and choices. A sick heart is a deceived heart (Jer. 17:9). When our desires are impure, so is our reasoning (Eph. 4:18; Rom. 1:21–22). When our hearts are renewed, we see and choose more clearly and wisely (Matt. 13:16). This is by God’s design. It is often supposed that strong feelings will only confuse our thinking. That can be true, but not always. Sometimes a burning, righteous zeal brings clarity and purpose. Passion arises to dislodge our apathy, and we finally jump into action because our heart can no longer take the distress.

We also see the connection between the mind and the rest of the heart in the ways our thinking is hopelessly entangled with our sinful desires and choices. A heart given over to impurity and rebellion can no longer sustain sound judgment. The roots of our reasoning reach down into the character of our heart. This is Paul’s reasoning in the first chapter of Romans: because the unbelieving heart has given itself to idolatrous and debased desires, it suppresses the truth and is itself given over to darkened, foolish, futile, and deceitful understanding. A deviant heart leads to a devious heart. As John Donne wrote in his Holy Sonnet 14,

Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captive’d, and proves weak or untrue.

When the heart is captivated by an illicit love, it will not listen to holy counsel, let alone common sense.

Similarly, we cannot speak of the mind’s thinking in abstraction from the heart’s will. The Reformers understood this well (as did Augustine before them). Martin Luther and John Calvin argued that a calloused heart does not see, does not believe, and does not freely choose God. This is of course what Paul meant when he wrote, “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does

What we know, desire, and choose are not independent but in league.

not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot” (Rom. 8:7). The heart’s thinking takes up an alliance with the heart’s choosing. The hardened heart is not just unfeeling; it is unbelieving.

Scripture unfolds this relationship between the mind and the will within the heart by asserting that our reasoning is not restricted to the content of thought; it also involves the direction of our thinking. For example, Paul writes, “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit” (Rom. 8:5). Your thoughts flow in the same direction as your life. The activity of your thinking is also the movement of your will. Our Lord assumed the same pattern of concerted thinking and willing when he rebuked Peter: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man” (Matt. 16:23). Jesus’ concern was not with a random thought from Peter, but with the whole orientation of Peter’s thinking. The will of the heart expresses itself deliberately in the thoughts we consciously entertain, in the desires we intentionally inflame, and in the directions we persistently chase.

We do not have to choose between aiming for the head or the heart. That is a false choice. The heart is where all thoughts live and move and have their being. And this is a good thing. It is how God designed us—and our salvation requires it.

The Heart’s Mind Renewed

To be born again means that God has given each of us a new heart. Just as every function and aspect of our old heart was perilously infected by sin, so also nothing in our new heart remains untouched by God’s grace—including our mind. God has graciously enlightened our understanding. Now we see our sin and we see its remedy in Christ so that we might call on the Lord with “a pure heart” (2 Tim. 2:22). God’s grace and truth shine “in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). This light does not bypass the mind. It opens the mind. Our hearts are full of saving belief, trust, love, confession, and salvation. We trust in Christ with our mind, with the assurance of a resolved will and the delight of renewed desires.

But this is just the beginning. There is so much more to learn. Our minds are transformed by the renewal that such knowledge brings (Rom. 12:2). With it arises more love for Christ, along with the strengthening of our will to follow him. This knowledge matures into a wisdom that makes right spiritual judgments and takes every thought captive in obedience to Christ (1 Thess. 5:21; 1 Cor. 2:15; 2 Cor. 10:5). God’s grace and truth penetrate the believer’s mind and raise it to its noble reward of entering into sweet communion with the living and true God, who promised, “They shall all know me” (Jer. 31:34).

The touchstone of what makes for true knowledge is that it leads us toward, not away from, an intimate whole-heart relationship with God. It brings us to

Reformer John Calvin's personal seal, a heart in a hand, referring to his motto "My heart I offer to you, O Lord, promptly and sincerely."

