Neuroscience, Emotional Health, Human Becoming, and Jesus
This Series: This is the first blog post in a series called Human Being, Human Becoming. I am exploring what human nature and human personhood are from biblical and theological perspectives. I combine those insights cautiously with other disciplines, like neuroscience, psychology, etc. Throughout, I am explaining why the medical substitutionary atonement view of Jesus – forging in himself a new humanity – makes perfect sense with this exploration of Scripture. Meanwhile, penal substitution renders human beings into “human doings” and impoverishes a truly Christian view of human nature and personhood.
Your Choices Shape Your Desires
A lot of the time we think that we have desires and therefore we make choices. For example, isn’t it true that when you feel hungry, you choose to eat. When you feel thirsty, you choose to drink. When you feel like you have to pee, you choose to pee. Your desires lead you to make choices.
But our desires do not stay constant. If you think they do, then you might look at Jesus and think, ‘There are things about him that I don’t desire, today. I’d have to be more truthful, or more sober, or more sexually pure, or more generous, so I really don’t want to go further with Jesus. In fact, he scares me.’ If you assume that Jesus calls you to choose against your desires all the time, then you’ll think your life will be miserable. So why come to Jesus?
What is not obvious – at least in our culture – is that your choices shape your desires. You have a say in what kind of person you become, how much of Jesus you experience, and how much of God you know.
For example, if you take cocaine, or play lots of video games, or watch pornography, then the same pathways in your brain will be stimulated.[1] Your brain will produce neural pathways within it, which will draw you just a little bit more towards those same escapist fantasies the next time. In other words, you will take a step towards addiction. If you’re a man, and if you watch pornography, a part of your brain will become active: the same place that becomes active when you see a very handy power drill. You’d train your brain to view a woman’s body as a tool. You’d hurt your capacity for deeper emotional life just a little bit more. You’d have the same desires for love, intimacy, and meaning. But you’d develop addictions to self-serving illusions.
Or, if you have sex, or if you’re a woman and nurse a baby at your breast, your brain produces oxytocin, a hormone that helps you feel emotionally bonded to that other person.[2] You can do that within the relational vision God has for you, in which case those oxytocin-fueled desires will enhance your relationships, and strengthen the bonds. Or, you can try it outside of the vision God has for you, in which case you’d risk breaking the actual relationships – because they were casual or superficial to start with – while still feeling those oxytocin-influenced desires for lasting connection.
Your choices shape your desires.
Jesus and Godly Human Desires
Your choices shape your desires in spiritual life, too. The apostle Paul, in Ephesians, says that ‘the hardness of their heart’ (Eph.4:18) leads unbelieving people into ‘ignorance’ and a ‘darkened understanding’ in the mind. But it’s not just about their rational, logical thinking. People, because of hardened hearts, progressively deform their own emotions and desires. They ‘have become callous,’ Paul says. And out of a desire to feel more stimulation and sensation, they ‘have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness’ (Eph.4:19).
Your desires do not stay constant. Your desires change, and you shape them. When you choose to exercise, you grow your capacity and usually desire for more exercise. You will enjoy exercise more. When you choose to eat healthy, you develop a taste for healthy food. You will enjoy healthy food more.
When you love Jesus and others by the love of Jesus in you, you will enjoy him more. You will desire more of him. Paul continues to teach us about accessing Jesus and reshaping our desires according to him. He admonishes us to ‘lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and… be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which according to God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth’ (Eph.4:22 – 24).
What is this ‘new self’? It is the new way of life Jesus offers to us. How? What did he uniquely do? Your understanding of the atonement matters here. We will explore that in just a bit, in Ephesians 5:1 – 2, when Paul circles back to that topic.
Letting Go of Anger
Sharing in Jesus’ new self means, not only right actions (orthopraxy), but also right desires and emotions (orthopathy). We must ‘speak truth’ with each other, specifically reminding each other that ‘we are members of one another’ in the body of Christ (Eph.4:25). Paul then highlights the first practical effect this truth will have on us: we deal with our anger and other emotions. Paul uses anger as the leading example of the discipleship of our emotions (Eph.4:26 – 27), just as Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt.5:21 – 26).
In the process of confronting our own anger, we ask Jesus for the courage, wisdom, compassion, and whatever else we need, to resolve conflicts with others. We reflect on how we are connected with others. We remind ourselves of the good qualities and potential of others. When we settle issues with others in a Christ-honoring way, it’s emotionally invigorating. We sleep better at night. Our bodies release the stress and anxiety our anger causes. We stop rehearsing bitter thoughts. For anyone who knows how good it feels to settle conflicts well, you know you develop a desire for better conflict resolution everywhere. Following Jesus is not just doing the right actions, but cultivating the right desires and emotions within ourselves.
