Your Spiritual Brain: Owner's Manual for Living a Christ-like Life

By Allen Nauss

In his latest book, Allen Nauss offers a unique and revealing explanation of the role of God's Spirit in the neurological functioning of the brain of a Christian. The explanation is based on recent brain research findings and pertinent passages from the Bible. The Christian's spiritual brain proves to be a formidable asset in one's everyday life. It is the cornerstone for the Christian virtues and character strengths making up the image that God created in Adam and Eve. Christians will also find distinct practical help in dealing with challenges in four areas of human relationship--living with God, living with oneself, living with other individuals, and living with groups in the church and community.

Have you ever noticed how giving yourself to Jesus as your Savior and to the Holy Spirit as your guide in this life has freed you from being absolutely controlled by the negative desires coming from your heart and mind and has freed you for the goals in the Bible that God would have you pursue?

Have you ever wondered

how you may live still more fully with God and worship Him?

how you may live still more comfortably with yourself?

how you may live still more completely with others and serve them?

how you may serve and lead still more effectively groups in your church or community?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798888511053

Book preview

Preface

In 2005, when I first began reading books and articles revealing the brain research findings, I recognized immediately some implications for ministry and theology. New ideas continued to appear regularly with additional research.

In this, my third book publication, I am continuing to search for practical implications of the neuroscientific brain research. My efforts focus primarily on investigating how God uses the functions of the brain he created for Adam and Eve and all the rest of us. Christians especially can appreciate learning how God has developed a powerful spiritual application of specific functions of the brain. An initial explanation of this benefit for us is presented in Part 1 of the book entitled The ABCs of the Spiritual Brain.

Of special interest to some readers are figure 4.1 and table 5.2. The figure represents a picture of the overall structure of this book. The table offers a verbal picture of the Christian’s formation as reflected in the biblical virtues or traits of the restored image of God in which he had created Adam and Eve.

Part 2 offers more specific applications of your spiritual brain in four pillar areas of living relationships, while Part 3 is the conclusion.

I have continued to appreciate the invaluable assistance of a number of persons who have evaluated my fledgling attempts at recording different ways of looking at our relationship with God with our own self, with other individuals, and with groups of people in church and community.

Reverend Robert Dargatz, Dr. Marian Baden, Dr. Robert Holst, and Dr. Michael Middendorf freely shared their reactions and comments as have members of my family (Ellen and Jon Pelzer, Ruth Stingley, John Nauss, Vikki Sparks, and Kaari Vasquez). I also could not have completed my work without the continuing support, encouragement, and welcome suggestions for being practical, offered by Vicki, my wife.

I also want to acknowledge the singular and gracious assistance of Dr. Robert Sylwester and Dr. Walter Rubke, two intellectual giants recently deceased, for their invaluable support and guidance of my early efforts to explain the implications of brain research for theology and ministry. Sylwester, emeritus professor of education at the University of Oregon and worldwide conference speaker on brain research, assured the validity of my references to brain structures and functions. Rubke’s expertise in communications and pastoral experience aided greatly in my efforts to communicate with clergy and laypersons.

My reliance on the Lord has finally been most helpful and necessary in my attempts to interpret accurately past events in the life of the church and of Christians.

I do believe you will find much worth in this book for your own self.

Allen Nauss

Part I

The ABCs of Your Spiritual Brain

Chapter 1

What Is This Book All About?

This book is about your brain, especially its spiritual side. If you are a Christian and accept Jesus as God’s Son and your Savior and if you believe that the Bible is God’s Word meant for you, you have an exceptionally good head start on understanding and using your spiritual brain.

However, even if you do not believe that Jesus is God but still believe in a divine power, you may still gain worthwhile information. You may be moved by the account in chapter 5 of the neuroscientific research with Buddhists and Pentecostal tongue speakers. Christians will be especially motivated by the deep reliance throughout this book upon God’s Word and the impetus to recognize God’s power to change their life.

A Question to Begin

The title of this book, Your Spiritual Brain, raises the question: What does God have to do with your brain? You may have never truly realized this possibility that God could play a physical role in the brain’s activity. That question has likely not arisen because you didn’t know that much about the brain. You recognize, to be sure, that God is involved in your life, but you may have been hesitant to spell out the relationship because our human minds cannot readily comprehend God’s mysterious ways. Is it possible that we might become able to look at God in a clearer, more personal manner? I believe we can.