The touchstone of what makes for true knowledge is that it leads us toward, not away from, an intimate wholeheart relationship with God. It brings us to him who is the depth of life, love, joy, and peace.

him who is the depth of life, love, joy, and peace. This present life gives us days of small beginnings, but they are not to be despised. They lead to the eternal day. The light of God’s truth and grace has flooded our hearts and will lead us into the glorious presence of our God. He is the promised reward for those who look to Christ in faith, the One who committed all his thinking, desiring, and willing to his Father and to us in saving devotion. Then it will be clear (as it should be now) that we do not have to choose between knowing him and loving him and choosing him when we give him all our heart.

A. Craig Troxel is the Robert G. den Dulk Professor of Practical Theology at Westminster Seminary California. He is the author of  With All Your Heart: Orienting Your Mind, Desires, and Will Toward Christ (Crossway, 2020).

22:37.

2. Genesis 6:5; Pss. 19:14; 49:3; 77:6; 139:23; Prov. 15:14, 28; Matt. 5:19; Luke 2:19; 6:45; Rom. 10:9; Eph. 1:18; 4:18; Heb. 4:12; 8:10.

3. Numbers 11:4; 1 Sam. 2:16; 23:20; Ps. 106:14; Deut. 12:15; Pss. 45:11; 132:13; Isa. 26:9; Matt. 5:28; Gal. 5:24; 1 John 2:16–17; Matt. 13:17; Luke 22:15; Acts 20:33; Rom. 1:24; 6:12; 7:7; 13:9; Col. 3:5; 1 Tim. 6:9; 1 John 2:16.

4. John Freeman, Hide or Seek: When Men Get Real with God about Sex (Greensboro, NC: New Growth, 2014), 16.

5. Psalm 63:1; Isa. 55:2; Matt. 5:6; John 4:10; 6:32, 48, 55; Heb. 5:14; 1 Pet. 2:2.

6. Ezekiel 36:26; 2 Chron. 36:13; Ezek. 3:7; Acts 19:9; Rom. 2:5; cf. 11:7; 2 Cor. 3:14; Exod. 4:21; 7:3, 13, 14, 22; 8:15, 19, 32; 9:7, 12, 34, 35; 10:1, 20, 27; 11:10; 14:4, 8, 17.

7. Genesis 42:28; Deut. 1:28; 20.8; Josh. 2:11; 2 Sam. 17:10.

8. Isaiah 66:2; 2 Cor. 7:10–12; Matt. 5:4.

9. Judges 8:21; 1 Sam. 2:1; 1 Chron. 22:19; Ezek. 40:4; Dan. 1:8; Acts 4:13; James 4:7; 1 Pet. 5:9.

10. Deuteronomy 28:28; Luke 24:38; Matt. 13:15; Mark 2:6; Prov. 15:14.

11. Exodus 14:5; 1 Kings 3:9; Prov. 19:21; Dan. 2:30.

12. Psalm 26:2; 64:6; Jer. 17:10; 20:12; Matt. 22:37 (Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27).

13. Proverbs 7:7; 9:4, 16; 10:13; 11:12; 12:11; 15:21; 24:30; 6.32; 9:16; 11:12; 12:11; 15:21; 17:18; 24:30.

14. B. B. Warfield, The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield, vol. 9, Studies in Theology (1932; rprt., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 464–65.

1. Matthew 6:21; Luke 6:45; Deut. 30:2; 1 Sam. 7:3; Jer. 24:7; Prov. 3:5–6; 4:23; Deut. 10:12; Pss. 86:12; 119:34; Isa 38:3; Matt.

DIVINE Story

by ZEPHRAM FOSTER

IHAD ALWAYS FELT LIFE first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller. —G.

1

K. Chesterton

Stories Are Soul Food

Creativity flows from the fact that we are made in the image of God our Creator. To image him is to be creative, or as Tolkien coined, to subcreate. It is a great gift to us and others to be able to reorganize the ingredients God has given us into something new that is true, good, and beautiful.

