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Antioch School System

I was asked by a friend to look at the Antioch school system. This short essay will be referring to Jeff Reed, because he is described as the ‘founder and president’ of the school and most of its material was written or compiled by him. I should mention in passing that someone who is the founder and president of some successful organization or company is almost always a Contributor person. Consistent with this, we will see that the Antioch School places a heavy emphasis upon Contributor-driven technical thought.

The Antioch school has several positive features: The books start with a clear description of the evangelical Christian message. The goal of the Antioch school is to encourage Christians to go beyond nominal belief to a change in lifestyle. The program emphasizes the Bible and it encourages people to study the Bible carefully in order to determine what the biblical text is actually saying. The program also provides numerous lists of other books for students to read and study in addition to the Bible. Reed recognizes that evangelical Christianity is facing a major crisis and he is attempting to come up with a solution that goes beyond the status quo. Reed is also trying to go beyond abstract theology to practical theology. Reed knows and interacts with established evangelical Christian leaders and he recommends well-known books by respected evangelical Christian leaders. Reed is acquainted with the academic perspective and with current trends within academic education. Reed recognizes the stultifying effect that academic accreditation has upon learning and is attempting to find a form of learning that avoids this restrictive and controlling impact. Reed notes that student evaluation needs to go beyond testing and assigning grades. And Reed accurately concludes that what is needed is a major paradigm shift in Christian education.

Unfortunately, the solution that Reed proposes has major deficiencies, which this essay will explore. Most of these deficiencies can be summarized as a fixation upon concrete technical thought. Defining what this means, mental symmetry suggests that the mind can function in one of three primary ways: the analogies and patterns of normal thought, the emotional schema of mental networks, and the rigorous thinking of technical thought. Each of these three modes of thought has an abstract side and a concrete side. Technical thought follows a limited set of rules within the confines of some ‘game’ as illustrated by actual games. It is motivated by emotional goals but attempts to pursue these goals in an objective and rational manner. Abstract technical thought is based upon precise definitions while concrete technical thought is guided by cause-and-effect. Abstract technical thought constructs ordered systems while concrete technical thought follows plans of action. Thus, a fixation upon concrete technical thought means emphasizing concrete plans of action. The quotes are taken from books in the Antioch school system library. It should be clarified that about 40 of the introductory and intermediate books were examined for this essay and the quotes are taken from these books.

MAP

The Antioch school system requires every student to complete a MAP or Motivated Abilities Pattern and the MAP plays a central role in the school curriculum. A student can perform a self-assessed MAP for free but is encouraged to have a consultant-assessed MAP for which the charge is $1250. MAP claims to be an integrated description of human personality. “The MAP is a system. To be more precise, an individual human being is a system––a unified, integrated whole. Therefore the individual’s MAP must be seen as a whole, not just a collection of five ‘parts.’” But the MAP is not a comprehensive personality assessment. Instead, it examines the role that a person can play most effectively within a corporation, it looks at factors that would hamper a person from functioning effectively as a business employee, and it attempts to optimize a person’s ability to function and advance within a corporation. This corporate emphasis is apparent if one looks at the 28 elements of MAP. MAP is described explicitly as a job-fit system. “Do you usually wake up feeling enthusiastic about the satisfying and productive day of work that lies ahead?... Your answers to these questions largely depend on the amount of overlap between your MAP and your job’s requirements. You will carefully assess how well you fit in your current job by comparing your personal MAP with your job’s critical requirements. You will then use this comparison to think creatively about practical ways to engage more of your motivated abilities in your current job. Since you cannot fundamentally change your MAP, then you will have to find ways to change your job, or how you go about doing your job, in order to improve your job fit.” Notice that the primary application of MAP is functioning more effectively as an employee of some job. Going further, MAP focuses upon progressing within a corporation. “Your MAP is extremely useful at each stage of your career. It can help you identify your ideal type of work. It can help you improve your current job fit. And it can help you know how high to climb within an organization.” MAP is extended as an afterthought to personal and social life. “You have learned how to use your MAP to understand your unique design, how you fit in your work, and how you relate to others. It would be easy for you to accept these gains as complete in themselves. But there is one more step that is necessary in order for you to get the most use out of your MAP. In this tenth step, you will learn how to integrate your MAP into your whole life plan.”

