Depravity and the Mind

Kymberli Cook: 

My name is Kymberli Cook. I'm the assistant director of the Hendricks Center here at DTS and I am so thrilled that you have joined us today as we talk about sin's impact on our brain processes. We are joined by three esteemed gentlemen who are more than qualified to walk us through these dizzying truths as we will eventually learn that it is a little bit disarming once we kind of get into how sin has impacted just very much how we think and what we think. So I am going to let each one of our guests, because we are joined by three, like I said, I'm going to let each one of our guests introduce themselves. So if you don't mind, please be sure to let us know a little bit about yourself and how you ended up thinking and researching in this area. So Rankin, let's start with you. 

Rankin Wilbourne: 

Okay, Kymberli, thanks for having me. My name is Rankin Wilbourne. I'm currently the director of Broom Tree Media, which is a nonprofit dedicated to helping people reimagine the church and ask what a healthy and viable church looks like today. We have a special heart for cultivating healthy leaders and wholehearted discipleship. Those are big terms. But part of my interest in this subject is just my own story of being the leader of a large church in Los Angeles and finding myself in the middle of a very painful church split. And largely because of some of my own blind spots on this very topic of how our unconscious is affecting us in ways we don't realize. So yeah, I got interested in this through my own story and I've had a lot of help and a lot of helpers along the way, but I'm pleased, honored to be here. 

Kymberli Cook: 

We are so thrilled to have you. I first heard Rankin at a conference that I was attending and I've actually heard him present on multiple things and it's all very, very good. But the one that particularly even launched my thinking about this podcast in general was a presentation on essentially faulty thinking and how we aren't as clever, more or less, as we think we are. So we are thrilled to have you with us, Rankin. All right, Thomas, let's have you go next. 

Thomas Dunham: 

Sure thing. My name is Thomas Dunham. I am a lecturer at Texas A&M University. I did my academic training, my PhD in neuroscience at UT Southwestern Medical Center there in Dallas. I also recently completed the MBTS degree from DTS, which is where I got kind of plugged in with some of what's going on there. My interest in the merging of theology and neuroscience simply comes from necessity. I was doing the work of neuroscience as a believing Christian and the two would not stay separate. They should not stay separate. And in particular as my research was in the area of synaptic plasticity and learning and memory, I became very interested in how sin affects our physicality all the way down to the level of our DNA in ways that predispose us to want sin over the Lord and how those desires can become ingrained in our brains. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Fascinating. And Thomas is actually one of our associates here at the center, which is a role that we have on our team and we are thrilled to have him because we're going to be launching a lot of different conversations on theology and science. And so you'll probably be hearing more from Thomas. But this, especially like you said, it digs right into some of your pure interest areas. So we're thrilled to have you here too. And then last but certainly not least, our distinguished Lanier Burns. Can you tell the listener a little bit about yourself? 

Lanier Burns: 

Well, I retired a year ago as a distinguished professor and the seminary was kind enough to give me the emeritus title. I'm not sure what that means. Maybe extinguished would be the best term. My story is rather similar to Thomas's. When I was getting my second doctorate from the University of Texas, I came across the idea that the humanities and the sciences have a huge gap between them. And in my 41 years of teaching theology, there was almost no awareness of biology. And I found that very disturbing, grounded deeply in the history of doctrine and the dualism of the classics in Catholicism. 

And so most theologians today are thinking in terms of a body mind dualism that I do not accept because the Bible presents a unitary being as a human being, a person, okay. So I turned from the second doctorate and as I taught theology here, I joined the Society for Neuroscience. I tried to narrow the field of science so I could be conversant and I belonged to the society for 30 years. And it has been a tremendous help to me in understanding the struggles that we face in theological instruction and in living for the Lord. 

Kymberli Cook: 

That's so wonderful. Again, we're just thrilled to have him. He was a professor of theology here for a long time. 

Lanier Burns: 

Long time. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And is well known for jumping up on desks and being quite animated as he teaches. So we're thrilled. And if you knock out your microphone or something, it's all right. We'll make- 

Lanier Burns: 

It's the dopamine. Yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah. Okay, fair enough. I'm going to trust you on that one. So the title of today's podcast is Depravity and the Mind, which means that we're going to be talking a lot about sin because that's linked to the term depravity and its impact. And specifically obviously we have in mind the mind. So let's start first by defining what we mean by depravity and unpacking that doctrine a little bit. And Dr. Burns, I think you are the clear place for us to start. Could you give us a definition of just a real basic definition and an understanding of what it is and isn't? 

