Biblical counseling sometimes gets caricatured as “take two verses and call me in the morning.” If we’re honest, sometimes there is a bit of truth to that critique. It’s easy to say that the man who yells at his wife has an anger problem or that the teen struggling with pornography has a lust problem. It would be equally true (and unhelpful) to say that the house burned down because of an excess heat problem. In The Dynamic Heart in Daily Life, Jeremy Pierre argues that we need “a theology of human experience.” The human heart is complex—we don’t always understand why we feel or act a certain way in the moment. Pierre explains that Scripture must provide the categories to understand our experiences.
The Bible uses the word “heart” to describe the core of a person’s being. Scripture portrays the heart in a multifaceted way: the heart can think, love, harden, or fear, to name a few examples. Pierre distills these many facets into three categories—thinking, feeling, and choosing. Thoughts reflect beliefs; feelings reflect desires; choices reflect the will. Returning to the example of the angry husband, Pierre says, “This husband did not have a generic anger inside him that happened to overflow. There is no generic anger. There is only a heart believing certain things, wanting certain things, choosing certain things—and anger is just his impassioned method of getting them” (13).
Yet the complexities of human experience go far beyond the heart itself. “To be human,” says Pierre, “is to be in context” (100). Think of the many factors that shape who we are—age, gender, ethnicity, location, family, education, birth order, wealth, language, life experiences, health, religious upbringing, genetics, time-period, friends, and culture. Most of these factors are beyond our control, yet they have a profound effect on our lives. Does that mean that the young man who grew up poor with a drunkard for a father is not responsible for his bad decisions? Not at all. But we must recognize that those circumstances will have a profound effect on the trajectory of his life and the way he views the world.
This is a book for people helping people change, but I also found it helpful to understand my own heart. Every psychological theory has to explain why people are the way they are, but only the gospel provides the power to change who we are. God created human hearts to worship him dynamically—“in the way they think, the things they want, the choices they make” (22). Pierre enriches our understanding of how to connect that truth to human experience.