Multiple Intelligences

God revealing his mathematical intelligence!

At one of the team meetings of the missionaries we work with in Costa Rica, we discussed reasons we may not be thinking with God.  The question Mike put to us is, “If we have the mind of Christ, why do we behave like morons?”  In the course of the discussion someone mentioned that it’s easy to forget to read your Bible and spend your time reading about the Bible or busy in our Christian work.  Of course, that’s great advice, but it got me to thinking about multiple intelligences.

In the education field we think a lot about Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which greatly simplified states that we are all intelligent, just in different areas.  If you’ve never taken a quiz about this before, here are a few links:  This one includes existential/spiritual intelligence. This one scores itself and gives you color results.  The theory includes the following intelligences:

• Verbal/Linguistic
• Logical/Mathematical
• Visual/Spatial
• Bodily/Kinesthetic
• Musical
• Intrapersonal
• Interpersonal
• Naturalist
• Existential/Spiritual

Let’s go back to the topic.  Do you think there are different intelligences in the Body of Christ?  Do you think that some of us experience our greatest intimacy with God in prayer?  Others in Bible reading?  And yet others in Bible study or musical worship?

Maybe David was a Kinesthetic/Musical learner as he sang and danced before the Lord.  Certainly we’d have to put the apostle Paul pretty high up on the verbal/linguistic and logical scales.  I personally find my greatest intimacy when I’m tearing apart a section of Scripture word by word with my Hebrew and Greek dictionaries at my side. We were not created by a cookie-cutter God.  Perhaps we find our path to intimacy with Him in different ways as well.