It’s a tragedy of Western culture that relegates the heart to a mere metaphor of human emotion. Ours is the only culture that does that; every other civilization seems to have understood that the heart is quite literally the seat of a higher level of understanding. Recently scientists have discovered that the heart has a sensory field more powerful than the brain, connected to a parallel neuron network of its own. It’s not simply a figure of speech when the Bible refers to the heart as the one place where you can hear the voice of God. He doesn’t speak to the intellect, so if you don’t have your heart attuned to His voice, you can’t hear Him at all.
Early Christians were very Hebraic. This is not the same thing as the Hellenized Judaism of Christ’s day and that we still see today. Rather, Christ was calling His people back to the ancient Hebrew perspective that predated Greece and Rome. He called them back to the Ancient Near Eastern intellectual assumptions about life and reality itself. The Old Testament arose within that frame of reference, and simply cannot be understood from a Western viewpoint.
The Bible speaks consistently of the heart as the seat of the will, the driving sense of commitment to eternal values and questions of morality. Scripture further presumes the reader understands that the heart is superior to the mind. Human intellect was treated as an extension of the fallen fleshly nature, incapable of dealing with genuine moral considerations. Rather, the heart was where real decisions in life were made. The mind could smother the voice of the heart, but it could in no wise do the same work.
Whatever it is that God has to tell us, He speaks to our hearts, not to our minds. In order to understand how this works, we need to go back and rebuild the ancient Hebrew cosmology and anthropology.
