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February 12, 2012
For nearly 25 years now, I have been telling college students and congregations and anyone else who would listen that the two great frontiers for theology in our time are astrophysics and neuroscience.
Astrophysics just might get closer to “reading the mind of God,” as the great physicist Stephen Hawking put it, than any other discipline. The farther out in space we look, the farther back we are seeing in time. And in theory, at least, if we can see far enough out, then we can to see far enough back to see the first light of the beginning of time when “God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light” (Genesis 1:3).
But in addition to “reading the mind of God,” theology must plumb the depths of the human psyche as well, so the other great frontier for theology in our time is neuroscience, the study of the structures that underlie the human mind. If, as Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your . . . mind” (Mark 12:30), and the apostle Paul says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5), then the structures of the brain that underlie the human mind are of utmost importance to theology.
Exploring the mind of God in astrophysics and delving the underlying structures of the human mind in neuroscience are the great frontiers for theology in our time.
But I know very well that you didn’t come here this morning for a lecture on astrophysics or neuroscience either one. What most of us feel that we need from church on Sunday is something we can carry away that will help us recover from the week that we just had and get through the week that lies ahead. So come with me for a few minutes to the grocery store. After all, that’s where we usually go to get the things we ran out of last week and need for next week, isn’t it?
Maybe you still need a Valentine’s Day card or a box of candy or a big helium balloon or a handful of cheerful flowers. Whether you’ve been dating for six months or married for 60 years or anyplace in between, you better come home with something on Tuesday.
I did a double take as I walked down the aisle. I was passing the magazines when a picture caught my eye. It was of a dark-haired couple in a romantic embrace, eyes closed, face to face, very nearly—but not quite—lips to lips. The photo was slightly grainy, sultry, steamy looking. In the bottom right corner, superimposed in red letters on a field of black was the word “Love.” Maybe Time would run this cover photo or The National Enquirer. But there was no mistaking the fact that this blissfully sensuous and romantic moment was framed by a bold yellow border that communicated as clearly and as incongruously as the white capital letters across the top: National Geographic. National Geographic? What kind of geography is this? Sign me up! I wanna be a geography major.
I did a double take and walked on by. After all, it wasn’t love I came to the grocery store for at 10:00 on a weeknight after having been up since 4 a.m. It was children’s Tylenol, a gallon of milk, and 0.7 mm lead for a middle-schooler’s mechanical pencil. Only to have my attention distracted by a grainy photograph in a yellow border. I walked away with the picture on the magazine still in my head, and I had to ask myself, “What is it I’m here for?” “Keep moving,” I said. “You’re not here for ‘Love’—or National Geographic either.” So I waited until the next time I was in the grocery store—about three days later. A gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and National Geographic, the February issue 2006, just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Since a whole bunch of you are signed up for the Valentine’s Day Banquet tomorrow night, I decided to return this morning to the topic of that first “fruit of the Spirit” in Galatians 5:22-23: Love. “Love: The Chemical Reaction” was the cover story. Lauren Slater’s article was a blend of Cosmopolitan, Anthropology Today, and Scientific American. And Jodi Cobb’s photographs from Argentina, Cancun, Italy, Las Vegas, Pennsylvania, and Ohio were vintage Geographic with a Generation Next edge.
The article introduced the reader to an anthropologist named Helen Fisher at Rutgers University who studies “the biochemical pathways of love in all its manifestations: lust, romance, attachment, the way they wax and wane” (p. 35). It turns out that the chemical pathways in the brain that light up when you are “madly in love” are those that are associated with a chemical neurotransmitter called dopamine. “Dopamine [is a chemical in the brain that] creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and motivation to win rewards. [Dopamine] is why,” writes Slater, “when you are newly in love, you can stay up all night, watch the sun rise, run a race, ski fast down a slope ordinarily too steep for your skill. Love makes you bold, makes you bright, makes you run real risks, which you sometimes survive, and sometimes you don’t” (ibid.).
Donatella Marazziti is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pisa, in Italy. She studies another chemical pathway of love. Her studies of people who could be identified as “passionately in love” have shown that their blood levels of the chemical serotonin are 40% lower than normal, which corresponds to level of serotonin exhibited by people who have been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. In the best one-liner in the article Slater writes, “Love and mental illness may be difficult to tell apart” (p. 38). “More seriously,” she writes, “if the chemically altered state induced by romantic love is akin to a mental illness or a drug-induced euphoria, exposing yourself for too long could result in psychological damage” (p. 44). In fact, “Studies around the world confirm that indeed passion usually ends. Its conclusion is as common as its initial flare. No wonder some cultures think selecting a lifelong mate based on something so fleeting is folly” (pp. 43-44).
A few years ago, I sat with a group pastor-colleagues looking at each other in shock when we heard the news that a well-respected young colleague of ours had separated from his wife of five years because, they said, they just didn’t “have the same chemistry” any more. That’s what they said. They didn’t “have the same chemistry.” Duh. The chemistry of courtship is an unsustainable imbalance in the brain more akin to mental illness than to any other human condition. The brain chemistry of a couple in love is literally different after four or five years of intimacy.
