Spiritual Experience and the Brain

Be Still and Know That I Am God

Ps 46:10

[Note: I wrote this blog just before my father-in-law had his second stroke the effects of which led to his death a little over a month ago. I have held off on posting this until now because the timing didn’t seem appropriate in light of his death. Now with all those things a bit in the past I believe that there has been sufficient time to return to consider this topic.]

As one who has grown up in the western intellectual and rationalist tradition and one who has been trained as an academician I want to know, to understand, and to be able to explain, measure and quantify life and even faith. I am not alone in this—this is the tradition in which I was trained. My master’s degree is in New Testament Greek exegesis. When I received that degree I was able to sight-read (i.e. without looking up many words in the lexicon) most of the New Testament. I have been taught to look at the background of the text and to analyze the grammar to squeeze every drop of meaning out of the text (and maybe at times even more than was there!). As I turned my attention to Historical Theology in my Ph.D. work I began to look at other theological traditions outside of my personal heritage. I saw in them a similar devotion to the rational understanding of God and his world and work. But along the way I came in contact with one major Christian tradition that had a different emphasis—Eastern Orthodoxy. The Eastern Orthodox tradition is predominantly mystical rather than rational. The Orthodox focus on the experience of God rather knowing about him. We could say “knowing God” rather than “knowing things about him.” In theological language Eastern theology is primarily apophatic, a theology that describes who/what God is not rather than the way of Western theology which is primarily kataphatic describing in positive assertions who/what God is.

Mysticism and an apophatic understanding of God are naturally connected although they are not technically the same thing. The apophatic perspective confesses that God is transcendent and infinite. He cannot be known as he is in himself, while mysticism “ focuses on a spontaneous or cultivated individual experience of the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception, an experience often unmediated by the structures of traditional organized religion or learned thought and behavior.” (Wikipedia s.v. “Negative” Theology)

I must admit, I have always been skeptical on some level of the truth of “experience.” Yet over the years I have had to admit that our modern evangelical aversion to experience has at the very least locked the Holy Spirit between the covers of the pages of Scripture. In the early 1990s I delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society entitled “The Witness of the Spirit in the Protestant Tradition” which became a chapter in Who’s Afraid of the Holy Spirit. After delivering the paper there was a time for Q & A. One of the questioners, an old acquaintance was very uncomfortable with the idea of the witness of the Spirit as it had been advocated and practiced within the broader protestant tradition asked, “What are the controls on the witness of the Spirit?” Another asked, “How does this differ from the Mormon’s “burning in the bosom?”

The aversion to “spiritual experience” in our tradition was a key motivating factor for Dan Wallace and me to do Who’s Afraid of the Holy Spirit? Our rationalistic approach to truth had left us unprepared to face the severe trials of life which we individually were experiencing at the time.

All this is by way of introduction to an amazing video which was forwarded to me by a cousin who had heard of my father-in-law’s stroke. This video is amazing in that the lecturer is a physician who is herself an expert on the brain and who experienced a stroke herself. She describes what she experienced and how her perceptions changed in different phases of the stroke. She also describes the physical make-up of the two halves of the brain and the way each half functions. I have always been skeptical of the validity “right brain” “left brain” talk, wondering if it were not psychobabble or only metaphorical. What brain research has demonstrated is that “right brain” “left brain” talk describes a literal reality. As I watched this video I immediately began to ponder the implications this has for how we related to and experience the presence of God in our lives.

I am still pondering, but I am convinced that there is something here that has implications for our spiritual lives and experience.

I urge you to carve out about 18 minutes to watch this video.

http://www.microclesia.com/?p=320