Lanier Burns: 

Well, let me just say that a simple scripture, Romans 3, presents the problem to me, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And Paul is not speaking in Romans 3 about sins. And that's what we think about all the time. I'm a good person because I don't sin in these specific ways. But every person is a sinner by condition, meaning that our minds default to whatever the nature of sin is. The implication of what I've said is we can be saved only by grace, but it doesn't mean that we're all as bad of a human being as we could possibly be. There is a social good that has continued, thank the Lord, but we are not acceptable before God except by grace and by the complete atonement of Christ on the cross. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And there's nothing we can do. 

Lanier Burns: 

Nothing we can do. 

Kymberli Cook: 

We are just depraved. 

Lanier Burns: 

Well, that's the meaning of depravity, defined very well by Calvin and his institutes. The whole stream has been polluted some more than others. And we'll probably talk about how that happens later in the program. 

Kymberli Cook: 

We absolutely will. Yeah, that's most of what we're talking about. So Rankin, I want to turn to you and some of the thought that you had presented even when I heard you. What are some ways that as you've kind of thought about faulty thinking in that area that you've seen or considered depravity and sin kind of creeping into our own thought processes and our rationality? 

Rankin Wilbourne: 

Yeah, I think for me, Kymberli, it's realizing that I had fallen into a trap of defining sin much too narrowly and sort of transgressing moral norms or something. And as Dr. Burns was commenting that it's more of the whole stream is polluted and there's ink in the water and that sin is sort of rediscovering Augustine and Luther and Calvin and this biblical idea that sin is much more what in scientific terms we'd call a complex. And it's not simply bad rational choices. This is much more of a condition that affects all of us, including our unconscious. And this is a much more biblical understanding of sin. But I ironically came to it through scientists like Dan Siegel and others who were… These scientists aren't talking from a Christian perspective, and I realized they're helping me read the Bible better and they're helping me understand my experience deeper. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So as they did that and as you dug in a little bit, what did you find were some of those biases and unconscious faulty mindsets? What did you discover? 

Rankin Wilbourne: 

Well, I think the big one is what I just named that moving beyond sin as isolated acts of deliberate disobedience. And Thomas can help us think more about this, but more of a network of compulsive attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that's deeply rooted in what the Bible would call our heart. And yeah, I was the pastor for over two decades. What have I been preaching about? And the upshot of it is, boy, we're not nearly as rational as we think we are. And sin affects us far more deeply neurologically, the way we're wired and the way we've learned to cope growing up, which Thomas can also talk to us about. Yeah, it's just really opened my eyes ironically to the depth of God's grace. Like wow, God's healing is complete and his compassion is unending because our need is so great. 

Lanier Burns: 

Could I add something to that? 

Kymberli Cook: 

Please, please do. 

Lanier Burns: 

One of the things that occurred to me that's so vital about what we're talking about is it's a part of the gospel. And so when we present the gospel to people, we say, "Do you realize that you're a sinner and that you need a Savior?" Now what do people understand when we ask them if they are sinners? 

Kymberli Cook: 

Moral judgment. Yeah. 

Lanier Burns: 

Well, yeah. But without answering the question, it shows the need for what we're talking about. And I don't think anyone accepts the gospel with a mature understanding. So in a way we go through a process of growth and about sin and salvation and what it means to walk with the Lord. 

Kymberli Cook: 

No, I love that. I love the idea that it helps us better understand our brokenness so that we can better understand grace and better appreciate grace. 

Lanier Burns: 

Yeah. Yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And the path, like you said, the path of sanctification. It's going to be time. And we will get into… Thomas, don't worry, we're about to turn to you. We're going to get into how it actually even just takes time physiologically for some of that to happen. 

Lanier Burns: 

Yes, yes. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So Thomas, is there research out there that seems to demonstrate the fallenness in the mind, brain? We'll get into that conversation in a second. But what research… And you said you even saw things in your own research about how it seems like sin is so deeply ingrained. So can you tell us about that? 

Thomas Dunham: 

Sure thing. I do want to say before I start that blanket disclaimer, I don't speak for A&M or UT Southwestern. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Fair enough. 

