In the last 400 years, the world has changed beyond imagination. In the midst of the wonders of the scientific age, humanity has lost something fundamental. It has rejected mystery, it has constrained wonder and worst of all, it seems to have lost its heart. John 17:3 is all about heart connection. Jesus teaches through John’s writing, “This is the key to life eternal, that we grow in relationship (Gk. Gnosko – γινώσκω) with the only true God and Jesus Christ his Son” (author’s paraphrase). How do we grow in relationship with God if we deny his essential mystery, if we think we can rationalise out his nature and being?

The last 400 years of rationalism have limited our wonder and the ability to think beyond the handcuffs of the scientific method that demands that we only believe what we have experienced and only accept what can be replicated. That’s very sad because God gave us a sense of wonder that can soar far above the very pedestrian existence that we are shackled to by the renaissance.

In this article, I want to explore the integration of heart, body, mind and spirit – how we balance our emotions, physicality, intellect and spirituality throughout our lives. I am tackling this as a person who has struggled to keep these four elements in balance throughout my life. Whether it’s emotional dysregulation, struggles with my weight, an overactive intellect or a fading spirituality at times, I know to my cost that imbalance can lead to great difficulty in leading a healthy and fulfilled life.

This isn’t just individual struggle – it’s ecclesial. Churches that get this balance wrong are unhealthy, and it’s the pastoral team’s task to facilitate integration across the body. An understanding of the balanced approach adopted by John Wesley, later developed by A.C. Outler and known today as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, may assist in this task.

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral is a theological framework for understanding God’s word where Scripture has primary authority but is supported by the wisdom of our history (tradition), logical analysis and coherence (reason), and our personal and communal encounter with the grace of God (experience).

Scripture must be primary – but Scripture doesn’t exist in isolation. We read it through tradition (how has the church understood this?), with reason (does this make coherent sense?), and tested by experience (does this align with how God actually works?). When any of these three displaces Scripture, or when we elevate one of the supporting three above the others, our churches become unbalanced and incapable of developing as they should.

I grew up a Christadelphian, which is a hyper-rationalist church. My experience of Christianity and God was intensely cerebral, perhaps even more than some of my fellows because of my family background. When I made the transition to orthodoxy around 8 years ago, I became aware of an enormous deficiency in my spiritual life. I had learnt all about God, but frankly, I doubt I knew God at all. I had no relationship.

There’s a reasonable argument that my relationship with God is a relationship of the mind, but I suggest that this is limiting. Throughout my life, including to this day, I can tell you about all sorts of subjects in the Bible. Old Testament is my jam. But I still struggle to articulate my relationship with God, and I am plagued with times where I wonder if I have believed ‘cunning fables’ (2 Pet 1:16). It’s passion – emotional connection, not intellectual assent – that carries us through these periods of doubt whilst we figure things out.

For at least two years during my transition, I ceased to pray. At one point, I was on the verge of leaving Christianity, because I assented to the intellectual precepts of Christianity but had no emotional attachment. Thankfully, the Lord in his mercy showed me a resolution for my doubts and gave me time to start developing connection in different ways than my intellect, including through encounters with Holy Spirit.

Let me give you another example. Around four years ago, well after my transition to orthodoxy, I was watching a YouTube video that posed what seemed to me at the time a difficult timeline issue for the birth of Christ – a conflict between Herod’s death and the governorship of Syria. It smashed my understanding of biblical literalism to pieces and led to me questioning everything. For a few months, I wavered horrendously. I could explain Trinitarian theology. I could defend biblical authority. I could work through sophisticated exegetical arguments. But when my rational framework cracked, I had nothing underneath it. I couldn’t pray without feeling like I was talking to myself.

Then I discovered the likely archaeological solution to the gubernatorial question. But looking back, I now think that Holy Spirit was quite deliberate in exposing me this way – it led to me reading a mass of apologetics literature such as Josh and Sean McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict and E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien’s Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. Even recently I listened with interest to five views on biblical inerrancy including scholars such as Michael Bird, Pete Enns, Al Mohler and Kevin Vanhoozer.

Sometimes, you have to come to grips with the fact that rational thinking lets you down and you have to give it time. Passionately honouring God, his Son and Holy Spirit and trusting them takes you far beyond mere hermeneutics and exegesis to communion – whilst the arrogance of intellect is humbled and able to grow through its own failing.

The Four Stages of Human Development

Drawing on developmental psychology and the work of Australian psychologist Steve Biddulph, we can identify four crucial stages through which humans mature. First comes emotion – babies are bundles of raw feeling, crying and responding to their immediate needs and sensations. Then they discover physicality – learning to control their bodies, walking, running, manipulating objects in their environment. Next comes intellect – the development of language, reasoning, and the capacity for abstract thought. Finally, if all goes well, comes spirituality – the capacity to wonder about things beyond ourselves, to ask the big questions about meaning, purpose, and transcendence.

What makes this framework valuable isn’t just that it describes individual development, but that it identifies a crucial principle: healthy maturity doesn’t abandon earlier stages but integrates them. A mature adult isn’t someone who has left emotion and physicality behind to live purely in the intellect. Rather, maturity means all four dimensions working together in proper balance – feeling deeply, living in our bodies, thinking clearly, and maintaining capacity for wonder.