There are a few fundamental forms by which we creatively pass along the human experience. We have the visual arts, by which we can transport others into our own palette, our own worlds, and show them things bigger than we can describe. We have music, which allows us to pour out longings and feelings in a way images or words alone cannot capture. And then we have story, which is not only its own art form but is found at the heart of every other.

Stories are the atoms by which the molecules of creative culture are constructed. Whether explicitly or implicitly, music, paintings, and poems all tell stories. The clearest expressions of story in our culture, however, come in forms such as the novel, the play, and the film. Film is possibly the most intricate example of storytelling available to us, combining the written word with theater, music, and the visual arts.

But music, which does not require images or even words to be meaningful, may be the best example to help us understand the nature of story. Think of your favorite song—whether a Beatles tune, a Beethoven symphony, or something from the soundtrack to Moana. Regardless of whether a certain piece has words, each one revolves around tension and release, harmony and dissonance. It evokes moods and shares meaning as it moves from a beginning to an end (whether the end resolves or remains unsettled). This meaningful movement is story, and it’s embedded in everything we humans create, however obvious or subtle.

Storytelling has not only been with us since the beginning, but it also communicates meaning to us in a way that bare fact cannot. This isn’t to say that in some sense story is pitted against fact; rather, story is fact fermented. In the words of N. D. Wilson, stories are soul food: They feed our spirit and nourish our hearts. So, whether we engage in storytelling through fiction or nonfiction, songwriting, painting, podcasting, or in any other form, we’re called to wield the image of God by faithfully reflecting his work of creative meaning-making for his glory and one another’s good.

Our minds can hold only what fits inside them, and the shape of our minds is determined by the stories we hear, by the sentiments we hold dear, and by the values guiding our desires.

Stories are effective because they teach us primarily by shaping our minds rather than simply filling them with information. They provide the matrix through which facts are interpreted. Objective truth and the story within which truth is found cannot be separated. After all, any fact, no matter how objective, is always interpreted. Even the facts unknown to us, the secret things that belong to God, are still given meaning by the One who purposed it all. Our minds can hold only what fits inside them, and the shape of our minds is determined by the stories we hear, by the sentiments we hold dear, and by the values guiding our desires. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “The head rules the belly through the chest.” 2 Lewis here isn’t pitting the head against the heart as two opposing sides within us. Rather, he’s distinguishing our thinking from our desires and feelings. Our sentiments—and therefore our reasoning and our choices—are shaped by the stories we know that convince us of the truth in a way they alone can. Feelings are not here pitted against reason; good judgment should still rule, but it can do so only through properly ordered desires. If we emphasize intellect at the expense of our will or feelings, then we get cold rationalism. Flip it around, and we have fuzzy sentimentalism. When each is strong and properly functioning within our minds or hearts, we have the rightly ordered means by which to interpret fact. In any case, story cannot be pitted against pure fact because story is fact ordered by God.

History as Story

History is a story written by the finger of God. —C. S. Lewis 3

The doctrine of providence tells us that God guides all things and that, in his grand story, he has chosen to write us as characters—real, true characters with moral integrity and responsible agency—into his grand opera. God acts in the world not only directly by miracle but also through secondary causes. He is weaving a magnificent tapestry of meaning in the heavens that will stand for all eternity so that all may look upon it and say that he is good and merciful. The story of redemption is the story that impresses upon us that the Creator is loving, gracious, kind, and powerful. This means that history—all of history—is a story that is meant to display the glory of God most fully, by which his goodness will be made most manifest. Even the darkness will somehow make the light seem all the brighter.

