ABSTRACT
The psychologist Jean Piaget proposed that these sorts of bodily competencies allow us considerably more than freedom of movement. According to Piaget, the development of cognition in children begins with a period of sensori-motor engagement with their environment. Johnson, much like Polanyi and Merleau-Ponty, maintains that the very roots of our rational engagement with the world are to be found in patterns of gesture, motion and embodied experience. In language strongly reminiscent of Piaget, he suggests that abstract representations of these recurring patterns are internalized as 'image schemata'. These observations are true of contemporary Christian worship as well. It is perhaps less common in our culture for worship services to feature all of the activities mentioned in the Psalms, dancing, the raising of hands or festal processions. When it comes to Christian transformation, of course, the answer is that neither mind nor body is the primary agent of transformation, but the Holy Spirit.