This integration principle has profound implications for Christian faith and church life. Just as individuals can become developmentally arrested – stuck at one stage whilst neglecting others – so too can theological movements and entire church communities. When a church elevates one dimension above all others, it produces spiritually stunted believers who may excel in one area whilst remaining underdeveloped in the rest.

Consider what happens when these stages fall out of balance in church contexts. A community frozen at stage one (emotion) produces believers who feel deeply but cannot articulate why they believe what they believe, who chase experiences without testing them against truth. A church stuck at stage three (intellect) creates members who can defend doctrine brilliantly but have no idea how to actually encounter God in worship or prayer. Stage two (physicality) without the others becomes empty ritual – going through motions without heart or mind engaged. And stage four (spirituality) unmoored from the earlier stages drifts into mysticism disconnected from embodied reality, rational coherence, or emotional health.

The Christadelphian community I grew up in was firmly arrested at stage three. We could explain doctrine with precision. We could argue biblical positions with sophisticated exegesis. We could defend our beliefs against all comers. But there was a troubling absence of that ‘otherworldly’ love (Gk. agape – ἀγάπη) that Jesus says marks his disciples (John 13:35). Ironically, we loved talking about agape because in our minds it gave licence to a kind of ‘cruel to be kind’ approach – love defined cerebrally as ‘doing what’s right for someone’ rather than felt compassionately. As a neurodivergent man, my own experience of this intellectual ‘love’ was fairly unpleasant.

Physical expression in worship was mocked – the ‘holy hands’ of charismatic Christians were and are still objects of derision. And mystery, that stage four capacity for wonder before the transcendent, was dismissed as intellectual laziness or capitulation. Emotion, when it appeared at all, was only acceptable if wrenched from cerebral exposition – an intellectual response to propositional truth, never immediate feeling or genuine encounter.

The question facing every Christian and every church community is this: are we developing in integrated maturity, or have we become arrested at one stage, mistaking partial development for spiritual health?

Mapping Biddulph to the Wesleyan Quadrilateral

The parallels between Biddulph’s developmental stages and Wesley’s theological framework are striking and illuminating. Both describe integrated maturity – Biddulph in human development, Wesley in theological method. Understanding how they correspond reveals why certain theological movements struggle with balance.

Stage 1 (Emotion) corresponds to Experience. Wesley’s ‘experience’ isn’t mere emotionalism – it’s our personal and communal encounter with God’s grace. But it begins with feeling, with immediate response to divine reality. New believers often operate primarily here – they’ve encountered God powerfully but cannot yet articulate what’s happened. This is healthy at the beginning, but maturity requires development beyond raw feeling.

Stage 2 (Physicality) corresponds to Tradition. This may seem counterintuitive until we recognise that tradition is embodied practice passed down through generations. It’s the physical rhythms of Christian life – liturgy, sacraments, corporate worship, fasting, feasting. Tradition teaches us to do Christianity with our bodies, not just think about it with our minds. It’s the developmental stage where we learn that faith involves embodied participation, not just intellectual assent or emotional experience.

Stage 3 (Intellect) corresponds to Reason. This is the rational analysis, logical coherence, and systematic thinking that allows us to understand and articulate what we believe. It’s essential – we’re called to love God with our minds (Matt 22:37). But when this stage operates without integration with the others, it produces the rationalist captivity I’ve been describing. Reason serves revelation; it doesn’t constrain it.

Stage 4 (Spirituality) corresponds to both Experience and Scripture’s transcendent authority. Here’s where the framework gets interesting. Spirituality – that capacity for wonder before the transcendent, for mystery, for encounter with reality beyond ourselves – operates at a different level than mere emotion. It’s why I’ve mapped Experience to both stage 1 and stage 4. Stage 1 experience is immediate feeling; stage 4 spirituality is mature wonder that can hold paradox and mystery whilst remaining grounded in the earlier stages.

Scripture stands above and integrates all four. In Wesley’s framework, Scripture has primary authority – it’s not one source among equals but the foundation. Similarly, Scripture speaks to all four developmental stages: it engages our emotions, shapes our embodied practice, demands our intellectual engagement, and opens us to transcendent mystery. A church that elevates tradition, reason, or experience above Scripture will inevitably become unbalanced. But equally, a church that claims ‘Scripture alone’ whilst functionally elevating reason above the other supporting lenses has merely replaced one imbalance with another.

This is precisely what happened in movements like the Christadelphians – and to varying degrees across Reformed and rationalist traditions. We claimed sola scriptura (Scripture alone) but practised ratio supra scripturam (reason above Scripture). When Scripture presented mystery – the Trinity, the Incarnation, divine sovereignty and human freedom – we subordinated revelation to rational categories. If it couldn’t be fully explained, we reinterpreted or rejected it.

But the opposite error – elevating experience above Scripture and reason – produces equal danger. Yet there’s another imbalance equally problematic: elevating a particular interpretation of Scripture above experience, reason, and tradition combined.