So, contrary to the popular quotation, history is not simply “one damned thing after another.” In fact, history, like all great stories, is filled to the brim with meaning if only we have eyes to see and ears to understand. How many tales of wartime heroism inspire us to righteous bravery as children? How often have stories from our parents given us a better understanding of where we come from? If I am a character in a bigger story, then the author has a reason for my entrance at this point. I have a role to play; I have a king to serve; I was put here for a reason. There are good works prepared ahead of time for me to do (Eph. 2:10); my

life and actions are of eternal importance because they will belong forever to the permanent story of the history of the world.

God weaves story into the fabric of his providential guidance of history and its meaning, but he also uses story to communicate that meaning to us as his beloved creatures. God is the author of all things and the author of a special book. God packed his book to humanity full of stories, along with celebrations and explanations of those stories and applications of them to our individual and communal lives. ***

The True Myth

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by “the veil of familiarity.” —C. S. Lewis 4

Myth is one of the most common forms that story has taken in the course of the world thus far, and it is central to Christianity. Much ink has been spilled on myth and its role in thinking theologically and typologically about the world. Lewis defined myth as, “at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.” Christ is the “myth become fact,” as Lewis went on to put it, the true myth to which nearly all world cultures refer, if only through shadows and echoes.5 Myth is in the marrow of the world, because God has imprinted creation with his eternal plan of redemption. A dying God come to earth to sacrifice or to conquer, a hero come to save, is a story repeated constantly in antiquity. The general outline of this story (and the longing for it to come true) seems baked into the cosmos—and why shouldn’t it be? Christ is indeed the “Lamb slain before the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13). God’s plan reaches back before time existed and permeates the whole of creation as its appointed end. This means, among many other things, that even stories not explicitly Christian implicitly endorse divine truth for those with ears to hear.

For example, a common question among young believers, secularists, and critics of Christianity is, “Why did God allow the fall?” Better yet, why did God proceed with creation in the first place, knowing what would come of it? Why not avoid such evil altogether? Let’s reframe such questions in light of Christianity as the true myth. Why did J. R. R. Tolkien write Melkor (his version of Satan) into the story of The Lord of the Rings, allowing him to sow discord into the original music of creation, which led to so much evil and suffering in the world of Middle-earth? Why not write a story in which Bilbo the hobbit sits around for hundreds of pages, smoking pipe-weed, and having yet another breakfast? The answer is glaringly obvious: it would be a terrible story. No characters would experience any growth through obstacles to overcome, there would be no displays of genuine courage or hard-won virtue, and there would be no ultimate victory. In fact, through the words of Middle-earth’s Creator God, Eru Iluvatar, Tolkien attempts to answer this very mystery of brokenness in the world:

If I am a character in a bigger story, then the author has a reason for my entrance at this point. I have a role to play; I have a king to serve; I was put here for a reason.

When God again walks alongside us in the new creation, it will be a deeper and more intimate communion than we could have had otherwise, because we sinned and yet God became man.

“And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.” 6

It is in the redemption of a fallen, enemy race that God most clearly displays his mercy, grace, and love. It is in this story that God has written an ending more poignant and beautiful for all its conflict. When God again walks alongside us in the new creation, it will be a deeper and more intimate communion than we could have had otherwise, because we sinned and yet God became man. Because God became man, he redeemed all flesh and became the firstfruits of the resurrection. The story of Emmanuel redeeming our human race reaches to greater depths and heights than the story of the unfallen angels remaining in heavenly places. As Saint Athanasius marveled: because God has become man, man will become like God.

Tell Stories

Everything that has moved or shall move in heaven, and earth, and hell, has been, is, and shall be according to the counsel and foreknowledge of God, fulfilling a holy, just, wise and unalterable purpose. —C. H. Spurgeon7

Our understanding of the significance of story affects how we value history, how we think about the tales we hear through Scripture, novel, film, and theater, and it will affect the stories we choose to tell ourselves and one another. In light of the fundamental importance of story for grasping God’s purposes in history and in redemption, I want to end by urging you to adopt a single vital practice: tell stories. Tell them to your children and grandchildren, but also to anyone who needs to hear the truth about God and the world in a way that cuts straight to the heart. Choose good stories, ones that speak to divine realities, and equip your hearers for hardships and challenges, ones that shape their affections and direct them toward worship of their king. Tell stories that turn their hearts toward righteousness.

