Heart is a much-used term in our language. For example, a sweetheart might declare, “I love you with all my heart.” Then we have the phrase, “The heart of the matter,” to speak of the essential or inner meaning of something.
“Heart” occurs often in English versions of the Bible. While several different Hebrew terms in the Old Testament are rendered into heart in English, we sometimes attribute a limited meaning to the term when we are thinking of it in relation to a human being’s makeup.
Used physiologically, we think of heart as the central bodily organ that serves as the essential core of physical life. However, like the Bible, we also often use the term in the psychological sense, as the center of a person’s inner life.
Emotion and feeling
Quite obviously in the Bible, heart often refers to a person’s emotion or feeling. In this sense, it carries the meaning of the seat of human passions or motives. For example, Romans 9:2 records the Apostle Paul’s feelings toward his unbelieving fellow Jews when he wrote, “I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart.”
Since human nature is composed of more than emotions, we also commonly switch from heart to “mind” to reference a person’s rational or thinking capacity.
In the Bible, however, heart also can refer to one’s seat of conscious thought. For example, Proverbs 23:7 says of a person, “As he thinks in his heart, so is he,” thereby linking heart to mental capacity.
Human beings also possess the capacity of volition or choice-making, a feature of our makeup we often refer to as the “will.” Again, however, the Bible uses “heart” in reference to human willfulness, as in Romans 2:5: “In accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart you are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.”
Heart, mind, will
Thus, a thoughtful reading of the Bible finds the single term “heart” doing multiple duties — speaking sometimes of the seat of rational thinking, sometimes of the source of decision-making, and sometimes referencing human emotional capabilities.
While invoking these distinctions by using heart, mind and will tend to aid in clear communication, the heart of the matter is that in the Bible one’s “heart” can reference the various human capabilities of thinking, feeling and choosing.
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