A couple of years ago I read James R. Wright’s Scripture Alone: Exploring the Bible’s Accuracy, Authority and Authenticity. The book directly and absolutely contradicted my experience of Holy Spirit. That contradiction led to a prolonged conflict in my faith. I did and do believe I experienced an encounter with Holy Spirit – the hand on my back, the undeniable sense of presence and personhood. But Wright’s cessationist arguments from Scripture challenged my interpretation of that experience.

Here’s what’s instructive: I didn’t just dismiss Wright because he didn’t align with my experience. His arguments caused me real angst and forced me to pause for considered thought. I needed a fairly lengthy discussion with one of the pastors to work through the tension. What emerged wasn’t a simple victory for experience over Scripture, but a recognition that Wright himself was operating with severe imbalance. He pursues sola scriptura to lengths that I don’t think Scripture itself supports – struggling between biblical literalism and biblical inerrancy in ways that elevate a particular hermeneutic above experience, reason, and the broad witness of church tradition. If you genuinely encounter the Spirit’s work, you’re forced to reconsider whether your cessationist interpretation of Scripture is mistaken – not whether Scripture is wrong, but whether your reading of Scripture has been too narrow.

This is messy. Integration often is. But it’s maturity – all four stages working together, even when they don’t produce neat answers.  This is precisely why we need integration. Experience without Scripture and reason can lead us astray – we can mistake psychological phenomena or even demonic deception for divine encounter. But Scripture interpreted without reference to experience, reason, and tradition produces either the arid intellectualism I’d lived for fifty years or the rigid biblicism that can’t accommodate what God is actually doing. The pastoral conversation helped me understand that my experience was valid and needed testing against Scripture, informed by tradition (how has the church understood Spirit encounters?), and examined through reason (does this align with biblical teaching about the Spirit’s work?). All four working together – not one elevated above the others.

This integration isn’t a one-time achievement but ongoing work. Recently I’ve been listening to debates around biblical inerrancy, and Pete Enns makes a compelling case against strict literalism in his position on the Conquest of the Land and Joshua. I studied that issue pretty deeply. There’s some archaeological evidence for elements of the conquest, but Joshua needs to be read more for its theological message – around things like the devoted things (herem – חֵרֶם) and God’s judgement – rather than as strict historical chronology. I suspect Judges gives us more of the actual historical story than Joshua does.

Setting all that aside, I can’t accept Al Mohler’s position because I think his stance on biblical literalism is damaging. We need to hold the historicity question more loosely than that. Yet I haven’t landed where Enns has either. I’ve settled somewhere in the middle, I think. Kevin Vanhoozer offers a pretty solid discussion in Mere Christian Hermeneutics and that’s where I land – difficult as it is to dispense with Joshua as pure chronological history, no matter how it actually feels. And for me, Joshua really does feel like straightforward historical narrative.

Notice what’s happening here: my emotional response (stage 1 – it feels like history), my intellectual formation (stage 3 – fifty years of literalism), and my developing understanding (stages 3 & 4 integrated – archaeological evidence, theological purpose, hermeneutical sophistication) are all in tension. The integration isn’t comfortable. But it’s honest engagement with Scripture (primary authority), informed by reason (archaeological evidence, literary analysis), tested by the wisdom of scholars across traditions (Enns, Mohler, Vanhoozer), rather than defaulting to whichever single lens feels most secure.

The Historical Roots – How We Got Here

To understand how Protestant Christianity became captive to rationalist methodology, we need to trace back to the Renaissance and its transformation of how educated Europeans approached knowledge and authority. But we also need to distinguish between reason as a gift and rationalism as tyranny.

Consider two contrasting approaches to divine mystery. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (‘Why God Became Man’) demonstrates reason serving revelation – using careful logic to explore the necessity of the Incarnation whilst acknowledging that divine reality exceeds full human comprehension. Anselm asks why God chose this particular means of salvation, but he doesn’t demand that every aspect fit perfectly into human categories before he’ll believe it.

Contrast this with Immanuel Kant centuries later, who argued that religion must remain ‘within the bounds of mere reason’ (Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft). Anything that couldn’t be morally rationalised gets bracketed as intellectually inadmissible. Mystery isn’t just unknowable; it’s useless because it can’t guide practical reason. The whole transcendent dimension gets collapsed into ethics.

Here’s what’s vital to understand: reason properly applied can challenge corrupt tradition and lead us toward truth. Consider Augustinian eternal conscious torment (ECT) – a doctrine that became orthodoxy despite serious theological problems. It took until the 20th century before it was seriously challenged again. But when reason asks, ‘How does it logically work to balance a gracious God with an eternity of punishment for 70-odd years of wickedness?’, that’s reason serving revelation, testing tradition against Scripture and coherence. That’s healthy.

The problem isn’t reason – it’s rationalism. Rationalism demands that divine reality submit entirely to human rational categories. If God’s nature involves paradox or mystery, rationalism rejects it rather than acknowledging the limits of finite minds encountering infinite reality.

The Renaissance shift wasn’t from faith to reason but from reason as servant to reason as master. Medieval theologians could embrace paradox whilst thinking rigorously. Renaissance humanists increasingly demanded that all knowledge, including theological knowledge, conform to what human logic could fully comprehend and systematise.