Not every person needs to be a writer, an artist, or a musician by vocation. But every person should be a storyteller, every person should be an artist, and every person should be a musician singing in service of glorifying the Lamb who was slain. We should aim to reflect the true, the good, and the beautiful in all we do, understanding how vitally the stories we hear and tell shape our hearts. The Creator is speaking through his creation and speaking in time, and he’s doing it in a way that displays his character.

Stories comfort us, challenge us, and guide us. It is so good for the stories shaping us as Christians to be stories from Scripture, stories of God’s faithfulness and of faithful saints overcoming persecution, of praising the Giver even when he

gives trials. And along with the stories directly from Scripture, all of us are shaped by other great stories that in their own ways reflect and magnify scriptural truths. In times of doubt, I have the apostle Peter and his denial of Christ, and I also have Trumpkin the doubting dwarf in The Chronicles of Narnia. Whenever I feel persecuted or attacked for righteousness’s sake, I have Saint Stephen the Martyr as well as Star Wars ’ Jedi Master Ben Kenobi as examples. When I am called to bravery and courage and must fight back against evil for the sake of the good or to protect the innocent, I have King David and also King Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings to look to for hope and encouragement. These stories have shaped my affections more than any lecture or list of abstract facts ever could; they have penetrated to my very soul.

Stories aren’t just any soul food; they deliver truth intravenously. They are potent in shaping our sympathies from the inside out. Story is how we communicate as humans, and it embodies the legacies we receive and pass on. Since this is true, let’s aim to communicate the story of this world and our own clearly, beautifully, and bravely, for the glory of God. As Lewis writes,

In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use.8

Zephram Foster is a writer and musician from Tahlequah, Oklahoma. He works in higher education and in youth ministry at a Reformed Baptist Church, along with writing songs, blogs, and hosting a film podcast called Not Qualified. He has been published in Touchstone magazine, Front Porch Republic, and elsewhere. Visit www.zeffoster.com.

In light of the fundamental importance of story for grasping God’s purposes in history and in redemption, I want to end by urging you to adopt a single vital practice: tell stories.

1. G. K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane, 1908), ch. 4.

2. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (New York: Macmillan, 1965), ch. 1.

3. C. S. Lewis, “Historicism,” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 100–13.

4. C. S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

5. Miracles (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 176; “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 66–67.

6. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).

7. C. H. Spurgeon, “A Feast for Faith,” September 16, 1866, Sermon, Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit.

8. Lewis, “Men without Chests,” The Abolition of Man, ch. 1.

POEM

Clouds of Dirt

by Lyndi Brey

Dirt kicked up with folly, laughter, and play; ignorance was bliss as we played board games. “He’s gone,” we overheard our mother say. There was no response as we called his name.

All our eyes were wide and stomachs lurching; as we held back tears and ran whilst praying. Clouds of dirt kicked up as we were searching, Not accompanying laughter, playing.

The river flowed as steadily as God, A contradiction to my rushing pulse. Windborne beneath our feet was gravel; sod. Mental movie screen previewing demulce.

A wave of peace at last—the sight ahead: the lost and little boy beneath the bed.

Engage IV.

Connecting with our time and place

THE Thoughts OF THE HEART

by PHILLIP CARY

IN THE BIBLE, the heart is not just where people have emotions. It’s also where they think. In a good translation of Scripture, you will often hear about the thoughts of the heart. It’s a holistic way of talking: it unites thoughts and feelings in a single whole by putting them together in the same place, rather than cutting them apart and locating them in different compartments—thoughts in the head, feelings in the heart. The Bible evidently wants us to realize that our thinking and feeling always go together.