A corporation is an expression of concrete technical thought, because a business pursues some bottom line within some limited field guided by carefully-defined procedures. Thus, focusing upon job-fit and career enhancement is an example of emphasizing concrete technical thought. Even though the Antioch school claims to be a Bible-based, church-oriented program, the Bible is not mentioned anywhere in the 140 page book on MAP entitled Becoming and the word ‘church’ appears only once. (The word ‘church’ also appears twice in the copyright notice, which says that “BILD is an acronym for Biblical Institute of Leadership Development—a training system and the leader of a global network of leaders working together to see the Church spontaneously expand by returning to the model of planting and establishing churches found in the New Testament.” However, if the goal is ‘to see the Church spontaneously expand’ as ‘found in the New Testament’, then why is the New Testament ignored and the ‘church’ mentioned only once in this foundational document?)

Mental symmetry, in contrast, is based upon Romans 12 spiritual gifts. (Romans 12 spiritual gifts are mentioned briefly in another book in the form of a few general questions that occupy less than one page. This brief mention does not even provide a list of the seven spiritual gifts.) Mental symmetry does not fit within a corporate structure. That is because mental symmetry points out that the typical business uses concrete technical thought to pursue peripheral goals in an objective manner that expects employees to ‘sell their souls’ to the corporation. Applying this to the evangelical concept of ‘asking Jesus into your heart’, mental symmetry notes that Jesus used the language of business in concrete technical thought in the gospels. However, the name ‘Jesus’ means salvation, and Jesus went beyond referring to the bottom line of a business to saving people. This suggests that a valid mental concept of Jesus uses concrete technical thought (the name Jesus means salvation) but goes beyond business thinking to save people rather than things. For instance, in Matthew 16:26 Jesus says, “For what good will it do a person if he gains the whole world, but forfeits his soul? Or what will a person give in exchange for his soul?” Saying this as clearly as possible, I suggest that placing a job-fit test that ignores the Bible and the church at the center of a system of church education is an example of spiritual prostitution because it reduces a church that should be saving people to the level of a business organization. I am not suggesting that MAP is wrong, evil, or useless. Instead, I am suggesting that it does not address the deepest issues. Therefore, is inappropriate to use MAP as a central feature of a church educational system that is supposed to deal with the deepest issues.

Related to the MAP is the LIFEN evaluation. The student develops a life plan, evaluates what actions have been taken that fit within a life plan and also which steps can be taken to move further along this line. A life plan is based upon ‘achievement activities’. The guide clarifies that “An achievement activity is specifically an activity that you yourself performed, not just an experience that happened to you. We all can remember pleasant experiences such as receiving an award, appreciating a particular song, or visiting an impressive place. However, none of those experiences are useful in identifying your design because they are primarily reactions to things that happened to you.” This describes concrete technical thought, because Contributor thought functions as the core of concrete technical thought by performing achievement activities, which means choosing to perform some action guided by some goal. Thus, the LIFE evaluation treats concrete technical thought as a general theory within which to place all of personal life.

Mental symmetry, in contrast, suggests that limiting personal life to the self-initiated actions of concrete technical thought describes ‘salvation by works’. Going further, mental symmetry suggests that the essence of Christianity involves dying to the ‘works of the flesh’ in order to become cognitively and spiritually reborn at a higher level. Going still further, mental symmetry notes that the deepest personal growth typically happens when one is blocked from performing ‘achievement activities’ and then chooses to react to ‘things that are happening to you’ in a righteous manner. Saying this again as clearly as possible, mental symmetry suggests that spiritual growth often requires choosing not to submit to some job-fit program, and often means paying the cost of not advancing within some corporation or organization because one is choosing to follow God and pursue personal transformation rather than sell one’s soul to the system. I speak here from extensive personal experience.