This shift became particularly potent when combined with the Reformation’s emphasis on sola scriptura. Luther and the Reformers rightly challenged papal authority and insisted on Scripture’s primacy over corrupt tradition. But within a few generations, this principle was being applied with Renaissance rationalist assumptions: individuals armed with Scripture and logical analysis, freed from institutional authority, confident they could understand divine truth with perfect clarity.

The result wasn’t just rejection of Roman Catholic magisterial authority – it was often rejection of the theological wisdom of the early church fathers, the ecumenical creeds, and even the broad consensus of Christian interpretation across centuries. ‘Scripture alone’ became ‘Scripture interpreted by my individual reason alone’, with no external theological guardrails.

Søren Kierkegaard, writing in the 19th century, recognised this problem acutely. In Fear and Trembling, he used Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac to challenge the Hegelian assumption that everything could be mediated and rationalised through systematic philosophy. Abraham faced a ‘teleological suspension of the ethical‘ – God’s command transcended rational ethical categories. Faith required a leap beyond what reason could fully comprehend or justify.

Kierkegaard was explicitly pushing back against Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who had attempted to systematise all reality, including religion, into rational philosophical categories. For Hegel, religion was a stage in the dialectical march toward absolute knowing, where eventually philosophy would supersede it entirely. The sacred became a tool for the rational. Volksreligion (civil religion) should be based in reason and intellectually defensible, permeating and regulating society without becoming theocracy.

This Hegelian confidence – that human reason provides adequate categories for understanding divine reality completely – represents the pinnacle of rationalist theology. And Protestant movements across the spectrum absorbed more of this than they realised.

The rationalist inheritance didn’t affect all Protestant traditions equally or in the same ways, but its influence was pervasive. Different movements elevated different lenses whilst claiming biblical fidelity.

Reformed and Presbyterian traditions often fell into the trap Kierkegaard identified – subordinating revelation to systematic rational categories. The beauty of Reformed theology’s intellectual rigor became a cage when mystery was treated as a problem to be solved rather than reality to be embraced. Doctrines like the Trinity and Incarnation were defended but often with such emphasis on logical coherence that the transcendent wonder got lost. Some streams developed such confidence in their systematic theology that questioning became suspect, and doctrinal precision replaced relational knowing.

Restorationist movements like the Stone-Campbell tradition (from which the Christadelphians emerged) took this further. Alexander Campbell‘s call to return to New Testament Christianity by rejecting creeds and traditions created perfect conditions for rationalist methodology to flourish. When Campbell advocated in his Christian Baptist and Millennial Harbinger for biblical interpretation based strictly on biblical language, rejecting traditional theological terminology, he unknowingly opened the door to Socinian-style rationalism that had been refined in 16th-century Polish exile communities.

The Christadelphians, under John Thomas’s leadership, represent an extreme but not unique example. Thomas applied rationalist biblical interpretation with remarkable consistency: if the Trinity couldn’t be rationally explained, it must be false. If the Incarnation involved paradox, it must be reinterpreted. If eternal conscious torment seemed unjust by rational standards, it must be rejected (here, reason actually led toward truth). The entire theological system was built on the foundation that divine reality must conform to human rational categories.

But even movements that maintained orthodox Trinitarianism weren’t immune. Fundamentalism in the early 20th century, reacting against theological liberalism, often became rigidly rationalist in its defence of biblical authority. Claiming to defend ‘the fundamentals’, it frequently elevated a particular hermeneutic – strict literalism, dispensationalism, inerrancy defined in narrow terms – above the other lenses of tradition, reason (properly applied), and experience.

Evangelicalism broadly has swung between these poles across generations. Reacting against dead orthodoxy, the charismatic movement emphasised experience and immediate encounter – but sometimes without sufficient grounding in Scripture and reason. Reacting against charismatic excess, the New Calvinism emphasised rigorous theology – but sometimes losing the vital dimension of personal encounter and embodied worship. Each correction risks overcorrection, producing the very imbalance it sought to remedy.

The common thread? Protestant confidence that we’d escaped Roman Catholic errors whilst often remaining blind to the Renaissance rationalist assumptions we’d absorbed. We claimed to follow Scripture alone whilst functionally elevating reason, or tradition, or experience – rarely recognising that Wesley’s integrated approach was closer to biblical and patristic wisdom than our partisan emphases.

But here’s what makes this so insidious: we can’t see it. Like fish that don’t recognise the water they swim in, we’re enveloped by rational models, frameworks, and the assumption that all things must comply with logical categories. It’s ingrained through schooling, through culture, through the entire structure of modern Western thought. Even writing this article, even having recognised the problem, I struggle to comprehend a different way of thinking. How do you step outside a framework that shapes the very tools you use to think?

This isn’t just a Christadelphian problem, or a Presbyterian problem, or even a Protestant problem narrowly defined. It’s the water Western Christianity has been swimming in for 400 years. Every tradition – Restorationist movements like Christadelphians, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses; Reformed and Presbyterian traditions; Fundamentalists and Evangelicals; even Catholic and Orthodox communions engaging with modernity – has had to wrestle with how to maintain biblical faith whilst inhabiting a rationalist culture that demands everything conform to human logical categories.