You can see this in biblical Hebrew, where the word most often translated as “mind” is actually the word for “heart” (lev or the closely related word levav), which refers to the organ in your chest as well as to the place where you think and feel. But that’s not the only part of you that both thinks and feels. You can also think with your gut, as the good Samaritan does when he sees a man lying half-dead on the roadside and has compassion on him (Luke 10:33). The Greek term for this compassion refers to the bowels (splanchnizomai), like the King James Bible in its description of “bowels of mercy” (Col. 3:12; cf. Phil. 2:1; 1 John 3:17, using the word splanchnon). Jesus has this gut-level compassion on the crowds throughout the Gospels (e.g., Matt. 14:14; Mark 6:34). You can even think with your kidneys (just look up “reins” in a concordance of the King James Bible—it’s an old word related to “renal”—and then compare it with a recent translation, and you’ll see).

What you won’t see in a good translation is talk of people using their heads to think. (The only exception I know of is Nebuchadnezzar, who seems to dream in his head in Dan. 2:28.) Even in New Testament Greek, which unlike biblical Hebrew does have a separate word for “mind” (nous), biblical writers do not talk as if the mind and its thinking are located in the head. In Luke 5:22, for example, Jesus knows the thoughts that are in the Pharisees’ hearts, not their heads.

One consequence of this biblical habit of speech is that Scripture never tries to find a way to bring head and heart together. There would be no point to it. We already think, feel, desire, and understand in one and the same place. Call it the heart—though you can also call it the spirit or soul or indeed mind or kidneys if you wish.

The Bible is not fussy about exactly where to locate our thoughts, it seems, because it’s not trying to give us a theory about the mind. It is conveying how it feels to think, such as when the sight of human suffering hits you in the gut. So, we need not be fussy either. We don’t have to use exactly the same terms as biblical Greek or Hebrew in order to learn from the Bible’s way of speaking, where thoughts and feelings occur together in the same place.

What I am suggesting is that we never have to make the effort to bring our thoughts and feelings together because they were never separate in the first place. The problems we have about head and heart today, both in education and

We never have to make the effort to bring our thoughts and feelings together because they were never separate in the first place.

Christian discipleship, arise mainly from bad habits of speech. We talk as if our thinking originates in a place different from our feelings, and that makes it hard to notice what’s really going on in our hearts. We overlook the way our thinking is always affected by our feelings—sometimes driven by them—and also the way our feelings are stirred up by our thoughts. If we adopted more biblical habits of speech, we would have a better understanding of ourselves, our hearts and minds, and our moral lives.

Consider one familiar habit of speech that’s a problem particularly for teachers. People often talk about “head knowledge” as if this were different from “heart knowledge.” But if the biblical habit of speech is right, then all knowledge inevitably shapes our hearts. It’s just that some forms of knowledge do so in a shallow way. Students know this. What they call “head knowledge” is something that gives them no practical ability other than knowing how to give the right answer on a test. Once the test is over, they have no more use for this kind of knowledge, so they go on thinking just as they did before. Shallow knowledge, in other words, does not deeply shape the heart in its emotions or actions or its thoughts.

Thoughts are different from emotions, to be sure, but they don’t take place in an emotionless brain. It’s possible to miss this point, because when we’re thinking hard, we’re often not paying attention to our feelings or bodies. Moreover, thinking typically goes best when our emotions are calm rather than explosive, because many kinds of thinking (such as solving a math problem) require a fair amount of peace and quiet. Indeed, those of us who love math know there’s a special, quiet kind of excitement—even joy—that comes with figuring out an abstract problem.