Biblical Interpretation

Turning now to biblical interpretation, the Antioch school explicitly states that the Bible should not be studied from the perspective of systematic theology. This is pointed out in the preface to the first volume. “Traditional Western Bible study material is often made up of a fragmented set of categories and individual verses. In one form or another, it has been shaped by Western systematic theology categories, which are tied both to the university system and to Reformation based theological systems. The emphasis is on knowing specific information and applying it in an isolated fashion to your life. This new method is driven by what we refer to as a Socratic discussion.” Reed wants to replace systematic theology with practical theology. “The move from systematic theology to practical theology has been defined above as a move from interpreting the classic texts, events, and images of the Christian fact, to a testing, a living out of the vision of systematic theology.” Mental symmetry would agree that evangelical theology needs to go beyond asserting belief in doctrinal facts to applying theological understanding in action. Using the language of mental symmetry, Server actions need to be added to Perceiver beliefs. In Reed’s words, “The work of the practical theologian, therefore, is praxis, theory-informed doing. It is ethical action, not simply ethical reflection, in which we work out how to act in a particular situation, how to behave, how our beliefs impact how we live. There is an integration of the reflection upon what we believe with the practical questions of how we live out what we believe.”

‘Theory-informed doing’ plays a central role in mental symmetry and is defined in the following manner: God is a universal Being who constructed both the physical universe and human minds to function in a certain manner. Mental symmetry describes how the mind works, maps in detail onto current neurology, and helps a person to develop a mind that is capable of understanding how the physical universe behaves. In addition, if one follows a personal path of cognitive development guided by the theory of mental symmetry, then one ends up with an integrated understanding that corresponds in detail to Christian theology and a concept of God that corresponds in detail to the Christian Trinity. This integrated understanding (or general paradigm) of mental and spiritual wholeness will generate Teacher emotions that will emotionally drive a person to behave in a manner that is consistent with this understanding, resulting in ‘theory-informed doing’. This is described scripturally as righteousness.

Reed explicitly rejects this form of thought in the volume on Preaching, referring to “The anomaly of preachers opposed to the fundamentalist view that every biblical statement is inerrant who yet identify the truth of preaching with the content of each passage... Called to think the world of Gospel in its truth, the preacher does not simply repeat the patriarchal or monarchical metaphors for God, the assault on Aaron’s or Israel’s idols, or Paul’s notion that a congregation is constituted by ‘spiritual gifts.’ The preacher must probe further and ask how these motifs actually express something important, true, and real and whether they are extraneous to Gospel. What is a ‘spiritual gift’ in the actual world of human psychology and congregational dynamics? Are there better metaphors for God’s activity than those supplied by ancient monarchies? What happens to preaching when it suppresses its theological task? A long and slippery road opens before the preacher, a road to truth indifference, the end of which is biblical literalism, empty rhetoric, banal moralism, and the superficial echoing of cultural fads. Gospel recedes in its power to transform actual human life.” Notice the progression. The preacher being described is looking for cognitive principles in the Bible by asking questions such as “What is a ‘spiritual gift’ in the actual world of human psychology and congregational dynamics?” This describes precisely how mental symmetry started. The goal of this preacher is to find universal cognitive terms that are ‘better metaphors for God’s activity than those supplied by ancient monarchies’. This again describes precisely the path taken by mental symmetry. Reed states that this leads to ‘a long and slippery road’ that is merely a ‘superficial echoing of cultural fads’ which lacks the ‘power to transform actual human life’. In other words, Reed suggests that following the path of mental symmetry will lead to culturally-based pop psychology and not to meaningful character transformation.

It is possible that Reed’s conclusion is an accurate assessment of those who teach Romans 12 spiritual gifts. I do not know, because every attempt of mine to interact with these individuals has failed and no other teacher of Romans 12 spiritual gifts has even extended the academic courtesy of acknowledging the extensive work done on this subject by my brother and myself. However, Reed’s conclusion is precisely the opposite of what I have discovered with mental symmetry. I have found that understanding spiritual gifts from a psychological perspective has led to a meta-theory that is capable of transforming people and surviving in the face of postmodern thought. But I have also found that character transformation will only happen if one is willing to pay the personal price of following understanding rather than societal approval, and this price has often involved following cognitive principles even when this meant giving up some path of career development—or continuing to do research on spiritual gifts while being ignored by others. Meanwhile, I have repeatedly seen evangelical Christian leaders who claim to be Bible-believing pursue secular methods that are inconsistent with the biblical principles that they supposedly preach.