Thomas Dunham: 

This is me. Absolutely. So being in the field of synaptic plasticity, studying how the brain creates and strengthens connections in response to different stimuli, to different experiences, the implications for sin and sins as we've been talking about for kind of that state of being in sin and sort of volitional sins are tremendous. So one of the things that got me thinking about this, particularly as it relates to that state of sin, that polluted stream, is learning about things like children who are born addicted to opiates, right, through no fault of their own. Yet they enter this world predisposed to addiction to opiates later on. They have to go through withdrawals before they can be released from the hospital. 

And one's understanding of sin has to grow and has to grow to fit that reality. And growing in my understanding of, well, what's going on there? What goes on when a child in the womb experiences opioids or what's going on with addiction? And truly what is happening is the synapses that are communicating that information surrounding the stimulus, they get so strengthened, they become so strong because the brain loves being in that state. Right? The brain being value neutral just loves to be in a heightened state, whether that's through a behavior or substance, that it strengthens those synapses to create motivation for the brain in the body to go and seek more and more of it. And so I hope that answers your question, but basically the same mechanism that allows us to learn and allows us to form memories is the mechanism that can get hijacked before birth in childhood, in adolescence, in adulthood, to direct our affections towards the things of the world or towards things that are ultimately destructive to our physical bodies and to our souls. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And that's just so interesting to me that it's, again, Dr. Burns, you were talking about the dualism. So this idea that there is a material and immaterial world and the two kind of function more or less independently of each other, or they're connected, but they're two distinct. This idea that, no, you can actually see, what you're saying, Thomas, that you can actually see those impulses getting stronger and stronger. And you can see, I'm presuming, I think, neural pathways happening. 

Lanier Burns: 

Let me affirm Thomas. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Sure. Go for it. 

Lanier Burns: 

Because this is rather recent science in the scope of the history of science. But in 1900, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, a Spaniard, and Camillo Golgi, Nahal came up with the neuron doctrine. And that's where the action potential is grounded in the neuron's cell body. This is for those who know a little bit. But it's grounded. And so a strong action potential works its way down the axon from the sensual stimuli, the senses that we have. And the strong ones make connections across the brain almost instantaneously. 

So this takes us to, if you persist in this, you come close to addiction or habit. And if you were to talk to a lot of people, they wouldn't realize they're sinning because it comes natural. A Friday night drunkenness, which the prophets don't particularly like. It's a pleasure principle over against a pain principle. Now when you come to Christ, the Holy Spirit begins to act on the person. And with feeble infantile movements, you begin to form these neural pathways using Thomas's terminology. And they're built up, meaning that you gravitate toward addictions and habits. And what we're after is a habit of godliness. And when it becomes strong, it becomes more habitual. We never lose the flesh, but it becomes more habitual and we find pleasure in serving the Lord. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And I love that. And I think the point where I was trying to make it just a second ago, and I'm so glad that you inserted all of that, is that we can see that. 

Lanier Burns: 

You can see it. 

Kymberli Cook: 

You can see it happening. 

Lanier Burns: 

And I have been accused of being a materialist. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, yeah, that would probably- 

Lanier Burns: 

I'm guilty, I'm guilty. But I also feel that the brain is the modern way of speaking of what the Bible talks about with the heart, which came from the captivity in Egypt who viewed the heart as superior. But the point is the same. There's a focus to the human person. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I actually want to go down… Well, first I want to do our due diligence. Thomas, I did want to ask real quick, is there any research that seems to challenge? So is there any research that affirms everything we're saying? That's great that there is. But is there any research that you've run across that seems to challenge this idea of fallenness or sin and that kind of interaction in our brain? 

Thomas Dunham: 

I cannot think of any. I cannot think of any off the top of my head. Clearly there are researchers, plenty of neuroscientists who would say that there's no such thing as fallenness. And they would come at that from a bunch of different angles. One of the interesting ones is that the pure materialists, the purely anti-supernaturalists will sometimes be honest and they will say, oh, there is no such thing as free will because we are only these neuronal firings, we are only the circuit activity of our brain. And so you really can't be held accountable for anything. You are just a series of stimulus response, stimulus response. And so they would come at it from that direction. I would strongly disagree with that. I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest from not a strictly materialist view that there are things going on within the mind, within the brain that go counter to what one might expect if we were just a series of stimulus response, stimulus response. 