This is why ancient Western philosophers sometimes spoke as if they were trying to protect their thoughts from their emotions. To put it in Greek, they wanted apatheia, which literally means freedom from passion. By “passion,” they meant emotions that get out of control and drive us to do stupid things—like raging anger and paralyzing fear and poisonous resentment. So apatheia is related to self-control, and it’s a quality of soul that ancient Christian writers often admired. Unfortunately, the word has sometimes been translated as “apathy”— but it’s really about something quite different, as we can see in the dialogues of Plato in which Socrates is presented (as later philosophers recognized) as a model of apatheia

Plato portrays Socrates as calm but not emotionless. He is persistently cheerful and often a bit amused, but he is remarkably free from overwhelming passions. He doesn’t get upset when his friends disagree with him or his enemies insult him. He’s always willing to have his ideas criticized. This is an emotional freedom that helps him keep his eye on the prize, which is the pursuit of wisdom through intellectual conversation. It also helps him to be patient and kind with people who don’t quite follow what he’s saying. Thus his apatheia puts his emotional life at the service of the shared work of philosophical inquiry.

There is more to life than philosophical inquiry, of course, and when we look beyond Socrates, we can see that emotions serve the work of thought in more than one way. The gut-level compassion of the good Samaritan gets him thinking

about how he can help the man lying half-dead on the roadside. Ruth’s intense feelings of loyalty to Naomi teach her how to think about the God of Israel. David’s joy as he dances before the ark of the Lord is a way of knowing who God is.

But it’s not just virtuous thinking and feeling that go together. Thoughts and feelings go together in a wicked heart as well. The jealousy of the scribes and Pharisees leads them to thoughts about how to get rid of Jesus. Herod is constantly thinking about how to stay in power, and the result is murderous rage when he hears that there is a newborn king in Bethlehem. Pilate, intimidated by an unruly crowd, is led by his fears to think of excuses for putting an innocent man to death. For better or for worse, feelings inspire thoughts and thoughts stir up feelings—and both give shape to our hearts, to our vices as well as our virtues.

The task of moral formation and Christian discipleship is misdescribed, therefore, if we conceive of it as bringing head and heart together. Our thoughts and feelings are already working together, for good or ill. Growth in righteousness always means cultivating both truthful habits of thought and virtuous habits of feeling, for the two are inseparable. We think more clearly—and more like Jesus—when the suffering we encounter on the road affects us like a kick in the gut or a pain in the heart.

Phillip Cary is professor and department chair of philosophy at Eastern University. He is the author of Good News for Anxious Christians (Brazos, 2022) and The Nicene Creed (Lexham, 2023).

For better or for worse, feelings inspire thoughts and thoughts stir up feelings—and both give shape to our hearts, to our vices as well as our virtues.

Book Reviews

Heart and Head: A Brief Bibliography

by A. Craig Troxel

The following books deal with the heart in various ways. Those by Jerry Bridges, Murray Capill, Elyse Fitzpatrick, and Kris Lundgaard feature extended sections on a biblical view of the heart. They build on John Owen and explain his insights in easily understood terms. Reading Owen directly is a challenge, but he rewards richly. John Flavel will put your heart to the test with a velvet hammer.

Phillip Cary, Os Guinness, C. S. Lewis, and R. C. Sproul each pay tribute to the mind and its importance in following Christ. Jonathan Edwards’s famous work displays his unique approach to the desires of the heart, but his is a handsome voice that adds a distinctive part to this distinguished choir.

A. Craig Troxel is the Robert G. den Dulk Professor of Practical Theology at Westminster Seminary California.

• Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness, 25th anniversary edition (NavPress, 2003).

• Murray Capill, The Heart Is the Target: Preaching Practical Application from Every Text (P&R, 2014).

• Phillip Cary, Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don’t Have to Do (Brazos Press, 2022). See ch. 6, “Why You Don’t Need to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart.”

• Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections (1746; Banner of Truth Trust, 2013).

• Sinclair B. Ferguson, “Preaching to the Heart,” in Feed My Sheep: A Passionate Plea for Preaching , edited by Don Kistler (Reformation Trust, 2008).

• Elyse Fitzpatrick, Idols of the Heart: Learning to Long for God Alone (P&R, 2016).

