The Mind’s Role in Spiritual Transformation
 

  1. Romans 12:1-2: “Renewing” is anakainosis in the Greek which means “Making something new. “Mind” is nous meaning “the intellect, reason, or the faculty of understanding.

  1. The body is the vehicle through which we interact with the world. My habits dwell in my body and its members.

  1. God gave us understanding (Job 38:33,36) and we are to seek it.(Proverbs 2:2,4)

  1. I am my soul and I have a body. ( 1 Peter 4:6)

  1. Our judgments about right and wrong, virtue and vice, and appropriate lifestyles depend largely upon what we take a human being to be.

  1. The soul is…

    1. The total person including the body. (Genesis 2:7, Psalm 63:1)
    2. The immaterial self. (Matthew 10:28, John 12:25) 
  1. The soul contains…  (These are also faculties of the soul.)

    1. Desires. (2 Samuel 3:21)
    2. Emotions (Psalm 119:28)
    3. And is what knows. (Psalm 139:14)
    4. And is what exercises volition. (Psalm 130:6, 119:29) 
  1. Sometimes “spirit” is a synonym for soul, but also refers to that aspect which relates to God. (Psalm 51:10, Romans 8:16, Ephesians 4:23)

  1. “Heart” refers to the center of human personality. (Proverbs 4:23)

  1. Mind is that which reasons.(Romans 14:5, Philippians 4:8, Colossians 3:2)

  1. The soul is a substantial, unified reality that informs the body.

  1. The Five States of the Soul are…

    1. Sensation. (The big 5) Emotions are a sub-class.
    2. Thought. Mental content which only exist while it is being thought.
    3. Belief. A person’s view, accepted to varying degrees of strength, of how things really are.
    4. Desire. Felt inclinations to do, have, or experience certain things.
    5. Will. Volition or choice.

  1. The soul has a number of capacities that are not currently being actualized.

  1. There are first-order capacities and second-order capacities to have first-order capacities. When something has a defect, it does not lose its ultimate capacities. Rather, it lacks some lower-order capacity it needs for the ultimate capacity to be developed.

  1. Beliefs, Behavior, and Character.

    1. The content of a belief.
    2. The strength of a belief.
    3. The centrality of a belief. 
  1. Scripture holds us responsible for our beliefs since it commands us to embrace certain beliefs and warns us of the consequences of accepting other beliefs.

    1. We can change our beliefs indirectly though study, meditation and reflection so changing the content, strength and centrality of beliefs.

  1. Certain beliefs form the plausibility structure of a culture. I will never be able to change my life if I cannot even entertain the belief needed to bring about that change. This is why apologetics is so crucial to evangelism. It seeks to create a plausibility structure in a person’s mind.

  1. Three types of seeing. Simple seeing, seeing as, seeing that.

    1. Simple seeing. You don’t need a concept of what something is to see it.
    2. Seeing as. Involves classifying the object of sight as an example of a mental concept, and concepts are located in the mind.
    3. Seeing that. Here one judges with the mind that some perceptual belief is true. 
  1. A developed mind helps us see in that the more you know, the more you see and hear because your mind brings more to the task of “seeing as” or “seeing that.”

  1. Intentionality refers to the “of-ness” or “about-ness” of our mental states. The minds points beyond itself to the objects we use our minds to contemplate.

  1. In the internal structure of the mind, we come to understand something, the mind develops a conceptualization of the thing so understood. This allows us to cooperate with reality, whether spiritual or physical, and tap into it power.

 

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