ABCs of the Spiritual Brain

The following four chapters (2, 3, 4, 5) present a four-pronged support for establishing a clearer picture of the role of God in creating and empowering your brain. Chapter 2 shows how the explosion of brain research just within the last quarter of a century has opened up a radically new and expanded understanding of this important organ of your body. It is the basis for your spiritual brain.

In chapter 3 Adam and Eve’s admission of Satan into their life resulted in a drastic change in their spiritual brain and in yours as well. In chapter 4, the restoration of God’s image in the human brain reveals how God’s Spirit directs the use of four primary brain functions. Chapter 5 identifies the detailed substance of God’s ongoing restoration of his image in you and in other Christians. That restoration consists of the Christian virtues and their unique character strengths that form the new identity of your spiritual brain.

Four Relationship Areas of Living

In four pairs of the chapters 6 through 13, the Christian’s spiritual brain makes use of specific brain functions together with Christian virtues and strengths in four major areas of living. The four areas are living with God, living with yourself, living with and serving other individuals, and serving and leading groups in your church and community.

The first chapter of each pair reveals how your spiritual brain can direct the brain’s functions in reaching their objectives in the specific area of living. The second of each pair shows how your spiritual brain can restore in you that part of God’s image, which was originally designed for Adam and Eve for their use in specific areas of living.

First, developing a relationship with God is your primary goal in life as a Christian (chapters 6 and 7). Several questions may help you achieve this objective. How may you use your memories to develop a closer relationship with God? How may God’s Spirit effect change within a person? Have you ever wondered how you might develop a closer relationship with God? Chapter 6 offers responses that can definitely help you.

Living with yourself is not always a simple, problem-free process. Have you ever wondered whether you might be able to control your emotions still more effectively? Have you ever wondered whether you have any creative talent? In chapter 8 you will find several critical functions in your brain that can be of real help.

Living with others is an unavoidable, but most fulfilling, relationship in your life. There are very few hermits in our society, if any at all. In many cases, people experience satisfying results from their relationships with others. However, for others, some problems always seem to arise. Have you ever wondered whether you could develop a closer relationship with a specific person? Have you thought of how you might be able to serve that person still more effectively? Chapter 10 suggests one resolution that begins in the brain and has significant results.

Differences and conflicts between groups in the church and community seem to be inevitable. Have you ever wondered how you might become more effective in resolving conflicts between certain groups in your church or community? Have you ever wondered how you might become more effective in promoting certain issues in your church or community? Knowledge of the brain’s two hemispheres detailed in chapter 12 can be of worthwhile help to you.

An extremely important question you will raise about the virtues of God’s image is how they may be translated into action. Chapter 14 offers practical guidelines for you.

Your Owner’s Manual

Probably, the majority of people who buy a new car or a special appliance for their home make at least some use of an attached owner’s manual. The same may apply to you as a Christian who has given your life to the Lord. The Bible can be considered your guide, or owner’s manual, that God has given to you to guide you in your relationship with God, with yourself, with other individuals, and with groups in your church and community. Your responsibilities are, of course, much more personal than operating a mechanical instrument.

Learning how to get along with yourself and with others, as well as with God himself, is also much more vital because your life on earth and in heaven is certainly of much more consequence than operating a car or other appliance. But you are still the new owner with a lifetime of enjoying and learning about your new relationships.

Ever since Old and New Testament times of the Bible, many clergy have worked hard to share their understanding of the Scriptures. In worship services, Christians over the centuries have been using the Bible to help them. And you have right before you the Bible, which contains the secret to having good relationships with God, with yourself, and with others.

The Secret to Having Good Relationships

God created your brain. As a Christian, you also enjoy the guidance and other benefits that his Spirit has added for you. This is the province of your spiritual brain. Its two features are identified in chapter 5. Self-awareness and careful use of your spiritual brain will guarantee good relationships.

A Book for Christians

This is a book intended to let Christians know more about the gifts God has graciously given to each of us. But it does still more than pass on critical knowledge. In this book, I point directly to functions of the brain you can develop still more than you may have done already. Most important is your awareness of how God does so much for you when he provides you with benefits derived from using your spiritual brain.

