of some educational movies I saw in Junior High, either in Florida or Kwajalein. They were old, fifties- or early sixties-era movies with the sort of dress and hair style that was used for comedy by Gary Larson in The Far Side cartoons. The main character was “The Professor,” who was all wise and knowing. There was always some area of science (maybe always biology) illustrated with cartoon animation interacting with real footage.

In one of these the subject was the nervous system with reflexes and brain. And this is what was portrayed. The senses were little godlings looking like Hermes/Mercury. Whenever alerted they cranked on electric generators that sent messages to the brain center. (So, despite the mythic personalities the main metaphor was body as electric cable system).

The Brain was a control room with lots of fifties era computer hardware. Piloting it was a man who was bald and wore a lab coat. He received input and sent orders through wires two and from senses and muscles. Remembering the images now reminds me of Ken Robinson’s point about how, for academics, the body is a transport device for the head. But there was another more serious glimpse of what Robinson talked about. He lectures that, if one analyzes the educational system of the modern world, one can only conclude that the university professor is the end goal for the system. All people are to strive to be and to see how close they can get to becoming academic scholars. And the little cartoon man in the brain control room is a white-coat wearing balding scientist type.

So that is the picture. Each center of consciousness is a little scholar piloting a great big lumbering body. It sends orders and receives information like Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise.

If you met a group of Christians who thought that was truly a picture of the essence of a person, what sort of views would they have about the nature of true faith, the relation to faith and behavior, the importance of ritual and bodily posture, or the importance of baptism and the Lord’s Supper?

We can embellish the model and make it even stronger. Say the walls of the control center are covered with charts. Say that the little man looks at the color chart to match names with colors, or number symbols and names with different numbers of objects.

Then the problem becomes even stronger. What sort of theory of signs and sacraments would people develop who believed that persons actually worked that way with symbols?

Because it doesn’t. Those charts have virtually nothing to do with how we understand language or use and interpret symbols. There is no little man in our head. We are not inside our skulls alone.

We are our bodies and when we touch we touch real people, not exterior shells.  When we see images like the words on the screen before you right now, we can almost never even force ourselves to think of the shapes of letters and how they each stand for a sound.  We see words first without any chart.