The heart is a wonderful thing. I would not want to be married to Leanne if my heart did not love her, but my heart must be informed by the facts. I want to be in love with the real Leanne and not with a creation of my own desires. I also want Leanne to be in love with me and not with some image she has fashioned in her mind. I want my heart affections for my wife to be based on the truth, for they are richer when they are built on reality.
We have spent half a year in these blogs discussing heart issues. Such issues are central to faith in Jesus, for without a right heart, no one will know God. This is basic. God wants us to love Him as I love my wife. And yet, the heart, by itself, is incomplete. Jesus said we are to love God with “heart, soul, mind, and strength.” Therefore, we must talk about more than heart issues if we are to talk about following Jesus. Now is the time to transition to a different category. It is time for us to begin discussing issues of the head, for we are called to love God with all our mind.
God made the mind, and He likes it. He wants us to use it. He does not want a heart divorced from the intellect. He wants an intellect driven by a pure heart. When Brian “falls in love” with Courtney, his heart can prevent him from seeing clearly, but great will be his pain if Courtney has significant problems that he simply ignores. If she is a flirt or has great consumer debt, and he ignores those things, he will pay later. His heart may blind him to these facts or convince him that she will change. He may push his head aside, but if he does, he will pay later. Indeed, his heart will pay later. If I buy a home solely because it is a pretty home that I would enjoy living in, but I pay no attention to the fact that I cannot afford it and that it is built on a flood plain, I am a fool.
In these situations, the mind is crucial. When people ignore facts and plain reason, the heart suffers in the end. It is true that hearts must be right, but facts and reason must inform those hearts. A right heart listens to reason. If people wish to know God, God will insist they use their heads.
This relationship between the heart and the head is complex. Each influences the other, and the road that navigates this relationship is fraught with pitfalls and misunderstandings. Here are two.
Many scientists and rationalists define reason in such a way as to exclude faith altogether. These people would have you think that listening to reason would require you to reject faith. The irony is that the force of their argument is not itself rational. They simply declare faith out of bounds by definition. If you were to examine their arguments, you would find them quite unable to show in a logical way that faith and reason are mutually exclusive. Of course, once you think about it, their claim is a bit impossible to demonstrate. These “rationalists,” therefore, must bring in something besides reason to get to their conclusion. They exalt reason as the pinnacle of knowledge but to do so, they place it atop the shoulders of their assumptions. And their assumptions sit squarely on the shoulders of their hearts. This idea cannot stand on its own legs.
On the other side, however, reason has taken somewhat of a beating. It used to be that truth was an objective fact that people needed to grasp; but with the postmodern shifts in philosophy and literary criticism, truth has come to be more a matter of personal perception. Each thinker creates his own truth. This idea has spilled over into theology, and many now believe that what you think about God doesn’t much matter, for one perception is as valid as another, and, after all, God is so grand and mysterious that no one can really know Him anyway. To these people, it is more important to be sincere than right, and the concept of religious doctrine is a great turnoff. This latter error is much more popular than the former, but intellectual fads come and go like the styles of clothing, and, no doubt, in a hundred years or so, the pendulum will swing back, and objective truth will become a trophy again.
These two extremes illustrate misunderstandings of the relationship between the heart and the mind. The rationalist attempts to use the intellect to squash out the heart, while the postmodern person attempts to use subjective hearts to squash out objective truth. Neither position is Biblical. The mind does not, cannot, and should not stamp out the knowledge that the heart gives us. Nor should the heart create facts willy-nilly. Rather, heart and mind work together to complement each other.
A right heart is humble and open to reason, and true reason is perceptive enough to see that it is itself greatly influenced by the bend of the heart. A right heart listens to reason, and true reason is clearer when it stems from a pure heart. These are aspects of a Biblical relationship between the heart and mind, and they help explain why the Bible so strongly condemns hypocrisy in the heart and false teaching, and why it so adamantly calls God’s people to purity of heart and of doctrine.