• John Flavel, Keeping the Heart: How to Maintain Your Love for God (Christian Focus, 2012).

• Os Guinness, Doubt: Faith in Two Minds (Lion, 1976).

• C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Macmillan, 1955; HarperOne, 2015).

• Kris Lundgaard, The Enemy Within: Straight Talk about the Power and Defeat of Sin (P&R, 2023).

• John Owen, The Mortification of Sin (1656; Banner of Truth Trust, 2022); Indwelling Sin in Believers (1667; Banner of Truth Trust, 2022).

• R. C. Sproul, “Preaching to the Mind,” in Feed My Sheep: A Passionate Plea for Preaching, edited by Don Kistler (Reformation Trust, 2008).

POEM

A Prayer

by Sara DuBose

Wean me from the world

From its worries

And its wealth.

Show me how to move

When you don’t remove

The problem.

Help me see how

I must bleed

If I’m to ever bless

And in it all

May I display

Your truth

And righteousness.

Head and Heart

by Michael Horton

THROUGHOUT CHURCH HISTORY, many have tried to identify the one mysterious thing within us that makes us truly human. Often, that special thing has been identified as our soul or even a specific capacity of the soul. Medieval schools debated which capacity: the Dominicans (following Aquinas) held to the priority of the intellect, while the Franciscans (following Scotus) gave precedence to the will or affections. According to the Dominicans, the will chooses that which the intellect already approves, while the Franciscans insist that love leads to knowledge. This disagreement over the core of what makes us human spilled over into a practical contrast between the good life as contemplative (studying and meditating) or active (loving and serving).

For his part, John Calvin was intentionally vague about the head-heart academic debate. Calvin scholars disagree over whether he was an intellectualist or a voluntarist. Wary of entering the fray, Calvin preferred to consider the soul as exercising various “powers” simultaneously: sense, intellect, and desire or will (Inst. 1.15.6). As in the Bible, he identified the soul with the heart (1.15.7; 2.2.7, 12; 2.3.7; 2.5.15).1

Calvin’s overarching category for properly ordered human life was piety. Piety is assured faith, which involves knowledge, assent, and trust; the whole person is engaged and refuses all false choices between spirituality and activism. Thus Calvin can say of a doctrine, “Justification by faith . . . is the sum of all piety” (3.15.7). He even called his

Institutes, a primer on Christian teaching, a “summary of piety” (3.3.1, 16).

Like Luther, Calvin turned our focus from looking within to looking outside of ourselves to discover the one thing that makes us who we really are. The whole human being is created in God’s image. Likewise, the whole person is corrupted by sin, and the whole person set free in Christ, the true and perfect man.

In our fallen condition, we’re always tempted to search for something in us that makes us human that remains relatively untainted by sinful corruption. Yet Paul taught in Romans 10: “God does not command us to ascend into heaven, but, because of our weakness, he descends to us.” Still today, God descends all the way to where we live, through ordinary human language, water, bread, and wine.2 His landing place is not any particular aspect of us uniquely suitable to welcome him, but the whole person. It is his external word and sacraments that sweetly incline our hearts toward him, producing faith, that generates love and bears the fruit of good works. Here, there is no division between head and heart. It is the whole person who receives Christ and who loves and serves others as Christ loves us.

Michael Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation.

1. Calvin on Ps 8:3 (CR LIX:54); a key summary is found in Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.5.7.

2. Calvin on Romans 10, in Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. 19, trans. John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 381–407; cf. Herman Selderhuis, Calvin’s Theology of the Psalms (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 203, on Pss. 42:2; 24:7.

Equip Your Church

RESOURCES TO AID DISCIPLESHIP

Designed to help people find answers to common questions and dig deeper into foundational truths, our Core booklets are ideal tools for discipleship. Typically fewer than a hundred pages and always written by trusted authors, these booklets provide rich, accessible content for personal reflection and group discussion.