Lanier Burns: 

The great problem here lies in the humanities. What do you do with the endemic problem of evil? And at the University of Texas, when I was doing humanities research, this gave scholars terrible problems. And as you know, many people would go so far as to say the Holocaust didn't happen. But another kind of thinking that comes from this is utopian, people are basically good. So if we put our skills to enough use, we can create a perfect society. Every four years this is the election. It's a messianic period in our nation. All the promises and so forth. But there's tremendous resistance outside the brain, which affects the brain to the idea of God and his goodness. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Can you walk us through a little bit more what that looks like? 

Lanier Burns: 

It looks like a transhumanist or a humanist who believes in the good angels or the good side of humanity, which is not depravity. And so we acquire these unfortunate habits like in inner city America where people live on the streets and we blame society for these. But really often they're grounded in behaviors that are very destructive. Sin is destructive. It will kill a person. It's not to be toyed with, it's not neutral. And so they don't like sin because that implies a theism and they don't like evil because it's negative. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, and that even gets to what, Rankin, what you were talking about, which is sin is not just these moral decisions. 

Lanier Burns: 

That's right. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And that, like you said, I love that, sin will kill the person. And we're talking about a physiological reality. 

Lanier Burns: 

A physiological reality. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Again, that we sometimes try to separate. We separate the spiritual and physiological reality, but our ontology is such that in biblical, scholars recognize that- 

Lanier Burns: 

Need we talk about stress and cortisol and its baleful effects on human thinking and health. 

Rankin Wilbourne: 

It's interesting to think about the biblical idolatry using something as a substitute for God to satisfy what God provides. This is a way of thinking about how sin hijacks our brains. We become habitually predisposed to meet core emotional needs that only God can meet. And that is beyond flagrant moral violations that we might commonly associate with sin. That is a human… Who has a problem with idolatry? Humans do. Our brains are predisposed to latch on to God's substitutes to meet core emotional needs. And this is not a way the church commonly talks about sin. 

Lanier Burns: 

Exactly. 

Kymberli Cook: 

No, it's not. And so I want to lean into this just a little bit more because I think it's so important that our listener hear the conversation and has a lot of clarity with regard to what we're saying about the relationship between the material and the immaterial world and the immaterial and the material parts of ourselves. So Rankin, do you have any thoughts in that area as far as how should we understand that relationship between the material and immaterial? I'm going to let a couple people weigh in on this. 

Rankin Wilbourne: 

Well, I'll leave that to the two experts on the panel. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I didn't know if you were going to take it or not. 

Rankin Wilbourne: 

I will say, as a pastor, our burden is to rediscover a biblical anthropology, which is profoundly united, that we are embodied souls and that the Hebrew way of thinking in some ways is more subtle and more advanced. Science is rediscovering what the Old Testament has always told us about the complex unity of the human person. As enlightenment rationalists, we have lost. So we're just recovering a good biblical anthropology. And I'll let Thomas and Dr. Burns give you the more sophisticated terminology there. But pastorally, we're just recovering a biblical anthropology. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Dr. Burns, would you like to weigh in? 

Lanier Burns: 

I certainly would. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I figured you would. 

Lanier Burns: 

The dualistic perspective separates mind and body. And the minds of many thinkers is not grounded in material things, even the brain. So what you see in contemporary theological thinking is a dependence on what I would call Aristotelian syllogistic logic. That is, if this is true, then this must be true. Or we see a Platonic notion that the mind is some sort of form floating outside somewhere. I would like to make one more tangible point. What does the amygdala do? What does the hippocampus do? The amygdala warns us of fears that we have built over a lifetime and it triggers fight or flight. And the hippocampus stores our experiences from our environment. And the brain coordinates all of this in what I would call a biblical way of thinking. 

Thomas Dunham: 

Amen. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And can you just flesh that out a little bit more? 

Lanier Burns: 

I think the way I would flesh that out is I have been in ministry for 55 years, missions, pastorate, teaching, seminary, and I've observed in the process of discipleship and in the process of maturation that saints who walk with the Lord almost reflexively have a greater mindset. I think Thomas used the word strengthening our neural pathways. But they're able to obey because they know the goodness of the Lord. And that comes out of a lot of interaction. Eventually we'll talk about the mind, but I think we need to rethink about how we think. And this goes with Rankin's thought about reason. We have been heirs of reason can satisfy everything, but it defaults to self-centeredness and narcissism. Have you ever heard anyone argue against themselves except a potential suicide? 

