The Apostle Paul and the Enneagram

What do you imagine the Apostle Paul would have thought about the Enneagram? I’m going to revisit the spirit/soul dichotomy I wrote about last week, and compare it with some of Paul’s writings, and maybe that will give us an idea. (Most of this post, by the way, is excerpted from my audio program, “Know Yourself to Know God.”

Watchman Nee describes the soul as the mind, will and emotions. This is where all that thinking happens. Judgments about self and others, opinions, preferences, decision-making – all that stuff. This is where your personality lives and operates from. This is where you get your feelings hurt, get offended, get angry or jealous, and so on. We tend to think of emotions as being related to the heart, but that’s only because emotion can have physiological effects that make our actual hearts race or hurt. Nope, emotions come from the mind.

Romans 12:2 says, “Do not be conformed any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Notice he said “your mind,” not “your spirit.”

Why does the mind, or soul, need to be made new? Because it’s operating on a faulty system! It is being run by a set of false patterns based on loss, lack and fear that are so ingrained in our subconscious that we don’t even know they’re there.

Now, listen to the rest of this verse: “THEN you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.” Because you’ll have the proper mindset; you won’t be stuck in the pattern of thinking you used to have.

And that will transform you, Paul says. And I agree!

Our minds also need to be renewed because we use them too much! More on that in a minute. First, I want to look at another verse that talks about thought. 2 Cor.10:5 says, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” We take captive every thought – why would we need to do that? To make it obedient to Christ. The clear logic here demonstrates that our thoughts are NOT obedient to Christ. Think about that: our very THOUGHTS are disobedient! And that makes sense, right? Because we don’t sin with our leg or our earlobe; sin originates in our thoughts. We think it up first (or it’s suggested to us) and then do it.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the first half of this verse, because here’s where it gets very interesting to me. “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.” What do arguments and pretensions do? They set themselves up against the knowledge of God.

Where do arguments and pretensions come from? Your mind! What do they do?

Prevent you from knowing God and, therefore, from knowing yourself. That’s why it’s critical to get a handle on our thoughts and to understand the mind’s proper role in our lives. In fact, if you look at the whole context of this verse, Paul is talking about warfare. He’s saying that he doesn’t wage war the way the world does. How? By demolishing and taking captive arguments, pretensions and thoughts. ALL of those come from the mind. You see, that’s how the world wages war – with the mind.

This is literal, in the sense that all conflict arises from the mind, from the personality. It is also figurative, in the sense that the mind, or soul, wages war with the spirit.

Well, that is not how it was meant to be. We were designed to live from our spirits but mainly live from our souls. The spirit is where God redeems us and begins to exert his influence in our lives.

This is where we see in action the paradox that the Apostle Paul articulates in Romans 7: “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing.” That happens because we are living from our souls (in the process of being sanctified), not our spirits (already sanctified). We can have all the correct theology in the world, but it has to compete with the fixations and habits and deep primal drives operating in our minds. We use our minds way more, and in unnecessary and even harmful ways, than we were created to.

This is why the Enneagram is such a powerful tool. It describes the nine sets of faulty patterns that humans operate under, and does so with diamond-sharp accuracy. Every human follows one of those nine pattern sets, and knowing which one you are being enslaved by—yes, that’s right, enslaved—enables you to start noticing those patterns and stop living so much from your mind/soul.

I think Paul would have loved the Enneagram.

PLEASE SHARE