(The outline of McGilchrist’s thesis is here: https://jotsandscribbles.blog/2023/11/07/introduction-to-the-master-and-his-emissary/)
Last post on McGilchrist, we saw a correlation between hemisphere processing and Biblical interpretation. This time, we’re going to explore if that applies to God’s own communication to us. A reminder that McGilchrist suggests that the hemispheres’ distinct ways of attending to the world are brought together with a distinct pattern. The right hemisphere first broadly receives everything, then sends things to the left hemisphere for analysis, before the left hemisphere sends it back the right hemisphere for the new information to be reintegrated into a richer understanding of the whole.
How the two hemispheres contribute to the richness of experience. Essentially this is that the right hemisphere tends to ground experience; the left hemisphere then works on it to clarify, ‘unpack’ and generally render the implicit explicit; and the right hemisphere finally reintegrates what the left hemisphere has produced with its own understanding, the explicit once more receding to produce a new, now enriched whole.
This right then left then right again dynamic reminds me of Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 2 about the Spirit’s role in relation to the message he brings. The words he speaks are from the Spirit:
7 No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began… 10 these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
13 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words.[c]
And the words are understood only by the Spirit:
12 What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. 14 The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.
This dynamic, of the Word being carried out from God by the Spirit, and the Spirit needing to enable us to receive and understand the Word rightly, is vital to have both confidence in God’s revelation and yet to be humbly dependent on God as we listen to him. Spirit without word lacks objectivity and stability. Word without Spirit lacks life. But actually they work together in a way paralleled by the right-left-right processing of the hemispheres. Spirit carries out the Word. And Spirit then enable understanding of the word.
If McGilchrist is right that the last 200 years have seen a left hemisphere dominance, then we’d expect a tendency to rely on the objective word without due weight to the role of the Spirit in enabling us to receive and understand the word. And that is I think a reality at times in Protestant thinking. There has been a real danger of treating the objective word of God (the Bible) as something we can control and master.
But I wonder if this problem goes back further than the enlightenment (which is one of McGilchrist’s targets). It seems to me that the category we need alongside the clear and reliable Word of God is wisdom. Wisdom is not a subjective free for all, but it is the understanding and application of truth in its context, sensitive to people and time.
The late second century bishop Irenaeus spoke of Son and Spirit as Word and Wisdom, the two hands of God. For God did not need these [beings] to make what he had himself beforehand determined to make, as if he himself did not have his Hands. For always present with him are the Word and Wisdom, the Son and Spirit, by whom and in whom he made all things freely and of his own will, to whom he also speaks, when he says, “Let us make man after our image and likeness” (Gen 1:26)—he himself taking from himself the substance of those things which have been created and the pattern of those things which have been made and the figure of those things in the world which have been adorned. Against Heresies 4.20.1
But in the 4th century debates about the full (or not) deity of the Son, Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22 was applied by all sides to the Son not the Spirit. The result is that the Son is both the Word and the Wisdom of God. But that means that Word and Wisdom are not really distinct. Instead of having the objective stability of the Word working hand in hand with the subjective and contextual Wisdom in a particular situation, either the Word is objectively true or there is subjective experience and contextual nuance. Either objective truth without the personal touch, or subjective truth without an anchor.
Not everyone has fallen into this trap. Wisdom has been maintained as distinct from both the Word and pure subjectivity. Martyn Lloyd Jones for example spoke of the need for a pastor to know which medicine, which Scriptural truth, to give people, which is an example of this wisdom category. But I think this tendency to collapse Wisdom into the Word has been and is at work. And so one application of McGilchrist’s divided brain hypothesis in the western church is to encourage us to seek the Spirit’s wisdom as we read the objective word (Scripture) and see the eternal Word (the Son). Wisdom as a category enables us to navigate the changing contexts and diverse situations while remaining firmly anchored to the truth, the unchanging word of God.
Jots and Scribbles 