Kymberli Cook: 

I don't know. I argue against myself a lot. So you mentioned the mind, and Thomas, I want to pull you in here. What is it your understanding of the mind from your training and your perspective as you also engage in theology? 

Thomas Dunham: 

Sure. So following Dr. Burns, absolutely humans are this inextricable link of soul and physicality, right? The mind very similarly I think is at the intersection of soul and physicality, which means it is not divorced from the brain. The mind is absolutely not something which is other than the brain. It is in fact reliant on the brain. It is not entirely the brain though. So we would know from cases like Phineas Gage, who very famous case of a railroad worker, an explosion went off and an iron bar shot through his jaw and up through his prefrontal cortex severing a good chunk of that area that's responsible for executive control, impulse control, decision making. 

And when he eventually came out of the hospital, because he survived, he had an extremely different personality. So he was alive, he had memories, very different personality. We would say that his mind was altered because of the injury to his brain. Similarly, patient HM, Henry Molaison, this was a man who had his hippocampi removed as part of epilepsy treatments back in the '50s. And when he woke up, he was unable to form new memories. And so again, we have an affliction, a treatment of the brain that affects what we would think of as the mind. Right? The mind is therefore unable to form new memories. And then on and on and on. And we see it today very apparently in a lot of the research around mental health and psychiatric illness. Right? So the idea that someone's mind can be bent in a direction of melancholy so extremely that they begin to actually neglect themselves to the point, as Dr. Burns was saying, that they begin to argue whether or not they should exist at all. 

And that is the mind being affected by processes that are going on in the brain, areas of the brain, like the lateral lobinula, other parts of it that are a little bit too active or not active enough, and underabundance of serotonin receptors and things like that. And so they are absolutely inextricably linked in such a way that, yeah, whatever you do to the one affects the other. And when the Holy Spirit comes and renews our minds, as Dr. Burns has said, that starts to affect our brain so that we start to learn to love the things of the Lord again. And so yeah, they are entirely linked together. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And learning to love the things of the Lord is actually a physiological phenomenon, not just a spiritual one. That's our point. And the whole idea here is that we are holistic beings. And I think, Rankin, you said embodied souls. And there's a theologian named Marc Cortez who wrote a very famous book called Embodied Souls and Souled Bodies. And so the idea is that there is not one without the other. And our contention is that that is how we should be understanding ourselves as human beings. That is what it is to be human. 

Lanier Burns: 

But you're looking at the physical manifestation of immaterial thought. So this is where a lot of neuroscience has really helped us. The most important aspect of the immaterial human being is the will. It is the will that underlies obedience or disobedience. But that's not an isolated phenomenon. It's the background, the environment, the nature, nurture, the whole shebang that causes a person to obey the word. I am indebted to some neuroscientists at Southern California named the Damasios, Hanna and Antonio, Portuguese scientist. And Antonio Damasio wrote a book called Descartes' Error. And that exposed the idea that reason is not the center of thinking. Emotions have a vital role here and environment plays a vital role. Nurture, how we were raised plays a vital role. So there's so much other than without denying reason, but it's reason plus so many other things. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And as I listen to this with this idea, okay, okay, so I'm a holistic person with all of these other dimensions, like you're talking about linear at play, but I'm also incredibly depraved, which we introduced at the beginning of our conversation. And the water has been poisoned. And so if I'm listening to all of this and I've never heard it, or quite frankly if I'm listening to it and I've heard it 1,000 times like I have, I still sometimes find myself hearing it and saying, okay, so what is my responsibility in the midst of all of this holistic fallenness? So what is my job? 

Lanier Burns: 

I believe the term spirituality should be spelled with the capital S, because God is the hound of heaven, who by grace will never let us go. So the Spirit, capital S, is working through our brain to transform our person. And we are the objects of the love of God. We're objects of his grace. And as we say yes to him, we grow. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I love that. Rankin, I do want to ask, so as we are in the process like Lanier is talking about, of growing and saying yes to the Lord, what are your thoughts as far as what can we trust if our mind is so deeply affected and our brains are so deeply affected as we are walking? What is it that we're trusting and as… Because if I am so deeply affected and if my brain processes are so deeply affected, how do I not result in a relativism or in a nihilism? How do I not end up there? What are your thoughts there? 