What Reed advocates in place of a rational understanding of fundamental Christian principles is—mystery. “Because it is about the divine mystery, Gospel is never reducible to a simple formula or a clear proposition. Further, every motif in the world of Gospel is brushed with the divine mystery: redemption, creation, divine presence, revelation, human evil, justice, the ecclesial community. Because the very meaning of all of these things is tied up with the mysterious Presence of God, each one carries with it a horizon, a referent to something not known, something not quite articulated, something still expected.” In a similar vein, I have found over the decades that every attempt to discuss mental symmetry with some theologian has led to a dead end with the theologian insisting that God and religion are ultimately a mystery.

If core theology is regarded as mystery, then rational thought can only be used to analyze peripheral topics and practical applications. Thus, Reed’s view of scriptural interpretation becomes reduced to practical theology that avoids generalization. Reed states that “No definition of interpretation could be more fundamental than this: To interpret we must in every case reproduce the sense the Scriptural writer intended for his own words. The first step in the interpretive process is to link only those ideas with the author’s language that he connected with them. The second step is to express these ideas understandably.” In other words, one should read the biblical text only at a historical and cultural level and not go beyond the specific situation being described to derive any general or symbolic meaning. Cognitively speaking, this means remaining at the concrete level of Server actions applied to specific Mercy situations rather than using abstract thought to view these Server actions as exemplars that illustrate general principles of righteousness. This type of scriptural interpretation reduces the epistles to a description of how to run a family, business, or church, because most of the practical examples in the epistles involve these realms, primarily because the epistles were written in a pre-scientific, family-based, iron age that was just beginning to discover abstract thought.

Mental symmetry, in contrast, suggests that the Bible was ultimately written by God because it conveys a larger message that includes—but goes beyond—the specific message that the human authors meant to convey. This means that the human authors only partially understood the full meaning of what they were writing. Thus, in order to understand what God is trying to say through the Bible, one must go beyond ‘the sense the Scriptural writer intended for his own words’. The end result is not mystery, but rather the emotional and cognitive power of a general paradigm. Saying this more carefully, mental symmetry views God as an Infinite being who expresses his character through universal principles that apply everywhere. This concept of God is backed up cognitively by the Teacher mental network of a general understanding of ‘how things work’. This Teacher mental network gives mental stability to systematic theology and it it also endows theology with a Teacher emotion of universality that transcends normal Mercy emotions of specific people and specific cultures. And because God’s ways and character are described as general principles, it is always possible to come up with new specific ways of expressing these general principles.

Reed knows the power of a paradigm because one of his volumes is entitled New Paradigms for the Postmodern Church. He observes that “Change is on the horizon. It appears to be far more than renovation. We need innovation. We need new paradigms for a new age that are in tune with the realities of the megashifts from an industrial to a technological society, in tune with the realities of the world becoming a global village, in tune with the needs of the Third World, and in tune with the guiding principles of New Testament ministry.” Mental symmetry has constructed such a paradigm which 1) uses the concepts of the ‘new age’ of computers and cognition, 2) analyzes both the thinking and shortcomings of a technological society, 3) uses universal cognitive principles to analyze many aspects of the modern global village, 4) looks extensively at the cognitive mechanisms that drive cultures and societies, and 5) provides a comprehensive cognitive analysis of Scripture and theology. Reed’s ‘paradigm’, in contrast, looks back to the previous age of the Roman civilization, it attempts to follow instructions written for a pre-industrial, non-technological society, it downplays the academic system that created the modern global village, it attempts to be in tune with the needs of Western corporations, and it replaces a search for ‘guiding principles’ with mystery.

Going further, instead of building a theological paradigm, Reed dismisses Paul’s theological statements as the flowery language of an overheated mind. “At times the impetuous torrent of Paul’s thought seems to rush forward so swiftly that it outstrips the flow of his words, and his words have to leap over a gap now and then to catch up with his thought. We can only surmise how the assistant contrived to keep up with his words. Time and again Paul starts a sentence that never reaches a grammatical end, for before he is well launched on it a new thought strikes him and he turns aside to digress. Then, when he comes back to the main line, the original opening of the sentence has been forgotten. All this means that Paul is not the smoothest of authors, or the easiest to follow, but it does give us an unmistakable impression of the man himself.”

Mental symmetry, in contrast, suggests that God guided Paul to use careful language to describe spiritual principles that go beyond the concrete technical thinking of Reed—spiritual principles that Paul himself probably only partially understood. It should be added that Reed provides a lexicon at the end of each section that defines important terms, and Reed often refers to the original Greek text of the New Testament and explains the meanings of the Greek words. This indicates that Reed is using abstract technical thought with its emphasis upon precise definitions. However, the underlying assumption is that abstract technical thought with its precise definitions is ultimately the servant of concrete technical thought with its concrete plans of action.

