Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

• Deuteronomy 6:5

So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul—then I will send rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine and olive oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied.
Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord’s anger will burn against you, and he will shut up the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you. Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

• Deuteronomy 11:13-18

“Therefore I will not keep silent; I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.

• Job 7:11

“Or someone may be chastened on a bed of pain
    with constant distress in their bones,
so that their body finds food repulsive
    and their soul loathes the choicest meal.

• Job 33:19-20

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

• Matthew 22:37-40

May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

• 1 Thessalonians 5:23

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

• Hebrews 4:12

“His Latin name is often translated as John the Scot, but the theologian and philosopher Johannes Scotus Eriugena was Irish-the medieval Latin for Ireland being “Scotia”. He argued that there was no conflict between knowledge that was derived from reason and knowledge from divine revelation. He even set out to demonstrate that all Christian doctrine had in fact a rational basis. This brought him into conflict with the Church, on the grounds that his theories made both revelation and faith redundant. Eriugena’s defense was that reason is the judge of all authority, and that it is needed for us to interpret revelation.”

• Sam Atkinson (senior editor), The Philosophy Book, Big Ideas Simply Explained

John Scotus Eriugena, or Johannes Scotus Erigena, or John the Scot or John the Irish-born (815-877) was one of the most influential thinkers of the ninth century, and possibly the most influential Irishman of the early monastic period.  I wrote about this thought before in To Know, To Not Know, and To Find when Truly Seeking.  Even with the same thought, I want to go in a different direction.

I have chosen a variety of Scriptures.  Two in particular state the Greatest Commandment.  In Deuteronomy 6, we are to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength.  Then in Matthew 22, Jesus quotes this verse, but somewhere in the translations (Hebrew to Greek to English – and possibly Hebrew to Aramaic and then Greek), we are to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind.

In the USA, sports in general are king.  In sports, you might need to use your mind, but using brute strength is important in most sports played today, not all.  But in God’s way of thinking, can we just write off the similarity of strength in Deuteronomy to mind in Matthew?  Behind those brutes who block for the quarterback, there is that quarterback who uses his mind to read the defense and know which direction the wide receiver is going to go, and then throws the ball to a spot that the receiver has not even made his turn to get to.  The coach that designs plays like that is pretty smart too.  And I love the idea that possibly the ancient Greeks equated mind to strength rather than brute force.

But John the Scot, although he was Irish…  The book on philosophy makes a big deal about that, and yes, there have been feuds between the predominantly protestant, or reformed, Scots and the predominantly Catholic Irish, but they both spoke Gaelic before changing to English, and some still do although there are variations.

Okay, with that out of the way, John the Scot got in trouble for equating revelation and faith.  We have a brain, but what part of the brain is our mind?  Is our mind even part of the brain?  What holds the concept that we are conscious?  Some animal lovers (the extreme animal lovers) will argue that animals are sentient.  But there are degrees of sentience.  A dog values the fact that it has a pain in its foot.  But does the dog process the information in its brain to rationalize that it is aware of its existence because it feels pain?  Humans are aware of their existence, even if you take all the senses away from them.  We can still live when we sleep and when we are knocked out and thus unconscious.  So, where does consciousness lie?  Where does our conscious thought of being conscious or unconscious come from?  Have you had surgery done and you had dreams during the surgery?  Where did the dream come from?

So, a revelation is a spiritual thing.  Faith is a spiritual thing.  But to express those things, we need a mind, an intellect, and a few brain cells.  John the Scot got into trouble trying to rationalize the spirit with the soul and body (the mind and intellect).

But if we die the first death, our body dies and decays.  That means the brain goes with it.  But our soul lives on.  About a hundred years ago, a doctor noticed that the body of a patient lowered its mass (weight) by so many ounces at the point of death.  Maybe the hospital bed had a scale which recorded the change in weight.  The newspapers published that the doctor had discovered the weight of the soul, considering that the soul left the body to be with Jesus.  Neither the doctor nor the media would make such a claim today.  Maybe a few, but would the media bosses allow it into print?  They might not, but you can still find the original article, or a copy thereof, on the internet.

And while the mind and our consciousness are related to the brain, the center of our emotions, our control center of our desires is the heart, not necessarily the blood pumping muscle.

I have heard arguments that the soul and spirit are the same thing, but the Hebrews quote above says that we can separate the two.

My soul belongs to God, regardless of the feelings that I might have at the moment.  But I have had several moments where I have been in the presence of the Holy Spirit, where the presence was palpable.  My soul was with God, but my spirit was lifted to a level that all the meters would be off the scales, if there ever could be a meter for that.  So, I think there might be something to this soul and spirit being different sides of the same coin.  Maybe having a soul attached to our body in some spiritual way stayed with John and Ezekiel and other prophets who were taken up in the spirit to see what God wanted them to see.

But this rambling is circling the runway, and I might just land soon.  We have a body that has strength.  We have a mind (something beyond the brain that is part of the body) so that we can be aware that we are aware of things.  We have a soul, an incorruptible, ever-lasting essence that will not die when we die.  And our spirit stays in contact with the Holy Spirit and touched by the Holy Spirit.

And God’s greatest commandment is to love Him with all of that.  Love Him with your body, mind, spirit, soul, and heart.  It all belongs to God.  He created us in His image so we would have all those things and be conscious of the fact that we have them.

This may not have been the direction John the Scot was going, but people have dug a few more rabbit holes since his day.

Let’s love God with everything that we have and in every way possible, including loving our neighbor.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.