Rankin Wilbourne: 

I think the whole idea or the whole theme of confidence is a very important theme in this whole conversation about neuroscience and spirituality in the brain. Where is our confidence? What is, to steal a phrase from Lesslie Newbigin, what is proper confidence? And our confidence is not in ourselves. Our confidence is not in our own reason. Our confidence is not even in our apprehension of God. God is greater than our best thoughts of God. Our confidence is in who God has revealed himself to be, which will always be better and greater than our apprehension of that. We can have more confidence in God's word and God's character and God's promises as long as there's an asterisk there, and that asterisk is I don't trust myself, I trust the Lord. I trust myself less. I trust the Lord more. And I'm not sure if I'm making that comprehensible, but our confidence shifts from our understanding to the faithfulness of God. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I love that you're saying that because that ties exactly into what you were just saying, when you're about a capital S, spirituality being the Holy Spirit, that is where our confidence should lie is in his work. And I think this conversation and maybe even feeling like the ground is falling out from underneath you, it's actually what you were talking about, Rankin, the rationalist ground that's falling out from underneath me where I say, oh no, whoa, I'm realizing how much I am actually relying on my own reason rather than on the Lord in some ways. Yeah, go head. 

Lanier Burns: 

I think faith and trust are synonyms. So I think the world really works is we have faith in a lot of things. We have faith in our job to provide. We have faith in our friends to be loyal. We have faith in our spouses to be a spouse. So I see growth in the Lord as a transferal of our little F faiths to faith in the Lord. And I see that beneath the idea of covenant, which is always a relationship. And so it's a transferal within a relationship. I think there's a problem with the individualism that's rampant in our society. I trust you, Kym, because we're both in love with Jesus and we share a community at Dallas Seminary, but all glory be to God who makes us recognize one another's allegiance. So it's a better faith. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And to a degree, I don't know, at least for those who might still be standing on more rationalist ground than they thought they may have been standing on a scarier one. 

Lanier Burns: 

Well, it is a little bit scary. Sure. 

Kymberli Cook: 

But it actually is reality. 

Lanier Burns: 

It's reality. Especially if you're trusting the Cowboys to win the Super Bowl. 

Rankin Wilbourne: 

That's a leap of faith. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So one final question for you gentlemen, and Thomas, I definitely want you to weigh in here, especially with regard to the biology. What are the spiritual changes, the physiological changes that we need to make or be attuned to in light of all of this? Or is it just the work of the spirit and there's not something we need to do and we just need to be aware of it or what's going on? But are there things that we can actually address in our own walk with the Lord, in our own physiological selves that can address this true depravity and poisoned well that goes much deeper than we probably ever thought? Thomas, why don't you start us out? 

Thomas Dunham: 

Absolutely. So I think when we are talking about what can we do, a good place to start is at the very beginning and at the fall itself, right? We understand that the fall was the moment when Adam and Eve partook of the fruit of which tree, the knowledge of good and evil. Right? So understanding that our brains have been rendered essentially value neutral. Right? They are value neutral or morally unable to approach God because our brains love the things of this world now, right? 

Having received new life in Christ, we want to start retraining our brains on what is good, right? And so we take in what is good. And what that does is the more you experience it, the more you experience anything, the stronger the synaptic connections that represent those experiences become, right? And so as you read the scriptures, as you pray, as you seek the Lord daily, as you remind yourself where he has shown up for you in the past, those connections that represent those events and those images and those times in your life become stronger and stronger and stronger. And as they get stronger, those experiences and those memories become easier to access. They become easier to access, especially in moments of stress, right? The flip side being that if what you are putting in is the indulgence of sin, it becomes easier and easier to do it because more and more of your memories become colored by it because you are strengthening the synaptic connections and the neuronal circuits that represent those experiences. 

I will say, and something that I always talk about when I'm talking about this is, particularly as it relates to addictions and addictive behaviors, I would wager we all know somebody who has been delivered in a moment from addiction. You don't know them personally. Maybe you can think of someone, right? We've been talking about how the mind relates to the brain, how they're inextricably linked. And one thing that it is imperative for us to understand is that delivery from addiction in a moment, that involves changes to the physiology of the brain, the removal of old synaptic connections, the creation of new, the weakening of some, the strengthening of others that typically take months to years to a lifetime. 

