I never wanted to be a black belt.

Oh, I'm not complaining. But I started karate to get in shape; I had no illusions about being the next Bruce Lee.

I did indeed get in shape, but also discovered I really like martial arts. One thing led to another, and one day, after a grueling four-hour test, I found myself the surprised owner of an instructor's certification and my first black belt in the Universal Kempo Karate Schools Association.

Of course, during my years of training I wrestled with the questions. Is it OK for me as a Christian to study martial arts? Aren't they just choreographed violence? Didn't Jesus say to turn the other cheek rather than resist an evil person? And what about the Eastern religions that permeate much of the martial arts?

I try to be a serious Christian, if not the deepest thinker in the world, so I applied what brainpower I could muster to such questions.

Thwip!

Which leads me to Spider-Man. Remember how Flash Thompson tries to attack Peter Parker in the first Spider-Man movie? Peter's standing there, oblivious, when, without knowing why, he ducks just in time to avoid Flash's locker-pulverizing fist. To his surprise, Peter finds himself fighting not the terrifying Flash Thompson, but a sloth on Valium.

I especially love when Peter sidesteps a lethargic punch, looking bewildered: Are we on dialup or something? he's thinking. Meanwhile, Flash sees nothing but a superhumanly speedy geek.

I've been cast in that scene many times — as both the Sedated Sloth and the Blurred Nerd.

Make no mistake: I'm usually the Sedated Sloth. Humility is good for Christians, and nothing's quite so humbling as trying to kick or punch someone, only to find that not only did you miss, you're flat on your back with no idea what happened.

But I've achieved Blurred Nerd status a few times, too.

The first time, I was helping teach a group of teens; they were taking turns sparring with me and the other instructors.

I'd been sparring one teen after another nonstop for almost an hour, wondering if I'd ever catch my breath again, when yet another annoyingly lively kid squared off with me. We began to dance, but I noticed he was moving rather slowly. I was about to ask him if he was OK when, for no reason, I leaned back a bit.

Idly registering the fact that a gloved fist had just floated past my nose, I felt a satisfying thud travel up from my heel, which I had just planted in my sparring partner's stomach. He staggered back, gasping like a fish and nearly falling, then rushed me with all the speed of a turtle wading through peanut butter.

This is weird, I thought, blinking as I realized I'd just tagged him twice more in the solar plexus and neck. This time I did knock him down.

And then it was over. It had lasted maybe five seconds, but subjectively it felt much longer, all in slo-mo. My opponent bounced back up with all the newly minted energy of youth, and I abruptly reassumed Sedated Sloth status as an exhausted 40-something facing an enraged 17-year-old.

He let me live.

Brain Macros

I've never been bitten by a radioactive spider, so what happened?

If the aforementioned Bruce Lee were alive, he'd say I had achieved "no mind" — that I was learning to "flow like water" against an opponent.

Sounds vaguely Buddhist; depending who you ask, it probably is. So why was I, a Christian, fiddling around in this state of no mind?¹

Well, it's like this: I don't believe in no mind — but I do believe in reflex arcs.

God, you see, is a terrific engineer. Not only has He built elegant, powerful protective systems into our bodies, He has also enabled us to modify those systems.

Ever touched a hot stove and snatched your hand away? When you touched the stove, an electrochemical signal traveled up your arm to your spinal cord — but before it continued to your brain, it triggered a reflex arc: a predefined neural pathway that mediates a motor action.

In other words, your arm moved automatically before you were aware of it. Same thing when your doctor hammers your knee: Your leg is moving before you even feel it.

Reflex arcs, then, bypass conscious thought entirely — saving often-crucial milliseconds.

Cool — but even cooler is that we can create our own reflexes to supplement the set we're born with. Even complex sets of motor movements, if repeated often enough, can create their own neural pathways. All it takes is repetition.

This is true whether we train to respond to a crisis — jamming on the brakes when a cat runs across the road — or we reduce a series of actions into a unit: rebounding in basketball, boxing drills or piano scales. Typing, walking, speech and numerous other incredibly complex actions, which take enormous concentration and energy at first, become subconscious and effortless with enough practice.

Do martial artists or other athletes give up self-control by doing this? No — training yourself to respond reflexively hardly negates your will any more than learning to type means you have no control over what words you type. If a responsible martial artist wouldn't kill someone on purpose, he's not going to do it by accident.²

Boards Don't Hit Back

Sports training is all about just such conditioning: Reducing conscious actions into controlled, subconscious reflexes.

My brief Blurred Nerd stint was simply me reacting to my sparring partner without conscious thought. Discarding those crucial milliseconds freed me to focus on him without thinking about what I was doing — and made me look insanely fast to boot. It's fragile — once I noticed it, it vanished like a soap bubble.

The pros spend their time learning how to get there, and stay there, whenever they want. I got there accidentally via exhaustion. Bruce Lee got there intentionally via an electroencephalograph.

Really. Lee had heard that a near-sleep state — when the brain's alpha wave production is highest — produces measurably faster reflexes.

So Lee bought a jury-rigged EEG that flashed a light when it detected alpha waves, trying to learn to produce alpha waves at will and put an edge on his already phenomenal speed.

