The lessons of Incognito, The Social Animal, and other popular books drawing on new research on the brain should make us think more highly of the church as the body of Christ, an organism of which we are members. We should think of our spiritual pursuits not as solitary pilgrimages but as an immersion into a wide river. Spiritual disciplines aren’t just enforced time with God, they’re rewiring the circuitry of our brains, forming and shaping disciples. The findings of Eagleman and other researchers call into question evangelicals’ emphasis on a correct worldview as the defining trait of a faithful Christian. How we cognitively rationalize our beliefs is of smaller consequence; those beliefs are shaped more than we think by our passions and desires, our behaviors and habits, which are in turn formed by our families and cultures, genes and neural pathways.
The lesson is not that we cannot help being who we are. The lesson of recent neuroscience is that who we are is much more than what we think. We are not separable from our bodies. The disciple swims in a river pushed by the saints of earlier eras, the biology of our families, and the culture they developed. We swim between banks, pulled by the habits we form, the disciplines we enact, the community we inhabit.
This view of humanity has little in common with the Enlightenment conception of man, the Romantic’s isolated individual, or the evangelist’s decision-maker who at a specific moment chooses for Christ. Instead it sounds like the Old Testament’s covenant community, formed by the ritual of the law into a chosen people, and through whom salvation comes to the world.
–Rob Moll in a review of David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Pantheon, 2011) in Books and Culture, November/December 2011 edition, p.19