Radix Fidem Curriculum: Anthropology

6. Anthropology

Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, are bound under a horrific, demonic mythology about the heart. It’s far more than an organ that pumps blood through you body. Even scientists know that the heart has its own sensory field that extends outward two or three times our height. It can mesh with the same field in other people, or even other creatures. However, science has no clue what that interaction means.

That’s because American science in particular has no clue what the heart signifies in the Bible. For Westerners, it is a repository of sentiment; this is the pernicious myth. We are taught to think of it as our upbringing, values, traditions and our particular desires. The only reason Western culture imagines such a thing is because the Western conscience is connected to nothing on the other side. The heart is supposed to be on the other side of that link; that’s how God made us. However, Western intellectual traditions vehemently deny that there can be anything above the intellect.

So we end up with a conscience filled with nonsense. The conscience is a part of the mind, the interface with a higher faculty. It’s supposed to link to the heart and bring to the intellect an awareness of the convictions. However, Western minds are conditioned to think the heart is nothing more than our sentiments arising from conditioning and experience, rather like Freud’s superego. But there is nothing there; it’s a false model. There is only the conscience hauling around a load of fallen human conditioning.

For most people, once they are made to understand that the heart is a sensory organ of its own, that it is a higher faculty that touches eternity, can usually allow it to dominate. They are capable of shifting the locus of conscious awareness (the ego) into the heart and out of the intellect. They can become heart-led, not led by mere fallen reason. Thus begins a long journey of discovery that teaches the conscience to discount conditioning and hear the ultimate moral truth of God written in our hearts as conviction. That electromagnetic sensory field extending from the heart is meant to read the moral realm. It’s meant to discern the character of God woven into the very fabric of Creation.

This process of shift means learning to listen to your conscience even in its current confusion. If you don’t use your conscience, it cannot learn to take out the trash, because it won’t know what is trash until you test it. It takes time and experience and lots of failure to begin hearing from the convictions written by the finger of God in our hearts. We have to remove many layers of deception. Of course, the other part of the process is comparing our conscience with the Bible, and Biblical Law in particular. That is, we have to compare it with the revelation in the person of Jesus Christ, the Living Law of God.

And this is where we have to return to the Hebrew conception of things, so that we can have an honest report of what Jesus meant by what He taught. He spoke mostly in parables, because divine moral truth cannot be described and delineated; it can only be indicated as a real place in your soul that you must explore. The ultimate truth is that you cannot change reality at all, but by the power of the Cross, you can change yourself. The ultimate miracle is the restoration of the self to God’s design, to His own divine moral character.

Of course, a critical part of that goal is creating in ourselves a living expression of that divine moral character. Then we discover that the electromagnetic field emanating from the heart can project that divine moral character to others. They will sense it, whether consciously or otherwise, and their own moral journey can be encouraged. Science cannot measure such things; the intellect cannot ascertain moral right and wrong by itself. It has no point of reference beyond the fallen inner nature and fleshly desires. It only pretends that there could be an objective standard in reality; it’s imaginary. We must teach our flesh to bow the knee to the Creator as the only One who can reveal the ultimate truth about His Creation.