Feeling Grief
We also become more attuned to how God feels. Paul says, ‘Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God’ (Eph.4:30). If God ‘feeling grief’ is an anthropomorphism, Paul encourages it anyway, because the emotion of grief serves as a connection point between us humans and God. When my children rebel, or fight amongst themselves, as a parent, I grieve. So also, God is not ‘neutral’ or ‘unaffected’ in the face of His children’s disobedience. Grief, then, is the appropriate human emotion that we need to cultivate to properly know God. Jesus said, ‘Blessed are those who mourn [grieve], for they shall be comforted’ (Mt.5:4).
Sometimes, we cut off the feeling of grief; we move to annoyance or anger too quickly. Sometimes when we sin against others, we want other people to forgive us and get over it quickly, perhaps so that we will not have to grieve what we have done. But God grieves. Does He do more than grieve? Certainly, but He does not do less. He is not afraid of grief.
Paul reminds us that we can cause God emotional pain, and he relies on the possibility that we can empathize with God. The more we experience relationships as God intended them to be, the more we will feel grieved when we do not. This fact supports my point: Right desires and emotions (orthopathy) are just as important as right actions (orthopraxy) or right belief (orthodoxy).
Imitating God in Christ
After giving these commands to show Christian love, Paul then gives one more exhortation to be ‘imitators of God’ in 5:1, and quickly narrows that down. How do we imitate God? By loving others like Jesus loved us in 5:2:
‘1 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; 2 and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.’ (Ephesians 5:1 – 2)
Jesus did not just live a life of sacrificial love, as an example for us, which is how many people read these verses. Of course, he did do at least that, at a minimum.
This is how Jesus alone perfected a ‘new humanity’ (Eph.2:15), or a ‘new self’ (Eph.4:24) for us. He perfected right human desires and emotions in himself, to share with us, too. How? By ‘burning away’ all the wrong human desires and emotions. How did he do that? By ‘burning away’ the corruption of sin within the human nature he had taken on in the womb of Mary. In other words, as Paul says, Jesus loved us by being like a ‘sin offering’ to God (Eph.5:2; cf. Rom.8:3; Heb.10:18; 13:11; Isa.53:10).
Huh?
In the Jewish sacrificial system, to perform a singular sin offering,[3] a priest killed an animal and then partitioned it into different pieces (Lev.3:1 – 17). The priest took the animal’s kidneys, liver, and intestinal fat and burned them in fire. Those parts alone were said to produce ‘a fragrant aroma to the Lord’ (Lev.3:5, 16). Exegetically, that point is absolutely important, and I cannot stress it enough: The death of the animal was not itself pleasing to God. God was only pleased when those parts of the animal associated with waste products and toxins were burned away. Is that a coincidence? (For more information, click here for an explanation of Leviticus and here for an explanation of Isaiah 53).
The Emotional Life of Jesus, and the Emotional Life God Wants Us to Have
Jesus ‘burned away’ from himself all that was spiritually toxic in his human nature, by his absolute faithfulness. He consumed in the fire of his love for the Father what we could not.
Jesus was tempted to be bitter at the Roman soldiers who had colonized his people and land. But he never allowed his heart and mind to indulge that emotion. Even when those soldiers nailed his hands and feet to the cross, he said, ‘Father, forgive them’ (Lk.23:33 – 34).
Jesus was tempted to be lustful. He faced many moments when women adored him, and perhaps especially when one woman let down her hair to wash his feet (Lk.7:36 – 50), which was a gesture a wife typically did alone with her husband. But he never allowed his eyes to see them as anything less than beloved daughters of God.
Jesus was tempted, even by his closest friends, to take a shortcut to fulfill his calling of being the messiah of Israel, with far less pain and far more domination (Mt.16:21 – 23). But he refused to give in to fear, laziness, and greed for power. He did not take the easy road. And so on.
God had an original vision for what human beings were supposed to be, and feel. He invests us with good desires for love, goodness, justice, and beauty, which ultimately lead us back to Himself. Jesus nurtured them according to God’s original vision. He relied on the Spirit to develop his humanity by the Father’s design. He resisted every emotional pull which could have drawn his human desires against the Father’s desires.
Jesus rejected self-focused love.
He refused self-congratulating standards of goodness.
He rebuked self-serving notions of justice, of what he ‘deserved.’
He repudiated self-absorbed motivations to consume the beauty of others.
From what we know from neuroscience, Jesus prevented neural pathways from forming in his human brain that would produce any desire towards bitterness, lust, greed, escapism, etc.