The question isn’t whether we’ve been affected by this inheritance, but how – and whether we can recognise it clearly enough to pursue integration rather than remaining captive to invisible assumptions we mistake for biblical fidelity.

This is why the rationalist captivity persists across generations and traditions. It’s not that we consciously choose rationalism over mystery – it’s that rationalism has become the invisible lens through which we see everything, including Scripture itself. We read the Bible through rationalist assumptions without realising we’re doing it. We demand that theological truth conform to Enlightenment categories whilst believing we’re simply being ‘biblical’.

The Christadelphians who dismissed my Spirit encounter as ‘just experience’ weren’t being malicious. They genuinely couldn’t conceive of encounter as a valid category of knowledge. Their epistemology – inherited from Renaissance humanism via Socinian networks via English Unitarianism via American restorationism – had no room for it. And they were completely unaware they’d inherited anything at all. They believed they were thinking biblically when they were actually thinking like 16th-century Polish rationalists.

This is the tyranny of the invisible. We can’t escape what we can’t see. And 400 years of rationalist dominance has made mystery, wonder, and transcendent encounter almost unthinkable – not because they’re unbiblical, but because our inherited frameworks have no categories for them.

The Cost – What Rationalism Does to Souls

Understanding rationalist captivity intellectually is one thing. Living inside it for fifty years is another entirely. The personal cost of developmental arrest – of being frozen at stage 3 whilst stages 1, 2, and 4 are amputated or atrophied – shapes everything: how you worship, how you relate to God, how you experience church community, how you process doubt.

Let me describe what this looked like in practice.

The Christadelphian community I grew up in was intensely cerebral. We could explain doctrine with precision, defend our positions with sophisticated exegesis, argue our beliefs with remarkable consistency. But there was a troubling absence of that ‘otherworldly’ love (agape – ἀγάπη) that Jesus says marks his disciples (John 13:35). Ironically, we loved talking about agape because in our minds it gave licence to a kind of ‘cruel to be kind’ approach – love defined cerebrally as ‘doing what’s right for someone’ rather than felt compassionately. As a neurodivergent man, my own experience of this intellectual ‘love’ was fairly unpleasant.

Physical expression in worship was mocked – the ‘holy hands’ of charismatic Christians were objects of derision. Mystery, that stage 4 capacity for wonder before the transcendent, was dismissed as intellectual laziness or capitulation. Emotion, when it appeared at all, was only acceptable if wrenched from cerebral exposition – an intellectual response to propositional truth, never immediate feeling or genuine encounter.

Worship was reduced to doctrinal precision. We executed the Breaking of Bread ritual perfectly – the prayers, the readings, the hymns, all in proper order. But as I wrote in November 2020, just after leaving that tradition entirely, our hearts weren’t engaged. I could participate in the ritual whilst my mind was planning the week, thinking about work, completely disconnected from what I was supposedly worshipping.

The hypocrisy of rationalist faith became starkest in moments of crisis. I watched a dear brother diagnosed with terminal cancer. The community prayed earnestly for healing – genuine, heartfelt prayer for divine intervention. And he lived. Years beyond what medical prognosis suggested, enough time for his sons to grow from young boys into teenagers. When he finally passed, the grief was profound and real.

But here’s what haunted me: we couldn’t talk openly about what had happened. Not in certain company. The broader community who witnessed this answered prayer found ways to explain it – time and chance, medical uncertainty, anything but acknowledging that God had intervened in response to prayer. Our theology had no room for what our hearts knew had occurred. We prayed as if God could act, but our rationalist framework couldn’t accommodate the possibility that he actually had.

This wasn’t malice. It was epistemological captivity. When your inherited framework has no category for divine encounter, you must explain away what doesn’t fit – even when it’s your own prayers being answered.

I want to be clear: I’m not advocating charismatic ‘claim your power’ theology. I don’t believe Spirit gifts inherently dwell within us to be commanded at will. But I do believe the Spirit works sovereignly in response to earnest prayer – not because we possess power, but because God graciously acts when his people cry out to him. The rationalist error isn’t rejecting charismatic excess; it’s having no category for God working at all except through ‘natural’ means that can be rationally explained.

My transition out of Christadelphia began in 2017 and was complete by late 2019. The year 2020 was wilderness – exploring house church models influenced by Frank Viola and George Barna’s Pagan Christianity?, trying to diagnose what had gone wrong. In November 2020, I wrote an article titled ‘When Ritual Overtakes Worship‘ that captured my struggle: ‘We learn our traditions and we execute them precisely and consistently… but have we left our hearts at the door?’ I could see the problem – ritual without relationship, precision without passion – but I was still looking for structural solutions (different church model) rather than recognising I needed epistemological transformation.

Late 2020, I started attending Hope Community, a Bapticostal church. What followed were five years of learning integration – trying to reconnect heart and mind, emotion and intellect, wonder and reason. It was harder than I’d imagined.

