2. Fundamentally super-rational, not cerebral. This correlates to the previous point. We reject the notion that reason and intellect are the pinnacle of human capabilities. While we recognize that most people abuse the word “mysticism,” making it mean something useless and irrational, we contend that God will scarcely bother with addressing Himself to human intellect, but calls to us from far higher faculties. Revelation is inherently mystical. We assert that He gave us other forms of “knowing” that are hard-wired into human nature. We reject the Western dismissive attitude about anything not rational. Faith is above reason, not below it.
Inherent in this assumption is a uniquely biblical anthropology; human nature has been revealed from Heaven and needs no refinement or replacement. It’s not a question of facts, but of function. The Bible takes quite seriously that the core of human moral awareness is not in the brain, but in the heart, and presents the heart in terms wholly different from Western culture. In Scripture, the heart is not quasi-emotional, but is the seat of faith, of moral will and the place in the human soul where God speaks. The same heart can be wicked, deeply compromised and misleading, and the mind can simply shut out the superior moral awareness of the heart. But God gave us our brains to organize and implement obedience as a servant of the heart. The intellect is fallen and untrustworthy. This is the terminology of the Bible and clearly how God wants us to envision our human nature.
Faith comes from the heart; the heart can directly perceive God’s divine moral character as a Person. In our minds we meet that faith coming down, bringing to His revelation our experience and thoughts to form religion as a response to His individual calling on our lives. No two of us can possibly have the exact same religion. Truth is not revealed as objective and codified; there is no such thing as propositional truth. That common notion in our Western world arises from a rejection of genuine faith. It is the mind arrogantly usurping the proper dominance of the heart. In the Bible, truth is personal; ultimate truth is God’s Person, His moral character. To imagine truth as objective and concrete is idolatry of man’s intellect. Our God is not a static and concrete idea, but a living Person. We know Him in our hearts, not in our heads.
