Authentic Faith emanates from the heart, NOT from the rational mind.

Readership: Christians
Theme: Mystical Awareness
Author’s Note: This article was originally published on Ed Hurst’s discontinued blog, Do What’s Right, on 2020/10/22 [Archive].  Updated and expanded by Jack, based on his correspondence with the author.  Headings and images added by Jack.
Length: 1,300 words
Reading Time: 7 minutes

Intro

I’ve been asked to review the meaning of “Heart-Led” in the context of this blog.

A major element of the Radix Fidem covenant is bouncing off the prevailing American culture and mainstream Christian religion, showing how they are wrong. Thus, we first have to point out what most people believe, and why it’s wrong.

The core problem is Aristotle. Not the man and his teaching so much as the influence he’s had on American thinking. He denied the existence of a Spirit Realm. He insisted that, if there were gods, they were restricted to this realm of existence. This world, as we experience it, is all there can be. Further, he insisted that human capabilities — reason in particular — were sufficient to grasp all that matters. He denied the Fall and insisted that humans were perfectible, at least in terms of logic and reason.

Enlightened Thinking Has Replaced Mystical Awareness

We understand that American culture arose from Anglo-Saxon culture for the most part, with a lot of other minority inputs from all over Europe. The whole mess together is the result of Germanic tribal barbarians colliding with the vestiges of the Greco-Roman Civilization. The existing Roman Church at that time quite intentionally ditched what remained of their almost forgotten understanding of the Hebrew influence in the New Testament teachings, and adopted a bunch of pagan ideas from the Germanic invaders, so as to brew up a brand of Christian religion that would appeal to them. This was a political move; the Church intended on converting the Germanic lords and so retain the Church’s political dominance.

Somewhere later down the road, the resulting civilization rising from the Dark Ages went back and reclaimed the classic literature and lore of the long-dead Greco-Roman Civilization. The result climaxed with the Enlightenment. There was some decent stuff there, but the core problem was the restoration of some elements of Aristotelian assumptions about reality. The details get murky, but the net result was that a lot of Western Christian thinking was unable to shake loose those pagan assumptions. So we have today a long legacy of Christians asserting that there is a Spirit Realm, but then they make it spooky and incomprehensible. They say that man is fallen, but then act like human reason can be trusted to get answers for faith. They assume “faith” means a compartment of the intellect, a matter of rational decision.

In Western mythology, the heart is restricted to serving as a repository of sentiment. Sure, it’s more than mere emotion, but it is still just a matter of feelings, even if they happen to be really strong feelings. Thus, the modern meaning of “follow your heart” is some inexplicable force of really strong feelings that won’t let you rest until you take them into account.

This is radically different from how things were viewed in the Biblical context. In the Bible, your heart is the seat of commitment, AKA faith. The Bible talks about interacting with living beings and hearing the celebration of the Creator. Western minds read that as parabolic, but Scripture treats it as quite literal. Thus, we find Jesus speaking to natural forces and those things obeying Him. And we have Paul solemnly teaching that Creation itself tells us about God and what is moral truth.

Wait…  But isn’t the Heart Wicked?

One of the first objections I often hear from sincere truth seekers inquiring about the Heart-Led Way is from Jeremiah 17:9.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?

Jeremiah 17:9 (NKJV)

They assume this verse indicates that the human heart is utterly depraved, and never to be trusted.  Granted, there are scripture passages that appear to confirm this conclusion (e.g., Mark 7:14-23; Romans 1:28-32), but the end result of this belief is them choosing to alienate themselves from their own heart and soul.  This rejection of discernment, resulting in the destruction of the integrity of one’s soul, cannot be the intended application, as Jesus’ work is not to destroy us, but to redeem us.

The Bible talks about how you can build barriers in your soul that darken your heart. It can be corrupted and made wicked. However, if you turn the light of revelation onto your heart, it will commit itself to faithfully serving the Lord of Creation. It’s not mere sentiment; it’s a wholly separate faculty that is able to accurately discern the will of God. And it is superior to the intellect. Meanwhile, the Scripture warns, starting with the Garden of Eden narratives, that human reason is fallen and insufficient to discern moral truth on its own.

The Submission of the Intellect

The next objection I often hear is, “What about the rational mind?”

God gave us brains so that we could organize and implement the moral truth coming out of our hearts. The heart always trumps whatever the brain thinks it knows, and the brain will often object to this (as depicted in the cartoon meme below). God’s will does not have to make sense to your head; it always makes sense to your heart. It’s burned into your convictions. If you make a conscious effort to refer to your convictions — the living fire of imperative in your soul — then you will always have peace with God.

The Heart — A Treasure In Earthen Vessels

So perhaps we should heed the majority of non-Western cultures yet living in our world today when they suggest that your soul is not in your head, but in your heart. Ask any Native American who actually knows their own culture where their soul “lives”, and they’ll point to their heart, whereas the vast majority of non-native Americans will point to their heads. And then we can examine the scholarly research about the Ancient Near East (ANE) and discover that they, too, assumed that the soul was in the heart, not the head — all of them, so far as we can tell.

Lo and behold, even Western science has discovered that the heart has its own sensory field, and that it possesses nerve nodes apparently capable of processing what that sensory field senses. However, science has no idea what kind of data that field senses, only that it most certainly does interact with other living things and the sensory field emitting from those beings. Given the cultural assumptions of the West, we aren’t surprised that the most active efforts to use that limited scientific information result in folks talking about “emotional intelligence” (EQ).

Abraham believed it; Moses believed it; Jesus and His followers taught it. Not the way I’m teaching it here, of course. They were basing their teaching on a shared assumption that had never varied across the entire history encompassed in Scripture. It turns out that the West is just about the only civilization that thinks the heart is just a repository of sentiment, and that the soul is in the head.

Conclusions

The Heart-Led Way means you have moved your conscious awareness from your head to your heart. It means you seek to sense moral truth directly from Creation, because God wove His own DNA in the fabric of reality. It means you strive to read your own convictions, which are awakened when your spirit is touched by the Divine Presence. It means you sense that powerful Divine Presence which lives in your heart as the Holy Spirit. It means you have compelled your reason and intellect to bow the knee to the superior moral wisdom of your heart.

That’s the Heart-Led Way.

By the way, Biblical Law assumes you are taking the Heart-Led path as the means to discerning what the written Law Covenants demand of you. You cannot obey God’s Law with your head — that’s legalism. The Bible expects you to get this Heart-Led Way as a prerequisite for peace with God.  It is required.  That’s the basis of true faith.

Related

• Σ Frame: A Mystical Approach to Meta Reality (2021/3/19)
• Christianity and Masculinity: Unpacking and tying together the meta-levels of Christianity, reality and the red pill into a hierarchical understanding: theological, scientific, and philosophical/cultural (2021/3/29)
• Σ Frame (NovaSeeker): Viewpoints on Man’s Confusion about How God Works in the Life of a Believer (2021/3/29)
• Σ Frame (NovaSeeker): The Noetic Nose Knows (2021/9/6)
• Σ Frame: Developing Discernment (2021/9/27)
• Σ Frame: What is Mysticism? (2022/2/1)
• Σ Frame: The Advent of Christian Mysticism (2022/8/1)
• Σ Frame: Christ is in You (2023/4/3)
• Σ Frame: Belief, Cognition, and Faith (2024/8/15)
• Bruce Charlton: Participation in Romantic Christianity (2025/10/14)
• Bruce Charlton: You *Don’t* need Faith to be a Christian! (Hope will suffice) (2025/10/14)