You won’t get this from the history books because those who write them don’t acknowledge the fundamental truth of our human existence.
Do you get tired of hearing about this heart-led stuff? Then go away, because it is the ever-present assumption of what do here. We have to keep talking about it because the dominant culture is so adamant about denying it. Unlike the West, which assumes the heart is either subjective sentiment or some other quasi-emotional drive, we teach the heart is entirely separate and above the intellect. Your heart has it’s own sensory apparatus and the means for processing what it senses, and your heart-mind is the only way you can connect with God’s revelation. Your heart operates in the moral sphere, the place where the Spirit Realm overlaps on this Fallen Realm. Your intellect remains entirely within the Fallen Realm.
Plenty of ancient societies lacked this understanding of reality. Barbarian tribal hordes did not have a civilization, but may have had a culture. Western Civilization is thus the first and only civilization that has rejected the notion of heart-led existence. This assumes you understand that the root of the West is partly a mixture of Germanic barbarian culture and Greco-Roman Civilization. The latter didn’t aggressively attack the notion of heart-led living, but laid the foundation for denying it through the influence of the ancient philosophers. There is a sense in which reading Greek and Roman classical literature provides a slender slice of elitist thinking, not the bulk of Greco-Roman social existence. By the time we get to Western Civilization in its full flower at the Enlightenment, virtually the whole of society from top to bottom is bereft of the heart-mind.
That means Western historical analysis will always miss that one critical ingredient to understanding every other civilization. Most of them took for granted a heart-led life, and so have very little to say about it. What they do say is easily perverted by a Western reading of it, as we see with the Bible narrative. The heart is mentioned, but the complete absence of heart-mind orientation means both translation and understanding will be crippled.
For someone who was fully engaged in the heart-led religion of the Old Testament, and in part as a reflection of the ambient Ancient Near Eastern culture as a whole, compelling your mind to serve the wisdom of your heart was entirely natural. It pulls in a whole range of shifted motivations that no one in that time felt required much comment. You could fall below the level back down to the Flesh, which is pretty much the meaning of “temptation,” but such people knew already without question that faith and truth could be found only in the heart.
Let’s choose a single item of historical study that is completely changed when you include the understanding of heart-led living: war. Even Western scholars understand that there was a professional cadre, mostly nobles who could afford to train and arm themselves, plus a significant number of folks who were simply talented enough to be hired as professional soldiers by those who had the money for it. These were your combat commanders and troop leaders, while most of the troops were conscripts. That would mean ordinary folks who trained part of the year when they weren’t busy with agricultural tasks. Most of these troops carried into battle limited weaponry with limited training, but enough to do the trick most of the time. The conscripts would gather in mass formations while the professional soldiers took up positions on the flanks, as rearguards and as a substantial forward battle guard. The whole idea was to march your troops into an enemy formation and make them run.
Notice something: The focus wasn’t slaughter. That might happen as a related event, but the primary focus was holding your formation intact while breaking up theirs. Why? Because everyone took for granted that if you held your ground, it could only be because your deity was in your heart leading you to honor him/her. If you lost your heart in battle — if you lost your heart-led focus and fell down into your mind and emotions — your deity had deserted you. Never mind whose fault it was; your god was not with you in the battle. It was not a matter of berserker emotions against berserker emotions. It was heart against heart. Fighting from the heart was fearless because death and injury were not all that important to the individual who faced them. His only real concern was satisfying the moral demands of his heart. Losing that meant losing the battle, because you couldn’t stay in the fray without it.
This is no mere mythology; this is reality. This is how we as believers face things today.