Bottom line: There was nothing superhuman or supernatural about me achieving Blurred Nerd status. All it took was lots of repetition.

Why, then, did Lee use Buddhist terms rather than describe the homegrown biofeedback he was really practicing? Simple, in my opinion: Lee was no one's idea of a serious Buddhist, but he was a great marketer. He knew that mystical phrases like "no mind" and "flow like water" sounded much cooler than "reflex arcs."

Martial arts are often identified with Eastern culture and religion (in reality, every culture in history has developed its own martial arts — but that's another story). And Buddhists can be just as Procrustean³ as Christians about forcing facts to fit their worldview: View athletic training through a Buddhist lens, and you get a Buddhist definition of a process that's no more Buddhist than making your biceps grow by pumping iron.

Let My Factoids Go

Which leads me to Moses. Before the Hebrews left Egypt, they asked for gold, silver, clothing and other luxury items (Exodus 3:22) — enough to later build the Tabernacle (Exodus 25:1-9).

Neither the Hebrews nor God himself were fussy about building the Tabernacle with stolen gold — much less the fact that some of it undoubtedly held occult significance in Egypt. Gold was gold, the attitude seemed to be; its value is inherent regardless of usage (a fact the priesthood conveniently forgot, though — see Matthew 23:16-20).

The same principle holds for truth itself: As the old saying goes, all truth is God's truth. Wheaton philosophy chair Dr. Arthur F. Holmes,⁴ among others, has observed that Christians are often skeptical, if not downright fearful, of information flowing from secular sources such as philosophy or psychology. The martial arts are no exception.

Why should this be? Holmes asked. If a thing is true, it doesn't matter who first discovers it. Should an astronomer discover something about God's creation, for instance, God is no less glorified, and the new knowledge no less true, even if the astronomer is a hardcore atheist.

Dr. Larry Crabb, in Effective Biblical Counseling,⁵ advocated a "spoil the Egyptians" approach to knowledge: Crabb argued that Christians can and should exploit secular knowledge for the sake of the Kingdom if that knowledge does not violate biblical principles. If a Christian is thoroughly grounded in Scripture, Crabb says, he or she can easily discern where secular truth and "disclosed truth," or revelation, appropriately overlap.⁶

Part of This Nutritious Breakfast

Which leads me to Madison Avenue. Despite being raised in Hong Kong, Bruce Lee was uniquely American in that he was ruthlessly practical: If something worked, he used it — without regard for its context or trappings. The U.S. in general is iconoclastic like this, in fact: We take what we like and ditch the rest.

Lee infuriated his peers by cherry-picking anything he found useful. Jeet Kune Do, his martial arts system, incorporated techniques from dozens of combative arts — even Western arts like fencing, boxing and wrestling — while cheerfully discarding their revered traditions and pageantry, including any spiritual baggage.

Most of the West has adopted Lee's eclectic approach to the martial arts. If there's another thing the U.S. is really good at, it's marketing: Martial arts training in the West can be spiritual, scientific or secular — your choice. All it takes is a little smart shopping — no one's going to turn you into a Buddhist when you're not looking. If I wanted to wander around in yellow robes with a blind kung fu master who called me "Grasshopper" and uttered profundities, I could. But I don't have to.

Not that physical training has no part in a healthy spiritual life — on the contrary (1 Corinthians 9:24-27, 1 Timothy 4:8). And this isn't news to us. We heartily support, say, Christian Olympians as they exercise their faith along with their bodies — despite the Olympics' ancient roots as nationwide worship of the Greek gods Zeus and Pelops. Paul was almost certainly referring to the Olympics in the above passages, but its pagan roots didn't seem to bother him either.

The Conclusion of the Matter

Which leads me to Solomon.

Obviously I believe the martial arts can be legitimate as for Christians as any other sport. Your mileage may vary, as they say: As Christians, we must respect our own consciences on disputable matters (Romans 14:1-6).

It takes information to make informed decisions, though — and while I must heed my consciences, I must also have confidence in truth. As Solomon said, it is the glory of kings to search out a matter (Proverbs 25:2); I need not fear the unknown if I explore it with the Light guiding my way.

You've probably noticed, however, that I haven't discussed the issues of violence and turning the other cheek I raised earlier. Those, too, are another story. Stay tuned.

* * *

1. No jokes about how I belong there, please. I've already heard 'em all.
2. Those rumors you hear about how a martial artist might accidentally kill you if you startle him or suddenly awaken him are no more true than those rumors about how martial artists have to register their hands as lethal weapons.
3. Procrustes, a bad guy in Greek mythology, had an iron bed in which he invited visitors to lie down. If they were too tall, he amputated the excess length; if they were too short, he stretched them on the rack until they fit. In philosophy, someone using a "Procrustean Bed" ruthlessly forces all knowledge to conform to an arbitrary standard, even if the facts are distorted in the process.
4. Holmes, Arthur F. All Truth Is God's Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's, 1977).
5. Crabb, Lawrence J. Effective Biblical Counseling (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1977).
6. Ibid., p. 50.