Turning now to God’s plan in history, Reed describes this overarching plan in The Story. However, what is presented is not an overarching plan of human history. Instead, it is merely an outline of the historical events described in the Bible. No attempt is made to look at deeper principles or derive general concepts about either what God is doing in history or about the nature of God. Instead, God’s plan of history is reduced to the three primary stages of 1) preparing for and predicting the coming of Jesus, 2) the death and resurrection of Jesus, and 3) preaching the message of Jesus’ resurrection. This places human history within the concrete life plan of the physical life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the man. Speaking of life plans, one wonders what type of MAP evaluation Jesus would have received from the professional consultants. One gains the impression that he would not have made the ideal employee. Going further, how did Jesus do on his LIFEN plan? He received glowing reviews from the religious authorities when he was twelve years old, but his career advancement trajectory came to an abrupt end three brief years after it began.

Mental symmetry, in contrast, notes that Jesus Christ is the Incarnation of God, with Jesus referring to the human side of incarnation and Christ to the divine side. The physical life of Jesus is only one aspect of a far larger plan involving the Christ of God. This relates directly to technical thought, because a mental concept of incarnation that corresponds to the scriptural description of Incarnation emerges when concrete technical thought is mentally integrated with abstract technical thought. However, a mental concept of Christ goes beyond the specializations of abstract technical thought to be guided by the general Teacher theory of a concept of God while a mental concept of Jesus goes beyond the objective improvements of concrete technical thought to save people within Mercy thought. This relationship between technical thought, a mental concept of incarnation, and the scriptural description of Incarnation can also be seen in the thinking of Reed: Reed rejects a general discussion of a Teacher theory of God and Christianity as unwanted systematic theology and treats abstract technical thought as the servant of concrete technical thought. This expresses itself theologically as a focus upon the historical Jesus and the specific issues addressed in the epistles. And this expresses itself cognitively as reducing human personality and human life to fulfilling some role within some business with its focus upon concrete technical thought. The general principle is that cognitive principles will continue to apply to a person or system even when the concept of cognitive principles is being explicitly ignored.

Nonformal Education

Reed says that Christianity needs to go beyond the technical thinking of academia to personal application. In Reed’s words, “Formal theological education today is a meso paradigm. It is a constellation of beliefs filled with rules about professors, students, courses, classrooms, testing, degrees, and the very powerful accrediting associations. The core biblical values—faithfulness in service, entrusting in ministry contexts, discipleship, spiritual disciplines, and character development—are marginalized, when taken out of their natural context of ministry and community life and institutionalized.” In other words, Reed recognizes that the academic emphasis upon abstract technical thought has led to an academic system of fragmented, specialized knowledge. Mental symmetry agrees with this assessment.

Reed’s solution is what he refers to as nonformal education. Quoting again from Reed, “Nonformal refers to an ordered, systematic educational process that lies outside the formal educational system. It shares similarities with both formal and informal but is truly neither in its essence. It was created to address radically new cultural ways of educating... An example of a nonformal education approach that is fundamentally outside the formal educational system is the system designed by Paulo Freire. Freire’s basic idea is that everyone needs to be educated to a level of critical consciousness.” Reed refers to Freire several times in various volumes so this is not just a random reference.

Freire is well-known in educational circles. Unfortunately, his approach is educationally and spiritually destructive. The problem is that Freire claims to deliver one thing while actually producing something quite different. This is discussed elsewhere. Freire’s premise is that students will find education more interesting if it is applied to personal situations that the students find meaningful. This principle makes sense. But what happens in practice is that the educational process becomes emotionally hijacked by the personal situation. That is because Freire applies education primarily to the personal situation of feeling oppressed and marginalized by modern Western technological society. The emotional result is that the tail (or tale?) of societal oppression ends up wagging the dog of education. Education turns into advocacy motivated by anger against the establishment. Using the language of mental symmetry, Teacher mental networks of rational understanding become overwhelmed by cultural Mercy mental networks and education turns into imposing my cultural mental networks upon general theory.

