Spiritual Temperaments: Intel

From the Series—The Heart of Worship
April 19, 2002

During this series of evotionals we’re exploring seven spiritual temperaments. Each type of temperament is one dimension of worship. We’ve already explored the musical, natural, ritual, and sensual types. Next week’s evotional will look at the emotional and mystical types. This week we’re focusing on the intellectual type.

Split-Brain Believers

It’s a fatal mistake to think that the spiritual and intellectual parts of us are mutually exclusive, or even worse, oppositional in some sense. Gary Thomas says, “Any form of Christianity that rejects or even denigrates the importance of the mind is not biblical Christianity.”

Mathematically speaking, the Great Commandment is 25% intellectual. The mind is one of four dimensions of love referenced by Jesus in Matthew 22:37, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.” A little knowledge of neurology goes a long way in explaining what it means to love God with “all your mind.”

In the 1970s, Nobel-prize winner Roger Sperry pioneered split-brain research. His work with epileptic paitents revealed that the right and left hemispheres of the brain serve very different cognitive functions. The left-brain is linear and logical. It is responsible for everything from mathematics to linguistics. Without it, life would be chaotic. The left-brain is the rational side of us. The right-brain is intuitive and creative. It is responsible for everything from humor to poetry. Without it, life would be robotic. The right-brain is the emotional side of us.

In between the right and left hemispheres is a cluster of neurons called the corpus callosum. It serves as our “dual-processor”. It allows us to access both sides of the brain. For what it’s worth, women have about 40% more corpus callosum than men which may be the neurological explanation for “a woman’s intuition”. But don’t feel bad guys, you have 20% more bone density!

Loving God with “all your mind” means loving Him with your right and left brain. It includes the rational and emotional parts. It includes the logical and creative parts. It even includes the humorous part.

The Neurology of Laughter

The May 2002 issue of Discover magazine documents the discovery of the holy grail of humor. Using magnetic resonance imaging, neurologists have identified the medial ventral prefrontal cortex as the “seat of humor”. Humor is a complex cognitive process. Neuropsychologists Vinod Goel and Raymond Dolan define humor as “a cognitive juxtaposition of mental sets”. Makes you want to laugh doesn it?

This may sound strange, but have you ever told God a joke? I’m serious. Does loving God with all your mind include the medial ventral prefrontal cortex? I know there’s a fine line where we can cross over into “sacrilegious” territory, but this isn’t it. Humor is not just healthy, it’s holy. It’s a gift from God. God is the one who created us with the capacity to guffaw. Permission to speak frankly? I don’t want a relationship with someone I can’t laugh with. Shared laughter is relational oxygen.

Maybe God would like to “share a laugh” now and then? Too many people mistakenly see God as a cosmic kill-joy! He is anything but. I think we underestimate God’s sense of humor just like we underestimate His power and glory and goodness. My kids crack me up all the time and I only have three of them! What with six billion of us running around this planet, I wonder if God ever stops laughing! There has to be millions of hilarious things happening all the time!

The Intellectual Type

Webster defines “intellectual” as “given to study, reflection, and speculation.” Intellectuals aren’t necessarily “intelligent”, but they love to learn. My two dominant temperament types are natural and intellectual. I love nature and I love to learn. Whenever I discover something new about God, it makes me want to worship Him. And if I’m not learning anything new about God, I feel spiritually stagnant. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “A mind stretched by a new idea never returns to its original shape.” Intellectual types need to have their minds stretched. In the words of Madeliene L’Engle, “I need questions that do not have answers.”

Study is to the intellectual type what singing is to the musical type. The Talmud, the Jewish commentary on the Old Testament, says that “an hour of study is as an hour of prayer”. Study doesn’t replace other types of worship, but it’s an important dimension of worship. II Timothy 2:15 says, “Study to show yourselves approved.” The scope of study is Scripture--what is called “special revelation” in theological circles. But the first chapter of Romans expands the domain of study to include all of creation or “natural revelation” .

Romans 1:20 says that nature reveals God’s “invisible qualities.” Learning about creation is one way of learning about the Creator. I don’t want this to sound perjorative, but a core tenet of my worldview is that all “ologies” are branches of theology. In other words, disciplines like neurology, ortinthology, and biology can inform our theology. Gary Thomas says, “Any study that explores, examines, and explains the natural world can shed some light on the nature of our God and help us know him better.”

I split my college education between the University of Chicago and Central Bible College. Theology classes at CBC helped shape the way I see God. But if you asked me which class had the greatest theological impact, I would have to say it was a class on immunology at the University of Chicago hospital center. The professor never mentioned God. Not once! But every class was an exposition of Psalm 139:14. “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” I had the same reaction as David. I walked out of every class praising God for the way He has designed us!

Study is a stewardship issue. Last week’s evotional on the “sensual” type emphasized the importance of being good stewards of our five senses. The same holds true for the mind. The word “disciple” comes from the Greek word mathetes which means “learner.” By definition, a disciple is someone who never stops learning! And according to neurologists, the human mind has the capacity to learn something new every second of every minute of every hour of every day for the next 300 million years! I think it’s safe to say that all of us have some space left on our hard drives.

Spiritual Intellectual

I don’t think you can be “intellectual”, in the truest sense of the word, and not be “spiritual”. And I don’t think you can be “spiritual”, in the truest sense of the word, and not be “intellectual”. It’s not either/or. We’re called to be both/and. That’s the combination in John 4--"spirit" and “truth”.

Jesus makes a profound distinction. He says, “You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know. Yet a time is coming and has now come when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth.”

Knowledge and worship are not mutually exclusive! Think of “truth” as an intellectual spectrum. On one side is knowledge and on the other side is ignorance. The intellectual type has the greatest potential to worship God for one simple reason: the more you know the more you can worship! Your level of worship is directly proportional to your level of knowledge.

Bodil Johnson makes an interesting observation about life. She says, “Once upon a time I thought that getting older would be like moving down a narrowing funnel--life would just get more constricted. It seems quite the opposite.” She explains it this way. “It’s like the biologist who can distinguish hundreds of different types of grass while other people see green and more green. The experience of experts are richer than those of other people.”

When an astronomer looks into the night sky, they see more. When the musician listens to a concerto, they hear more. The mature believer ought to worship more because they know more! The more you know about God the greater your potential to worship Him! The truth is: worship without knowledge is empty!

When my wife and I get into an argument--hypothetically speaking, of course--I’ll occasionally offer what is known in male circles as the “premature apology”. You have no idea what you’re arguing about, but you know the only way to end the argument is to apologize. Warning: this technique occasionally backfires! Every once in a while, when I say “Sorry”, my wife will ask “What for?” I have no idea! Of course, that begins another hypothetical argument. And rightly so. If you’re don’t know why you’re sorry, it’s an empty apology.

Worshiping what you do not know is like saying “thank you” but having no idea what for! It’s empty. It’s ignorant. We are called to worship “in truth”. You’re level of worship will rise or fall to your level of knowledge.

Next week we’ll cross the corpus callosum and talk about right-brain worship--the emotional and mystical types.