We’re Pointers

I thought I would take a few more minutes to talk some more about this article. I wish there were a way to talk about the article without seeming to attack the author. I don’t know anything about Lucy Ann Moll and I don’t have any ill will toward her. I favor giving her the benefit of doubt and think she was probably swept up in the coolness of the “discoveries” of psychology. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians and warned them about being carnal, he had the highest regard for them, he just saw that they were headed toward a very nasty fall and wanted to keep that from happening. So, I don’t have anything against Lucy other than that she is headed for a nasty fall and taking a bunch of people with her. I love you Lucy.

The article said that people with OCD do the things they do because their brains are faulty. There’s a glitch in the “caudate nucleus, causing the frontal lobe to become overactive.” The OCD suffer “might be flooded with, and act on, thoughts and impulses that enter their mind.” In other words, the person who is having these thoughts and actions are having them and doing them because their brains are misbehaving. The assumption is that the brain causes thoughts and actions.

The author went on to say that “the renewing of one’s thoughts can create real, measurable, and observable changes in the brain.” This is done through various means using cognitive/behavior therapy.

Let’s put these things together logically: science says, I think what I think, and I do what I do because my brain fires in a particular way at a particular time. This means my brain causes my thoughts and actions. And, if I change my thoughts and actions, my brain will change. And then, when my brain changes it will change my thinking and my behavior. Here’s the question, if my brain causes my thoughts and actions, how do I go about changing my thoughts and actions in order to change my brain so that it can change my thoughts and actions from thinking and doing things I don’t like to things I do want to think and do?

Or put another way: If A causes B and B changes A, how do I change B in order to change A when A causes B? Does that make sense?

There’s a component missing from the whole system and this is where the theology comes in. First, I’m happy to know that my brain is firing away at the same time my fingers waggle at the little girl across the room. I’m even happy to acknowledge that my fingers wouldn’t have moved, had my brain not sparked and caused it. However, what induced my brain to want to make my fingers move? Why then? Why to that extent? Why not more, or less? Why not cause my legs to jump up and my arms to embrace or hit the little girl? There’s something going on before my brain kicks in to move my fingers.

The Bible says this something is me, my mind, soul, spirit. The me that is there when my body dies. The part that, when I die, goes to live with Jesus until I get a new body. This is the part that psychology doesn’t believe in. Which is funny when you remember that the word ‘psychology’ means the study of the soul.

The Bible tells us, “What comes out of a man, that defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man” (Mk 7:20–23). And “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45).

The bible says that the thing that gives our brains direction to think and act (and to feel by the way), is our hearts. We have dirty hearts and so our thoughts and behaviors are evil. When our hearts or cleansed, our thoughts and behavior become clean.

I know what you’re thinking: if our hearts are evil and cause our thoughts and behavior, how can we want to get new hearts? If A causes B, how can you get a new A in order to get a new B? It sounds like the same problem that the psychologist has.

You’ll notice that I used the passive voice above when I mentioned heart cleansing. In the psychologist’s view, we change our thoughts and behavior in order to change our brain, which we saw was logically impossible. In the same way, we can’t change our hearts. Rather, we need to have our hearts changed for us. And we don’t want to have our hearts changed—because we are evil. There is nothing inconsistent here. We don’t want to have new hearts. We like the dirty old nasty hearts. This is because our hearts are who we are and we want to be the center of the universe and we like it that way. It’s all the people who don’t like what we want who get in our way and cause our problems.

But then, we run into Jesus. We meet Jesus in the life and words of his representatives. They share the good news about God and his Christ and while we’re listening, we hate it, but at the same time we love it (because it is true), he enters into our life and changes us from the inside out. He changes our hearts. We get new hearts and we begin to think new ways and behave in new ways. In Christianity this inward change comes to us from the outside and transforms everything.

The purpose of Biblical counselors is not to help people think new thoughts and to do new things in order to change their brains. The purpose of the Biblical Counselor is to point to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith (Heb. 12:1-2), so that he can change us into his likeness (Rom. 12:1-2; 2 Cor. 3:18). Biblical counselors aren’t changers, we’re pointers.