A similar hijacking of education may be happening with the Antioch school. Reed says, “The process of doing church-based theology must be rooted in a true sense of an international movement, especially in the emergence of respect for the theologizing process of Third World churches. Every indication is that all Western cultures are truly post-Christian, and the Western Church will continue on its nominal course... If that is true, we can expect some of the most innovative and stimulating theology to come from these young developing churches... Those of us from the West must shed our colonial Western type thinking and learn to hold our Western tradition with healthy suspicion.” Mental symmetry agrees that theology should become cross-cultural and international by building upon universal truths that transcend specific cultures. Mental symmetry does this by learning from the objective aspects of Western culture that have become cross-cultural and international, which include science, technology, the global economy, and academia. Reed, in contrast, wants to replace Western thought with ‘the theologizing process of Third World churches’ and expects ‘innovative and stimulating theology to come from these young developing churches’. This goes beyond applying Western thought to other cultures and learning from other cultures to replacing Western thought with the thinking processes of other cultures.

‘Colonial Western type thinking’ is regarded as evil in postmodern circles, but it is important to distinguish between subjective and objective Western thought. Subjectively speaking, most colonial thinking was arrogant, imperialistic, and culturally insensitive. But speaking objectively, Western colonialism was successful because Europe had experienced the transformative effects of the Protestant Reformation and the scientific and industrial revolutions. And these scientific and industrial revolutions laid the foundation for the aspect of modern society that currently is international. However, instead of building upon the international aspects of Western thought, Reed rejects this as the source of the problem. “Theology itself has been dominated by a pattern of systematizing which we call systematic theology. Western systematic theology has its roots in Western philosophy, which has its roots in the Greek academy.” Thus, Reed is attempting to make Christianity more international by rejecting the aspects of Western thought that allowed it to become international.

What Reed recommends instead is to adopt the approach of Freire. “One of the most respected educational theorists worldwide, Paulo Freire, has demonstrated quite convincingly, that effective education of ‘the people’ involves engaging them in a problem-posing process, from the base of their culture and current life situation.” That describes a cultural hijacking of education, in which Mercy mental networks of local culture are imposing their structure emotionally upon Teacher mental networks of theology and education. It also contradicts the nature of Incarnation. Jesus is the Word made flesh who started with God in universality and came down to local human culture. Freire, in contrast, makes a God out of the local human culture.

Family and Church

Finally, there are the two matters of family and church. Reeds regard these two as fundamental pillars of Christianity. “There are only two basic concepts that need to be grasped in order to set the basic integration framework in place. One is the concept of the individual household, the family. The family is the basic, most core institution of the Christian education process... The second basic concept is that of the household of God, the local church family. The idea of the local church being an extended household, a family of families, is not just a metaphor but a real truth. This can be seen throughout the New Testament epistles.”

Looking first at family, it is true that modern society has led to a severe erosion of the traditional family. But the family cannot be the most basic unit of Christianity because the family is ultimately based upon biological reproduction and physical nurturing. Family provides the starting point for human existence and it is vital for family to provide a healthy starting point for children, but the fundamental premise of Christianity is that one must be internally reborn—as an individual—and become ‘transformed by the renewing of the mind’. Paul describes this in Galatians 4:3-5. “We too, when we were children, were held in bondage under the elementary principles of the world. But when the fullness of the time came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons and daughters.” Notice that Paul connects children with the fundamental principles of the world system and he says that God wants to redeem people from this natural system by redefining family.

Modern technological society tries to minimize family by belittling traditional values, focusing upon objective achievement, and replacing family care with professional institutions. Reed is correct in rejecting this path. But the answer is not to focus upon the family, because the family is ultimately based in biological necessity, which means that building upon the family will create a mindset that is ‘held in bondage under the elementary principles of the world’.

Mental symmetry suggests that cognitive styles and cognitive modules are more fundamental than the family. How I interact internally with the different parts of my mind is more fundamental than how I interact externally with the members of my family. Mental wholeness is more basic than a healthy family because how I treat and develop the other parts of my mind will ultimately determine how I treat other cognitive styles who emphasize those parts of the mind. Focusing upon mental and spiritual wholeness will lead naturally to a healthy family, while attempts to create a healthy family will ultimately fail if mental and spiritual wholeness are overlooked. Going further, while the family has become viewed as an alternative to abstract theory and technological society, cognitive modules and mental wholeness have been used as a meta-theory to integrate many aspects of academia, build a systematic theology, and provide a framework for family interaction. Reed talks extensively about following a new paradigm, but the family is not a new paradigm. Instead, it is an ancient paradigm that ruled traditional society. Cognitive development and cognitive wholeness is a new paradigm that emerged in the 1950s with the cognitive revolution.