Sustainable loving relationships inevitably move “from the dopamine-drenched state of romantic love to the relative quiet of an oxytocin-induced attachment,” writes Slater. “Oxytocin is a hormone that promotes a feeling of attachment, connectedness, bonding. It is released when we hug our long-term spouse, or hug our children. It is released when a mother nurses her infant” (p. 45). We tend to speak of the “chemistry of love” as metaphor, but it turns out that the literal chemistry of love in a long-term relationship is different from the heady brew of a romantic chase. Our body produces is less dopamine and more serotonin and oxytocin, so that long-term relationships are chemically less like mental illness than courtships are. It’s no wonder that our concept of love is sometimes so confused. The literal chemistry of our love changes over time.
Our relationship with God also changes over time. In this morning’s gospel lesson, Jesus said that there is no commandment greater than “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). That sounds almost dopamine drenched, serotonin-starved, enthusiastic and obsessive, doesn’t it? All, all, all, all! And there is a second, he says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). That one sounds oxytocin rich: attachment, connectedness, bonding with others. Who would have thought that biochemistry and the Bible, neuroscience and Scripture, could be so much alike?
Look at how the Old Testament book of Hosea talks about the growth and development of our relationship with God. In chapter 2, we read of God’s courtship, God’s wooing of God’s people Israel: “I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. . . . There she shall respond as in the days of her youth” (Hosea 2:14-15). Do you see the allure, the responsiveness, the underlying passion of courtship in these verses? But the relationship does not end there.
The relationship moves from short-term courtship to long-term commitment: “On that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband.’ . . . and I will take you for my wife forever” (Hosea 2:16,19). When the relationship moves from courtship to long-term commitment, we no longer read of allure and passion. The prevailing terms of the relationship shift to righteousness and justice, and steadfast love and mercy. “I will take you for my wife in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord” (Hosea 2:19-20). In Hosea 2, God’s relationship with Israel—and with us—is described as though it moves from a dopamine-drenched, serotonin-starved courtship in the wilderness to an oxytocin-rich relationship grounded in core covenantal commitments: righteousness, justice, steadfast love, mercy, faithfulness.” Those are some marriage vows! Those core covenantal commitments long outlive the initial energy and enthusiasm, obsession and compulsion in a relationship and replace them with attachment, connectedness, bonding.
Notice one more thing about this long-term commitment. It is only in the long-term relationship of attachment, connectedness, and bonding with God that the book of Hosea says we “know the Lord” (Hosea 2:20). So many recent converts to the Christian faith make the mistake of assuming that the way they feel at the beginning of their Christian walk—the energy, the enthusiasm, the passion, the obsession and the compulsion of their feelings for God—are the substance of a relationship with God. But the book of Hosea very clearly says that’s only the courtship phase. After the courtship phase comes settling down and settling in for the long haul in righteousness, justice, steadfast love, mercy, and faithfulness, the core covenantal commitments.
There are entire churches that are designed for courtship. Their mission is centered almost exclusively on match-making between God and new believers. They design their worship experiences and their ministries to elicit energy, enthusiasm, passion and obsession for God and for the church. Those are exciting and lively churches. After all, Psalm 47:1 says, “Clap your hands, all you peoples, shout to God with loud songs of joy”; and Psalm 150:4 says, “Praise God with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe!” Those churches are as noisy as teenagers in love. Every Sunday is Valentine’s Day.
But other churches are designed almost exclusively for marriage, the long-haul relationship with God in this life that is characterized not so much by obsession and passion but by familiarity and trust, in “the relative quiet of an oxytocin-induced attachment.” Habakkuk 2:20 tells us, “the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him!” There’s no clapping and shouting there, but silence in the presence of the holy one. “The effect of righteousness,” says Isaiah 32:17, “will be peace . . . quietness and trust forever.” Every Sunday in those churches marks an Anniversary Day decades long in the making.
One of the unfortunate things about the American church scene in our time is that these two kinds of churches talk about each other as though each is the only kind of church that is really church. The old marriage churches call the new courtship churches “all style and no substance,” while the new courtship churches call the old marriage churches “cold and dead.” And even some people inside their own church sometimes launch attacks based on “hot” and “cold,” “style” and “substance,” “loud” and “quiet.” And all the while, those criticisms are signs of arrogance and ignorance.
It’s arrogance, because that criticism asserts that where I am in my relationship with God and my walk with God and my worship of God is where everyone else should be. And it’s ignorance, because it knows nothing about the chemistry of love, the profound and powerful ways that our deepest and most intimate relationships begin in enthusiasm, passion and obsession, and then develop and change over time in attachment and connectedness and bonding, “quietness and trust.”
Whichever church you’re in, don’t get caught up in the arrogance and the ignorance of criticism.
By the way, it turns out that I was in the grocery store for love at 10:00 p.m. on a weeknight. It isn’t the dopamine-drenched, serotonin-suppressed love of the first four or five years of Bev’s and my romance. Instead, it’s the oxytocin-rich love of 34 years of marriage and four children and all the joy and the anguish, all the gratitude and the disappointment, all the happiness and the heartache that comes with the chemistry and the core covenantal commitments that are at the heart of love that lasts.
And I’m still in love with the local church more than 30 years after my ordination, not for the rush of it that it was in the beginning, but for the core covenantal commitments between God and God’s people at the intersection of time and eternity in Jesus Christ.
So if ever find yourself asking, “What is it I’m here for?” I suggest that you consider answering this way: I’m here for love in all its manifestations, and above all, love for God with heart and soul and mind and strength and love for neighbor as for self.
Copyrighted © 2012 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
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