Jesus became the normative human being. Throughout his whole life, Jesus condemned and destroyed the corruption of sin within his own human nature (Rom.8:3), to return his human nature to the Father, healed and purified. He lived a fully human life, faithfully, unto God the Father. He brought his human nature to maturity in the Spirit. He did not just do this transforming work at his death alone. His death on the cross made manifest what was happening during in his whole human life, and served as the ultimate expression of his entire life. He died to kill what was killing us: the corruption of sin, because he shared in our fallen human nature. He dealt sin its final blow. Truly, ‘he gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma’ (Eph.5:2), consuming in the fire of his faithfulness what we could not. He ‘burned’ it all out of himself.
Jesus Shares His Emotions and Desires With Us
But that’s not all. Jesus didn’t come to make himself the next moral and emotional standard, impossible to imitate and therefore inevitably resented. Instead, by his Spirit, Jesus shares with us his life, expressed through his actual human nature. Because Jesus perfected his human nature, he is filled with only godly human emotions and desires. And he gives us his Spirit so we can share in his own emotional life. When Paul wrote to the Philippians, he anchored the affection he felt for them to Jesus (Phil.1:8). Apparently, Jesus had an affectionate personality towards others. And Paul knew it was God who was at work in Christians to help us do His will – and not just do it, but desire it (Phil.2:13).
Paul’s comparison in Ephesians 5:2 between Jesus and the Jewish sacrifices calls our attention to the flow of Jesus’ life into us, too. The sacrificial animal had other body parts which played different roles in the whole process of atonement. Notably, the blood of the animal represented cleansing and purifying life from God. Israel contaminated the creation because they, like all of us, had sin and death within their humanity. Human beings were corrupted by sin, but animals were not. God in His love had to cleanse the creation, renewing its sanctity and life. So God gave the life-blood of animals back to Israel as a cleansing, healing substance – to disinfect people and non-moral objects like land and furniture. God was acting like a dialysis machine, taking our impurity into Himself, and giving us back purified life.
Likewise, Jesus breathes out his Spirit to us, to renew godly sanctity and life in us (Jn.20:22). He raised his human nature in resurrection glory as a God-soaked, God-drenched humanity. And he started bestowing his Spirit to us, so we can participate in him, not just imitate him. We can actually have the loving mind (Phil.2:5 – 11) and affections (Phil.1:8) of Christ Jesus in us, reshaping our emotions and desires, and even our neural pathways. No wonder Paul said, ‘We shall be saved by his life’ (Rom.5:10).
Indeed, Jesus said that he had come to cast a divine ‘fire’ on the earth, a ‘fire’ that he wished was already started (Lk.12:49), a fire that he could only spread through his own life, death, and resurrection (Lk.12:50). We now participate in his holy, divine ‘fire.’
Fifth century Egyptian theologian Cyril of Alexandria wrote a moving reflection on how Jesus empowers us emotionally. He said this:
‘Just as death was brought to naught in no other way than by the Death of the Saviour, so also with regard to each of the sufferings of the flesh [that is, those feelings of dread, grief, fear, and alarm, which are not sinful per se, as long as we do not give in to them further]: for unless He had felt dread, human nature could not have become free from dread; unless He had experienced grief, there could never have been any deliverance from grief; unless He had been troubled and alarmed, no escape from these feelings could have been found. And with regard to every one of the affections to which human nature is liable, thou wilt find exactly the corresponding thing in Christ. The affections of His Flesh [i.e. these particular ones] were aroused, not that they might have the upper hand as they do indeed in us, but in order that when aroused they might be thoroughly subdued by the power of the Word dwelling in the flesh, the nature of man thus undergoing a change for the better.’[4]
Jesus is who we are meant to become, even emotionally.
Exegetical Point: Penal or Medical Substitutionary Atonement?
Here is where our understanding of atonement matters. Does penal substitution explain Ephesians 5:1 – 2? If God must preserve a principle of retributive justice, and not set it aside, then we cannot forgive the way God does. Therefore we could not imitate Him.
If Paul understood Jesus to be a penal substitute, then the punitive mechanism involved in Jesus’ death would conflict with how Paul advocates that we forgive others. If we are facing conflict with others (Eph.4:31 – 32), in what sense are we supposed to imitate God (5:1)? By forgiving others, certainly.