Fifty years of rationalist formation doesn’t disappear overnight. I had to learn how to worship with my body, not just my mind. I had to learn that emotion in worship isn’t suspect or dangerous. I had to learn that encountering God is as valid as thinking about God. The struggle was real enough that I wrote an article trying to systematise what should be instinctual: ‘How to Have a Heart Connection with God‘.

Looking back at that article now, there’s something both beautiful and heartbreaking about it. I was writing instructions to myself about how to feel, how to engage emotionally in prayer, how to let wonder happen. That article consistently performs as one of my most-read pieces – I suspect because thousands of other people, formed by cerebral Christianity, recognise the same wound. We’ve been taught to think clearly but never taught to feel deeply. We can explain doctrine but struggle to encounter the God that doctrine describes.

Even now, having joined Narangba Baptist Church in mid-2025 and started my MDiv in early 2024, I wrestle with integration. My intellect is strong – Old Testament is my jam, I can work through complex theological arguments, I love rigorous academic work. But I still struggle to articulate my relationship with God. I’m still plagued with times where I wonder if I’ve believed ‘cunning fables’ (2 Pet 1:16). The difference now is that I recognise what’s happening: I’m experiencing the tension between fifty years frozen at stage 3 and the slow, difficult work of developing stages 1, 2, and 4.

And stage 2 – physicality, embodied expression – remains my weakest area. I can’t relax my inhibitions enough to dance. It took a hideous amount of scotch in Shanghai 13 years ago before I actually managed it… once. There’s probably a lot at play there – Anglocentric upbringing, neurodivergence, fifty years of formation that treated physical expression as suspect. But the result is the same: even when my mind wants to worship and my heart is engaged, my body stays locked down.

The difference now is that I recognise what’s happening: I’m experiencing the tension between fifty years frozen at stage 3 and the slow, difficult work of developing stages 1, 2, and 4. Integration isn’t a destination; it’s ongoing struggle.

Not Just Christadelphians

This isn’t just a Christadelphian problem. The rationalist inheritance affects Protestant Christianity broadly, manifesting differently across traditions but producing similar developmental arrests.

I’ve attended Presbyterian services where I felt those same Christadelphian vibes – worship that was intellectually rigorous but emotionally arid, sermons that were exegetically precise but relationally distant. The Reformed tradition’s beautiful emphasis on systematic theology can become a cage when mystery is treated as a problem to be solved rather than reality to be embraced. Some Presbyterian contexts elevate doctrinal precision so highly that questioning becomes suspect and emotional engagement feels inappropriate.

On the opposite end, I’ve attended Pentecostal services where I nearly choked on the dry ice. Stage 1 (emotion) and stage 2 (physicality – the production, the spectacle) dominated whilst intellectual rigour and discernment seemed absent. Experience became self-validating. If it felt powerful, it must be from God. The lack of stage 3 guardrails made these communities vulnerable to prosperity gospel distortions and theological shallowness.

The ‘Bapticostal’ movement – Baptists with charismatic leanings – attempts integration but often swings between extremes. I’ve seen contexts where this works relatively well, and others where pastors flirt with prosperity gospel or show concerning interest in movements like Bethel, where some leaders have endorsed books exploring New Age concepts such as ‘healing frequencies’ and crystals (The Physics of Heaven). When stage 4 (spirituality/mystery) operates without sufficient stage 3 (intellectual discernment), you get mysticism unmoored from biblical boundaries – bridges toward practices Scripture explicitly warns against.

Catholic and High-Church traditions face different challenges. Stage 2 (physicality/tradition) is strong – the liturgy, the embodied practice, the rhythm of the church calendar. But this can become ritualism where the body goes through motions without heart or mind engaged. The very strength of tradition becomes a weakness when it replaces encounter rather than facilitating it.

The broader evangelical movement swings like a pendulum between these poles across generations. Fundamentalism was a cerebral reaction to theological liberalism – all doctrine, suspicious of emotion. The charismatic movement reacted against dead orthodoxy – all experience, suspicious of intellectualism. The New Calvinism reacted against seeker-sensitive shallowness – back to rigorous theology, often losing experiential vitality again. Each correction risks overcorrection, producing the very imbalance it sought to remedy.

The Way Forward – Integrated Maturity

Understanding the problem is essential. But diagnosis without pathway forward leaves people discouraged. If rationalist captivity is invisible, if we’re swimming in water we can’t see, how do we actually move toward integration?

Sometimes breakthrough comes from unexpected places.

In 2017, I was contemplating my future without really understanding what was wrong. Then I got an invite from a friend to attend ‘Walking with God’, a Christadelphian men’s camp in Melbourne based around John Eldredge’s book Wild at Heart.

I resisted attending. When they sent me the book, I opened the first page, found it talking about hairy-chested hunting-elk stuff, and put it down in disgust. This wasn’t rigorous theology; this was emotional masculinity nonsense.

Then we booked a cruise and at the last minute, I threw the book in my luggage. I don’t do crowds, and there were 1,500 people on the ship as we pulled out of port. So I crashed in our room and started reading. Within 20 minutes, I was quoting paragraphs to my wife. I was hooked. I finished it that cruise.