And so when we hear somebody say, "I was delivered from this in a moment," we have to understand that that is miraculous, and that by definition it is not the norm. These processes take so much longer whether you are dealing with addictive behaviors or post-traumatic stress or mental health, to move out of them, to actually lay on new memories in the place of the old, to surpass those old pathways and lay on something that is stronger, it takes years, decades. And those old pathways, they don't always go away either. 

And so our role then, as if we are not one of the few who are extremely blessed to receive a miraculous deliverance and a miraculous rewiring of our affections in a moment, is to train our brains on what is good and to starve our brains essentially of what is evil. And then at the end of that, we must be looking forward to the resurrection. That is something that we have to do because we have to know that when we are resurrected, we will not just receive a new body, meaning everything from the neck down, we will receive a new brain as well, a brain that values only the things of the Lord, and that will not send us after things that would destroy us any longer. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So I'm hearing we need to attend to the habits that we talk about so much in church, but not just because it makes you a good Christian, but because it's actually training your brain. There's neurology behind those. And also to extend ourselves the same grace that God gives us through because of sanctification, that it's a process that it's going to take a while and extending ourselves grace in the midst of that. Go ahead, Rankin. 

Rankin Wilbourne: 

It took decades for these pathways to form. It's going to take decades for them to reform. By grace, it is the spirit's enabling. But this is where cutting edge neuroscience meets the ancient wisdom of spiritual disciplines. 

Lanier Burns: 

Amen. 

Rankin Wilbourne: 

Neuroscientists would call it neuroplasticity. Biblically, it's being transformed by the renewing of your mind. It's the same idea, but it is slow, it is painful, it is non-linear, and God's grace is there every step of the way. 

Thomas Dunham: 

I will say, I think it's important to remember that when we are doing ministry among people, right, we don't expect people to move out of a destructive or a sinful behavior in a moment. We have to be content with them taking those progressive sanctifying steps. And so to use an extreme example, you don't come down hard on a heroin addict for smoking cigarettes. Right? You don't. That could very well be a sign of God's grace, moving them from a severe addiction to one that is milder. And as long as they keep walking with the Lord and seeking that renewal of their mind, they can help retrain their brain to set aside more and more as they pursue what is good again. And so we have to be content with the length of that process. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Lanier, we've got time for the Bible verse I see that you have located or thought of. 

Lanier Burns: 

Well, I was going try to make goodness very concrete. And so because we're created in the image of God to rule as his vice regents, everyone wants to be great, everyone wants to be significant. It's the driving force behind every human being. It comes down to the issue of power. So when James and John and their mother, really when it came to crunch time at Calvary, mom said, "We want to be CEO and CFO." 

And Jesus said, "You, don't understand the way I made you. I made you for servant leadership." And so I think the specific discipline that promotes personal transformation is serving wherever we find ourselves. And that's what people are not inclined to do. So if you serve and you serve and you serve, you give and you get from God a joy, a freedom, a peace. My life counts. So that's what I would say this quest for goodness should be. It's trying not to raise ourselves up, but to lower ourselves. Philippians 2:6, let this attitude be in you which was in Christ Jesus. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I love that. To kind of summarize everything that we've talked about, or at least give my best crack at it, we are holistic beings who are depraved and sinful. It doesn't mean that we're as bad as we could be. It just means that everything is impacted by sin. And what we've been hammering away here is that the mind itself, the brain, all of that, our thought processes are also impacted by sin. It's not just a moral bad decisions or that kind of thing. It's everything about us is sinful. 

And having that realization itself hopefully will open up a lot of understanding with regard to scripture and even, Rankin, what you were talking about, the ancient wisdom of spiritual disciplines and that kind of thing, and recognizing the importance of regular habits, not just of spiritual disciplines, biblical study, that kind of thing, but also, Lanier, what you were talking about, humbling ourselves. 

Lanier Burns: 

Yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

And serving repeatedly. And that that in and of itself, those things actually transform not just our soul, but our soul is a part of our body and it actually transforms our body as well. So gentlemen, I want to thank you so much for your time and for this conversation. It's been so fun to dig into these things with you. Thank you so much for being here. And we want to thank you, our listener, for being with us. If you like our show, please leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app so that others can find us. And we hope that you'll join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology for everyday life.