But his encouragement is puzzling on the emotional level. Paul uses the same Greek word ὀργὴ (orgē) here for human ‘wrath’ in Ephesians 4:31 that he does for God’s wrath in Romans 1:18; 2:8; and 5:9. Paul urges us, ‘Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice’ (Eph.4:31). Paul urges kindness, tender-heartedness, and forgiveness instead (Eph.4:32). But if God pours out His own wrath within Himself, that is, upon the Son, then in what sense can we imitate God? There would be an angry transaction behind the back of this forgiveness.
It’s true that forgiving someone else can feel like giving up, or ‘sacrificing,’ something to which we’re entitled. But if Jesus absorbed a punitive, retributive punishment from God the Father, then in what sense can we love others like Jesus loved us? Can we deal out wrath, and then receive it, from different points within ourselves, in order to deflect it from others?
I repeat: If God must preserve a principle of retributive justice, and actually execute that principle within Himself, then we cannot forgive the way God does. Therefore we could not imitate Him.
Nor would speaking of Jesus as an offering and a sacrifice make much sense. In what sense are we supposed to love others like Christ did (Eph.5:2)? Jesus certainly did forgive us and others, as Paul says in a parallel passage, Colossians 3:13, showing that he is able to state that quite clearly when he wants to. But Paul is not exactly citing Jesus forgiving others. Rather, in Ephesians 5:2, he is citing Jesus being an offering and sacrifice to the Father.
The Jewish ritual sacrifices were not identical with just any act of moral sacrifice or ‘giving up’ something you feel entitled to, even though the same English word – ‘sacrifice’ – is used in both cases. That similarity does not exist in the original Hebrew. The Jewish ritual sacrifices were a way to send something into God, allowing God to burn part of it away, and receiving something back from Him – purified life, and often a meal of fellowship.
If, however, we read Ephesians 5:1 – 2 in the framework of medical substitutionary atonement, as I believe the rest of Scripture does teach, the awkwardness evaporates.
We can imitate God straightforwardly. How? By perceiving what God did in Christ to burn away the sinfulness in the humanity of Jesus on our behalf, out of love for us. The action of God which we imitate, according to 5:1, is clarified to be the atoning, cleansing, and purifying work of Christ in 5:2.
We, too, must burn away the corruption of sin in ourselves, in the Spirit of Jesus. Why? Because we, by the Spirit, participate in the ‘new humanity’ of Jesus (Eph.2:15), the ‘new self’ which he perfected for us (Eph.4:24). We now participate in the fire of the Son’s love for the Father, in the Spirit – a holy, divine fire which purifies our emotions, desires, and even our brain formation. That is how we best love others.
(Mention of offering, by the way, fits quite well in the larger point Paul makes in Ephesians, comparing Jesus’ humanity to a ‘new temple.’ The ‘temple’ concept calls attention to God coming through the humanity of Jesus, as God once came through the temple of the Old Testament. The ‘offering’ concept calls attention to Jesus burning away the corruption of sin through his own humanity, as the kidney, liver, and intestinal fat was once burned away from the sacrificial animals. Thus, ‘temple’ and ‘offering’ are complementary ways of referring to the role of Jesus’ human nature. In Colossians, by comparison, Paul relates the eternal Son-Word to all creation, and explains Jesus’ new humanity in Adamic terms as God’s ‘new creation.’)
[1] Michael D. Lemonick, “How We Get Addicted,” Time, July 5, 2007; William M. Struthers, Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009); Gary Wilson, Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Commonwealth Publishing, UK, 2014); Samuel D. James, “See No Evil,” First Things, April 27, 2016; John Schwartz, “Learning to Learn: You, Too, Can Rewire Your Brain,” New York Times, August 4, 2017; Janelle Nanos, “Stop Answering Your Phone,” Boston Globe, January 6, 2018
[2] This is true even for men; see Maia Szalavitz, “How Oxytocin Makes Men (Almost) Monogamous,” Time, November 23, 2013. Curiously, in women, oxytocin is also produced in greater amounts during times of stress and isolation, but this is not well understood; see Tori DeAngelis, “The Two Faces of Oxytocin,” American Psychological Association, February 2008
[3] A singular sin offering was only a small part of the larger ritual pattern rooted in Israel’s annual calendar cycle. For more information about that, please see my blog post Atonement in Scripture: Temple Sacrifices and a Bloodthirsty God? Part 3: God as Dialysis Machine and the Day of Atonement. There were other types of offerings as well, of course. It is theoretically possible that Paul was referring to Jesus as a “burnt offering,” or a generic offering. But the “sin offering” provides us with the likely significance of the “burnt offering.” Why was the burning of the “burnt offering” pleasing to God? Because the entire animal was consumed in fire, which also destroyed the kidneys, liver, and intestinal fat.
[4] Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John’s Gospel, John 12:27 – 28.