The Aging Brain is a highly practical book for enhancing your health and well-being. Jennings examines how genetics, stress, and lifestyle all influence our level of health. To have a healthy brain, you must nurture a healthy body. Even simple things like regular care of your teeth will reduce your dementia risk. Jennings states that in order to make healthy life choices you must appreciate the importance of "design law," the "parameters, protocols, and principles on which life is constructed to operate." He emphatically asserts: "It is not possible to be healthy outside the laws of health."
I eagerly devoured Chapter 3, "Epigenetics and Aging: The Impact from Our Ancestors." What your parents and grandparents experienced will often alter your genes. Jennings discusses how famine, low-calorie diets, smoking, alcohol consumption, stress, and early childhood learning environments all impact our genetic leanings. He writes: "If a mother is highly stressed while pregnant, which may be no fault of her own, then her child will be born with a brain more vulnerable to anxiety and depression." We need not despair, however, because every day offers a new start to rewiring our circuitry through better health choices.
For the most part, the book is a clarion call for making daily choices that lead to health. It is all the standard stuff we've heard and read before: eat a healthy plant-based diet, exercise regularly, avoid substances that increase inflammation, seek mental stimulation, and get 7-8 hours of sleep each night. What Jennings adds is the importance of a sound belief system. Apparently, his book, The God-Shaped Brain goes into further detail about the impact of religious views on the brain. He writes: "God-concepts that promote love, forgiveness, compassion, beneficence, reasoning, thinking, and the pursuit of truth and evidence while respecting the freedom of conscience are healing to the brain. God-concepts that incite fear; promote hostility, intolerance, conflict, and resentment; shut down thinking; undermine reasoning; minimize truth and evidence; and lead to the coercion of others are damaging to the brain."
And here is where I began to feel a creeping doubt about the author's perspectives. While God is a benevolent God, all-loving, desiring our very best, and His laws are set in place to keep the world in harmony and peace, He is also just and whether we want to admit it or not, there is such a thing as sin in the world. If we do not recognize our need for a Savior (as Jennings clearly disputes the need of Christ's act on the cross in order to atone for sin), then God becomes some hippy-dippy, free-wheeling entity who has no power to change our lives for the better. For Jennings, the key is simply to believe in God's love and leave it at that.
Indeed, he goes so far as to say that a loving God would not require His son to atone for sins on a man-made cross: "If the God concept one holds is of a deity from whom we need to be protected (perhaps by offering him sacrifices - even offering the sinless blood of his son), then it is impossible to trust the future to such a being." In my opinion, that is a heretical thought. The God I believe in and trust can fully be trusted because His love extended to that very important act of the death of Christ on the cross to cancel out the sins I am beset with. I don't fear Him or worry about His righteous judgment. I don't believe that my brain is suffering because I believe in a God who has a clear standard of right and wrong and who, while relentlessly pursuing us to atone for the chasm between us, also will be just if that free gift is rejected. You cannot force someone to seek reconciliation in any relationship, let alone one with the almighty God. But Jennings sets people on a path to believing there is no need for reconciliation, only the good vibes of God's endless love. He presents a God who is only interested in our happiness and well-being, not in our holiness and redemption.
If you ask me, Jennings is creating a God he feels comfortable with, one in his own image. In our adult Bible study at CBLI, the leader talked about "would-be Jesus." Would-be Jesus is a Jesus who agrees with your belief system, who likes what you like and hates what you hate, who accepts what you accept and rejects what you reject. But that is no different than fashioning an idol out of wood or stone. We don't get to call the shots. Indeed, I wouldn't want to because I recognize how fallible I am. I'm not God and I don't want to fashion God in my image.
So, while the book holds a great deal of value for the prescriptive advice about enriching health, I think I cannot recommend the book fully without caution about his spiritual foundation. It is a foundation of sinking sand, not the solid rock of Christ's atonement. And if I am destined for dementia because I believe in the God of the Bible, the God who Jennings wants to call a "punishing dictator God," but who is really the only supreme being capable of reconciling sinful man to his holy maker, then bring it on. God can carry me through that, as well.
Indeed, he goes so far as to say that a loving God would not require His son to atone for sins on a man-made cross: "If the God concept one holds is of a deity from whom we need to be protected (perhaps by offering him sacrifices - even offering the sinless blood of his son), then it is impossible to trust the future to such a being." In my opinion, that is a heretical thought. The God I believe in and trust can fully be trusted because His love extended to that very important act of the death of Christ on the cross to cancel out the sins I am beset with. I don't fear Him or worry about His righteous judgment. I don't believe that my brain is suffering because I believe in a God who has a clear standard of right and wrong and who, while relentlessly pursuing us to atone for the chasm between us, also will be just if that free gift is rejected. You cannot force someone to seek reconciliation in any relationship, let alone one with the almighty God. But Jennings sets people on a path to believing there is no need for reconciliation, only the good vibes of God's endless love. He presents a God who is only interested in our happiness and well-being, not in our holiness and redemption.
If you ask me, Jennings is creating a God he feels comfortable with, one in his own image. In our adult Bible study at CBLI, the leader talked about "would-be Jesus." Would-be Jesus is a Jesus who agrees with your belief system, who likes what you like and hates what you hate, who accepts what you accept and rejects what you reject. But that is no different than fashioning an idol out of wood or stone. We don't get to call the shots. Indeed, I wouldn't want to because I recognize how fallible I am. I'm not God and I don't want to fashion God in my image.
So, while the book holds a great deal of value for the prescriptive advice about enriching health, I think I cannot recommend the book fully without caution about his spiritual foundation. It is a foundation of sinking sand, not the solid rock of Christ's atonement. And if I am destined for dementia because I believe in the God of the Bible, the God who Jennings wants to call a "punishing dictator God," but who is really the only supreme being capable of reconciling sinful man to his holy maker, then bring it on. God can carry me through that, as well.
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