“The Master and His Emissary,” a book by Iain McGilchrist, is a wonderful study of the way our brain functions. I have found it helpful as I consider engaging with the Bible through imagination. Our brain is divided into the right and left hemispheres. Both hemispheres function at all times during our human experience, but they have decidedly different roles and strengths. The left hemisphere contains language, facts, and categorizes our experiences accordingly. The right hemisphere perceives images, music, and processes our experience in much more subtle ways. We all, to one degree or another, favor one hemisphere over the other. Western culture, including much Western church culture, favors left hemispheric thought. Activities of the right side, such as music, meditation, narrative, metaphor, and nuance, are typically seen as less important than activities of the left hemisphere, such as topical teaching, clear doctrine, Bible study, and facts. All of these activities are necessary for a healthy Christian walk, but by favoring activities of the left side, we may be hampering our walk.

The left side of our brain loves certainty. It happily reduces information to easy statements, even if the statements may ignore some of the facts. An extremely left-brained person will tend to have a high opinion of themselves. Their confident knowing places them in the center of their own universe. Much recent Christian teaching stokes the left hemisphere. “Five Steps to a Successful Marriage” or “Three Practices to Grow Closer to God” are examples of such teachings. These sorts of teachings are often helpful, but they look nothing like the way that the Apostles, and especially Jesus, taught in the Bible.

Information processed by the right side of the brain is processed within the big picture. Where the left side can pull out a single detail and feel it knows everything it needs to about it, the right side processes details only in relation to the whole. It is more likely to pick up discrepancies between details. Information processed by the right side is then passed over to the left side, but without the certainty that leads to stagnation. What I mean by this is that sometimes, when we are completely certain of all the individual details, we begin to try to teach others the details, or worse, stop trying to learn ourselves. By engaging the right side, we are inviting others on a journey of discovery. A parable of Jesus can deeply affect us for a lifetime, often in different ways at different times. When we reduce a parable to a list of facts or truths, we are left with something less than the parable as it stands. It is precisely the ambiguity of narrative that invites us to become part of the story, not simply to know about it.