The evangelical church, like the traditional family, is also going through a major crisis. Reed asserts that the church is at the center of God’s plan. “The church is at the very center of Christ’s plan for this age. In addition, He has a specific plan for His church. An aspect of Paul’s job description was to reveal that plan to the churches. Through this plan, God’s wisdom is being revealed to all who watch—even the angelic and demonic forces.” Going further, Reed says that “Investing in the local church is a central part of investing in eternity. Christ is building His church, and if properly understood, the degree to which we contribute to that work is the degree that our work will stand the refiner’s fire.” However, since the 18th century, the church has only played at most a supporting role in the progress of Western society, either responding to secular developments or piggybacking upon them. One of the fundamental principles of mental symmetry is that God’s plan is bigger than any church. God’s plan has to be bigger than the evangelical church, because during the last decade I have both seen and personally experienced the self-destruction of evangelical Christendom. Therefore, either God’s plan has failed or else God’s plan is bigger than the evangelical church.

Reed’s basic assumption is that one can look to the New Testament church for the ultimate example of how church should function. This is cognitively impossible, because the New Testament church functioned within a Roman civilization that was militaristic, hero-worshiping, male-dominated, family-ruled, slavery-based, pre-scientific, proto-technological, pre-theological, and idolatrous. People who are immersed within such a society are mentally incapable of functioning within an ideal church structure. They can stretch forward from their society but they cannot break fully from it. Saying this another way, if living in a democratic society requires an educated populace, then constructing the ideal church also requires an educated membership. This does not mean that biblical descriptions of church have no validity. Instead, it means that one must go beyond the specific church issues being addressed by first century biblical authors to the cognitive principles being described by God, the ultimate author of the Bible. Unfortunately, Reed’s method of scriptural interpretation prevents one from doing this.

Conclusion

This brief analysis may leave the impression that the Antioch school lacks doctrinal, academic, and psychological substance. However, that is not the case. For instance, the book on Shepherding contains several articles that go beyond a surface reading of the biblical text by applying Scriptural principles to psychological issues. Quoting from one article, “Obedience, however, is only one part of the goal. A Christian must do more than change his behavior. Attitudes must change, desires should slowly conform more to God’s design, there must be a new style of living which represents more than a collection of obedient responses. The change must be not only external obedience, but also an inward newness, a renewed way of thinking and perceiving, a changed set of goals, a transformed personality.” This is consistent with the approach taken by mental symmetry, which attempts to go beyond merely changing behavior to transforming the entire mind. However, most of these insightful articles are written by other authors and have been compiled by Reed. And it appears that this helpful and meaningful material is largely limited to the concrete realm of Server actions and Mercy emotions. For instance, the psychological model proposed by the author just quoted makes a division between heart and body, describing righteousness as the heart controlling the body. The heart represents personal identity within Mercy thought, thus this distinction states that a mature person will be guided by an internal concept of personal identity rather than ruled by physical sensation. This is an important aspect of maturity, but it does not describe righteousness which involves being emotionally guided by a Teacher-based concept of God.

Mental symmetry, in contrast, does not respect these limitations and it challenges the underlying assumptions of Reed. Thus, I do not see any way of adding mental symmetry to the Antioch School system, because mental symmetry questions a number of Reed’s fundamental assumptions and choices. Therefore, if these two systems were brought together, then one would end up imposing itself upon the other, and the Antioch School system would win because it is an established organization with a well-developed system backed up by a president and founder who is not going to lose control of his organization and system. This does not mean that there is no value in the Antioch school system. Such a system is most useful within a Third World society that is trying to move beyond traditional culture but is not familiar with the realm of abstract thought. The Antioch school can also be viewed as a way to bring balance to the current academic hyper-emphasis upon specialized, abstract technical thought. However, bringing balance by emphasizing aspects that are being ignored is not the same as providing an integrated solution.