I am attempting to share knowledge of this special awareness with you as just one of the multitude of Christians for whom this book is intended. Many Christians are already aware of how personally God directs and guides them through his presence and activity in their brain. I hope you will find this same help here.

Chapter 2

From Unknown to Known

Up until the early nineties of the twentieth century, the brain had remained a mystery. Little was known about this vital element in God’s creation that is so essential to carrying out his commission. In the early history of civilization, the brain was considered a minor, insignificant organ of the body. It gained more prominence during the Renaissance with Leonardo da Vinci and then later with Descartes. In the early nineteenth century, Franz Gall’s (1758–1828) phrenology became highly popular with its localization of thirty-one personality organs in the different bumps on the surface of the brain (see figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1

The Brain

Investigation of the brain began in earnest only near the beginning of the twentieth century. It occurred with the aid of unique technological instrumentation that has brought us to this present point where we can find out much more about the brain. In the centuries preceding our current time, investigators were able to use only an invasive exploration after an individual’s death to look into the brain inside the skull. The invention of noninvasive imaging technology in the early 1990s and its succeeding use have resulted in the recent explosion of brain research within the last quarter of a century. Thousands of books and articles have now given us a new, more accurate picture of the brain’s structures and functions.

I want to recognize that brain research would not have been possible without adequate technology. The grandfather of this technology seems to be the electroencephalogram produced by Hans Berger in 1924.¹ It was only later in the 1970–1980 decade that the second generation appeared with the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). The MRI was developed and became affordable for more popular use at that time. It could produce an image of the brain and its contents but only in a static form.

The present generation of technology began with the invention in 1994 of the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) by Ogawa and his colleagues in Japan. It was able to produce a picture of networks of neurons that were actually functioning in contrast to those that were inactive. The fMRI spurred the present explosion of neuroscience research.² God may well have directed the mind of this apparently non-Christian Japanese researcher. He is called the father of fMRI. Ogawa was born in Japan. After undergraduate education at the University of Tokyo, he completed a PhD at Stanford University. During his work in research at the AT&T Labs in New Jersey, he developed the principles underlying the invention of the fMRI. It has enabled neuroscientific researchers to make a map of the brain that shows which part was active during an event in a person’s life or during any experimental testing. The invention became financially available to researchers at many universities where they were eager to investigate the brain, and it was only the first of a number of additional methods invented later.

But that wasn’t all that happened right about this same time. In the late eighties and early nineties, the computer underwent remarkable developments and became immediately available to the whole world. And finally, the Internet and World Wide Web were developed to create an avenue for letting practically everyone know what had happened in the past and what was going on in the present.

These three developments in the scientific and social world—the fMRI, the computer, and the internet—have helped to communicate brain research findings to the whole world. Did these developments occur by chance? Historians of science might rather point to the creative instinct in individuals that led to questions and consequent inventive results. Historians of Christianity might also suggest that the confluence of these developments may well have reflected the intended action of God’s hand. The effects of the research have clearly resulted in a much clearer understanding of methods of communicating and applying God’s Word. That understanding leads to the picture of the role God plays in the creation and application of our brain’s functions.

The Brain’s Role in Your Life

You have at least two general ways to use your brain significantly. First, when reading the Bible, you can use your brain to reveal God as your Creator. Second, in the process of learning about God, you are able to find how biblical sources use words to express two main functions of the brain, cognition, and emotion. These brain functions, along with others, are intended to help you in your relationships with God, with yourself, with other individuals, and with groups in your church and community.

Finally, you can marvel at how God has created in your brain a structure that enables you to combine cognition and emotion.

Using your brain to reveal God the Creator

The confluence of the invention of the fMRI, the computer and the Internet has opened up to us the brain and so many of its workings. The chapters of this book reveal just a few of the more revealing pictures of this wonderful organ of our body, and it helps us come to see what a great God we have. It adds to the substance of our belief in the first article of the Apostles’ Creed.

As a Christian, you have the opportunity to confess your faith in the words of the Apostles’ Creed. But the research that has brought us so much more specific knowledge of