The camp itself terrified me. My friend who’d convinced me to attend cancelled at the last minute. I arrived in a suit with extensive luggage after client meetings, collected by an administrator in a small sporty BMW with one other person. Where was my luggage to go? I was ready to pull the pin and fly home. Then the administrator cheerfully grabbed my gear, squashed it in, and we were on the way.

I wasn’t willing to chat, just enduring. But then he said, ‘Alright, we’re going to pull into this pub and have a parmi and a beer.’ And we did, and I began to loosen up.

As we got out of the car at the camp, he mentioned casually, ‘There’s quite an infestation of tiger snakes here, so just be careful not to disturb iron or timber and you’ll be fine.’ I walked on air getting to the cabin, only to find a heap of guys mostly way younger than I. ‘Find a bed and it’s yours.’ I found a bed way down the end next to a guy curled up facing the wall – neurodivergent too, dealing with it the only way he knew how.

Later, I loosened up enough to come out and found that a cohort of mates from a church I used to attend had rocked up. Things started to get better.

Sometime late on Saturday, I felt something give. The shackles of rationalism seemed to have been broken by John’s book. I can’t even recall specifically what. I know that I was very moved by John’s chapter about the wound that fathers often give their sons, but that wasn’t it specifically. I suddenly felt that salvation wasn’t through the doctrinal purity of the Christadelphians.

So, in a way, 50 years did get reversed in a weekend. But it didn’t get unlearned.

What happened at that camp wasn’t abandoning intellect but experiencing breakthrough in the other three stages I’d neglected for fifty years.

Stage 1 (Emotion) broke through first. Eldredge’s emotionally evocative writing – which I’d initially dismissed as unrigorous – bypassed my intellectual defences. The father wound chapter connected at a level I’d never allowed theology to reach. I felt something, not just thought something.

Stage 2 (Physicality) showed up in the pub over a parmi and beer, in the embodied camaraderie of men gathering not for doctrinal precision but for shared experience. Finding my people in physical space rather than through theological agreement. Learning that fellowship could involve bodies and presence, not just minds and propositions.

Stage 4 (Spirituality) emerged in that moment late Saturday when I suddenly recognised that salvation wasn’t secured through doctrinal purity. God was bigger than my rational categories. Mystery wasn’t intellectual failure; it was appropriate response to transcendent reality.

Stage 3 (Intellect) wasn’t abandoned – it was dethroned. I didn’t stop thinking; I stopped letting thinking be the gatekeeper for everything else. The intellectual rigour I’d developed over fifty years remained valuable. It just couldn’t be the only lens through which I experienced God.

The shackles broke in a weekend. But learning to walk without them? That’s taken years and continues still. Breakthrough and integration aren’t the same thing. You can recognise the cage in a moment whilst spending years learning to move freely outside it.

This is why the pathway forward requires both honest assessment of where we are and patient commitment to long-term growth.

Assessing Individual Integration

Where am I on this developmental journey? Where might you be? These aren’t diagnostic criteria so much as questions I’ve had to ask myself – and they might resonate with your own experience.

When I recognise Stage 3 (Intellect/Reason) arrest in myself:

I notice I’m dismissing emotional expression in worship as suspect. Mystery feels like intellectual laziness rather than appropriate humility. I can explain doctrine brilliantly but struggle to actually encounter God in prayer. I test every spiritual experience against rational categories before I’ll accept it as valid. My faith feels more like assent to propositions than relationship with a person. When doubt comes, it threatens everything because my entire faith rests on intellectual certainty.

This was my story for fifty years. If you recognise yourself here, you’re not alone. The good news: your intellectual capacity is valuable and doesn’t need to be abandoned. The challenge: learning to integrate the other dimensions without feeling like you’re betraying your mind.

I’ve had to make intentional choices to facilitate this integration. I deliberately seek churches where the worship sparks something in me, because it’s too easy to fall back into my default cerebral approach. My current church’s worship is far from slick and certainly not performative, but it’s heartfelt and welcoming – it invites my heart to connect, not just my mind to analyse. That matters for someone who spent fifty years frozen at stage 3.

When I see Stage 1 (Emotion/Experience) dominance in others:

I notice people who chase powerful worship experiences but struggle to articulate why they believe what they believe. When asked to explain their faith, they default to ‘I just feel it’ or ‘I know in my heart’. They’re suspicious of systematic theology or doctrinal study as ‘dead orthodoxy’. They evaluate churches primarily by how worship makes them feel. Intellectual challenge feels like an attack on their relationship with God.

If this describes you, perhaps stages 3 and 4 need development? Your emotional connection to God is real and valuable, but it needs grounding in Scripture, testing through reason, and maturation into stage 4 wonder that can hold mystery without collapsing into mere feeling.

When I see Stage 2 (Physicality/Tradition) without engagement:

I’ve watched people (and sometimes caught myself) going through liturgical motions without heart or mind engaged. Church attendance becomes about duty and ritual rather than encounter or growth. Tradition gets valued primarily because it’s familiar and comfortable. We execute worship perfectly whilst our minds plan the week. Change in worship format feels threatening regardless of theological merit.

If this resonates, you’ve got embodied practice down but might benefit from developing stages 1, 3, and 4. Faithfulness to tradition is commendable, but integration requires heart engagement, intellectual understanding, and spiritual vitality alongside physical participation.

When I see Stage 4 (Spirituality/Mystery) without grounding:

I’ve encountered people drawn to mystical practices or spiritual experiences without testing them against Scripture. They’re attracted to concepts like healing frequencies or energy work. Systematic theology feels constraining rather than clarifying. They trust spiritual impressions without subjecting them to reason or scriptural examination. Intellectual analysis seems to limit the Spirit’s work.

If this describes your journey, you might need to develop stage 3 discernment alongside your capacity for wonder. Mystery is beautiful, but without intellectual rigour and scriptural grounding, it can become mysticism unmoored from biblical boundaries.

Learning to See the Water

John 17:3 defines eternal life: ‘Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent’ (ESV). Not knowledge about God. Not doctrinal precision concerning God. Not rational systematisation of God. But knowing – ginosko (γινώσκω) – relational, experiential, whole-person knowing of the living God.

For fifty years, I knew about God brilliantly. I could explain doctrine, defend positions, argue theology. But I didn’t know God. I had stage 3 (intellect) highly developed whilst stages 1, 2, and 4 lay dormant or atrophied. I was developmentally arrested, frozen in childhood intellectual development whilst mistaking that for spiritual maturity.

The Renaissance gave Western Christianity extraordinary gifts – rigorous scholarship, systematic theology, intellectual tools for understanding Scripture and defending faith. But it also gave us rationalism: the assumption that divine reality must conform entirely to human rational categories. That if something can’t be fully explained, it’s likely false rather than mysterious. That reason doesn’t serve revelation but constrains it.

For 400 years, Protestant Christianity has been swimming in rationalist water without recognising we’re wet. We’ve absorbed assumptions about knowledge, truth, and certainty that come not from Scripture but from Enlightenment philosophy. We’ve elevated reason above its proper role – sometimes explicitly (as rationalist movements like Christadelphianism do), sometimes whilst claiming we haven’t (as Reformed traditions often do), sometimes by swinging to opposite extremes that are equally imbalanced (as charismatic movements can do).

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral points us towards integration: Scripture primary, supported by tradition, reason, and experience working together. Biddulph’s developmental framework shows us what maturity looks like: emotion, physicality, intellect, and spirituality integrated rather than one dimension dominating whilst others atrophy.

But here’s what I’ve learnt over eight years of wrestling with this: integration isn’t a destination. It’s ongoing work. The shackles can break in a weekend at a men’s camp in Melbourne. Learning to walk without them takes years. I still struggle with stage 2 – I can’t dance unless thoroughly medicated with scotch (can’t do that anymore because my body doesn’t take too well to alcohol). I still battle doubt when my rational framework cracks because fifty years of formation doesn’t disappear overnight. I still have to deliberately choose churches where worship invites my heart to connect, because my default is cerebral analysis.

This isn’t failure. It’s honesty. It’s recognising that we’re all somewhere on this journey, all wrestling with imbalances shaped by formation we didn’t choose and often can’t see.

So where are you? Which stage dominates your faith? Which dimensions have atrophied? What would it look like to pursue integration – not by abandoning your strengths but by developing what’s been neglected?

And perhaps more importantly: can you see the water you’re swimming in? Can you recognise that what feels like ‘just being biblical’ might actually be inherited rationalist assumptions shaping how you read Scripture itself?

The goal isn’t to reject reason – God gave us minds and calls us to love him with them (Matt 22:37). The goal is reason that serves revelation rather than constraining it. Intellect working alongside emotion, embodied practice, and spiritual wonder. All four stages integrated, with Scripture as primary authority and the living God as the one we’re learning to know – not just know about.

Come, let us reason together (Isa 1:18). But let us also feel together, worship together with our bodies, and wonder together before the mystery of the God who reveals himself in Scripture yet remains infinitely beyond our full comprehension.

That’s not intellectual weakness. That’s integrated maturity. That’s knowing God with our whole selves – emotion, body, mind, and spirit – the way John 17:3 invites us to know him.

Note: I’ve used AI assistance to help organise my research and refine my writing for this article. The theological analysis, personal narrative, and conclusions are my own, developed through eight years of transition, MDiv studies, and ongoing integration work.

Works Consulted

Anselm of Canterbury. Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man).

Barna, George, and Frank Viola. Pagan Christianity?: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2008.

Biddulph, Steve. Manhood: An Action Plan for Changing Men’s Lives. 3rd ed. Sydney: Finch Publishing, 2010.

Bird, Michael F., Pete Enns, Al Mohler, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, and John R. Franke. Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy. Edited by J. Merrick and Stephen M. Garrett. Counterpoints: Bible and Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013.

Eldredge, John. Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2001.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.

Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft). 1793.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. 1843.

McDowell, Josh, and Sean McDowell. Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Sceptical World. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2017.

Outler, Albert C. Development of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral framework (1960s).

Richards, E. Randolph, and Brandon J. O’Brien. Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible Theologically. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2012.

Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Wesley, John. Theological method (Scripture, Tradition, Reason, Experience).

Wright, James R. Scripture Alone: Exploring the Bible’s Accuracy, Authority and Authenticity.