Contrary to the greeting card industry, the seat of human love is not the heart but the head.  More specifically, the brain.  There we find a teeming network of neurons that weave their way so mysteriously into that immaterial thing we might call the soul.  And while the soul itself cannot be measured—not by any craft of human agency—the brain itself represents one of the last true medical frontiers.

Helen Fisher is an anthropologist and researcher.  If you’re on the singles market—or you’ve opened your spam folder recently—you might be familiar with the name “chemistry.com.”  The site, partly founded by Fisher, boasts of its ability to match singles through a scientifically-based process.

Shrug your shoulders if you want, but Fisher’s done her homework.  In February of 2008, Fisher delivered a TED Talk entitled “The Brain in Love.”  The research she shares is staggering.  When in love, Fisher says, there’s a part of your brain that activates, “part of what we call the reptilian core of the brain, associated with wanting, with motivation, with focus and with craving. In fact, the same brain region where we found activity becomes active also when you feel the rush of cocaine.”  But it’s more than that, she says, because with cocaine—or any drug—you come down from your high.  Not with love, she says.  And this “obsession,” as she calls it, “can get worse when you’ve been rejected.”  After experiencing a breakup, “the reward system for wanting, for motivation, for craving, for focus—becomes more active when you can’t get what you want.” And finally—and perhaps least surprisingly—researchers “found activity in a brain region associated with deep attachment to another individual.”

“Love is in us,” she concludes.  “It’s deeply embedded in the brain.”[1]

LOVE AS ROOTEDNESS

What we learn from the brain only reinforces what we learn from culture: that love is universal, and part of who we are.  Earlier we were introduced to Simon May, a Yale professor whose groundbreaking work on the history of love weaves through literally centuries of philosophy and history.

Among the many great books he surveyed, May placed special significance on Plato’s Symposium, a work from ancient Greece.  The work itself contained the famous myth of Aristophanes.  In the myth, the gods created human beings that were perfect—only we had two of everything: two faces, two pairs of eyes, arms, etc.  So perfect was humanity that we chose to challenge the gods.  Rather than kill humanity (and risk losing loyal subjects!) the gods chose to chop every person in half.   According to the myth, this set every human being on a search, then, for his “missing half.”  In Plato’s view, man is a forlorn, lonely wanderer, cursed with the all-consuming desire for wholeness.

Though an ancient myth, May sees this same desire as operative in a variety of ways.

“This myth, like many myths, articulates deep human realities.  We still say that we have ‘found ourselves’ and feel ‘whole’ when we stumble across that unique person who can ‘complete’ us.  We still believe that there must be a ‘right’ person for each of us—the perfect ‘fit.’…For we have a sense of (re-)gaining something that belongs to our very nature, of restoring something primal…Over two thousand years later, we find Freud picturing the experience of the lovers’ union in remarkable similar terms.  He describes the desire to merge with our loved one—and the ‘oceanic feeling’ of lovers that the boundaries between them are melting away—as a regression to a primitive stage of development when the infant was united with its mother…”[2]

Here, now, we finally come to an understanding of what love truly is:

“Love, I will argue, is the rapture we feel for people and things that inspire in us the hope of an indestructible grounding for our life….This is the feeling that I call ‘ontological rootedness’…To feel rooted is to experience a relation to a ground beyond oneself, a ground that must seem insurmountably independent of us if it is to be a place in which we might anchor our being.”[3]

The phrase “ontological rootedness” doesn’t quite sound that great when written in a greeting card, but May seems to be onto something fundamental: that love is really about the search for home, the search for a horizon that is distinctly ours.

HOMESICK FOR EDEN

In a way, then, love is about being homesick for Eden.  It was there that God first fashioned man and woman for one another as bearers of the divine image (Genesis 1:26).  Is it any wonder that the very first words of human speech were actually a love poem written from man to wife?

“This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called Woman,

because she was taken out of Man.” (Genesis 2:23)

To bear God’s image, then, gives us the capacity to love.  In his careful study of the “image of God,” Anthony Hoekema concludes that the primary way that man reveals God’s image is in his capacity to love one another.[4]

The story—at least this first part of it—parts by describing the couple as “naked and unashamed” (Genesis 2:25).  Yet the funny thing is, they didn’t even know it.  If you remember the Genesis story, it’s only later, after they eat the forbidden fruit that “their eyes are opened and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7).   No; before so much as a mote of wickedness had stained their world, this first couple felt totally “at home,” totally “rooted” to one another, to the created world, and to the God who fashioned all of it.

No one had taught them that they had to hide.  They’d never known separation.  Or rejection.  Or mistrust.  No one had needed to tell them that they stood before one another stark raving naked.

And that’s beautiful.  Unclothed bodies, unclothed souls.  Our whole discussion has been about what love is like in the “tWorld,” that is, the world of tradition, the world marked by devotion and commitment to one another rather than to self.  And it is within the tWorld—and only in the tWorld—that love can truly flourish.  Why?  Because the moment I become concerned with self, my sense of “rootedness” disappears.  And that’s why love is such a crazy thing, because in the shadow of the Fall, the best we can hope to do is sift some scrap of “home” from the ashes of paradise.  But that’s what makes love simultaneously so possible and so difficult.  In his recent book on marriage, pastor and author Tim Keller says that love is about being “known” and being “loved.”  “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.”[5]

So in a very real sense, even as we seek to define love, we come to realize that love defines us.  The reason pop songs and poets have such enduring power is because, as Helen Fisher concluded from her research, “love is in all of us.”  But unlike Fisher, Christianity believes that love is not “embedded in the brain,” but imprinted on the soul.  It’s more than a feeling—even more than an action.  It’s part of us, part of ourselves and part of our world.  It demands that we nurture it, nourish and protect it.  For without love’s root, there can be no growth, and without love there can be no home.

[1] Helen Fisher, “The brain in love,” TED Talk, February 2008, https://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love?language=en

[2] Simon May,  Love: A History, p. 43.

[3] Ibid., pp. 1-10.

[4] Anthony A. Hoekema, Created in God’s Image.

[5] Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God, p. 95.

“All you need is love.”  This, of course, was the conclusion of the Beatles.  And as we scan the radio dial, we find that love still has pride of place in contemporary music.  But with popularity comes plurality—if “all we need is love,” whose definition should we choose?

If we take our cues from Selena Gomez, love is about satisfying our lover’s expectations of us:

“gonna wear that dress you like, skin-tight, do my hair up real nice, and syncopate my skin to your heart beating…let me show you how proud I am to be yours, leave this dress a mess on the floor, and still look good for you.”[1]

Or, perhaps, we look to Ed Sheeran, who sings of a love whose value surpasses circumstance:

“Loving can hurt, Loving can hurt sometimes, but it’s the only thing that I know…When it gets hard, you know it can get hard sometimes, it is the only thing that makes us feel alive”[2]

Or maybe love is about freedom—about being who you are, like when Katy Perry promises to love “unconditionally:”

Acceptance is the key to be
To be truly free
Will you do the same for me?[3]

Indeed, if “all we need is love,” then we have a variety of options to choose from. It’s no wonder that “love” has become such a bankrupt word.  It’s a word that’s become cheapened with overuse.  You can love your spouse just as easily as you can say “I love tacos.”  With shuddering irony, “love” is the most-used words on a major porn site.[4]

Yet despite the shifting sands of American culture, love remains a dominant force.  But why love?  Why does love have this power, this significance?  We cannot make sense of sexuality, marriage, or family without first anchoring ourselves in an understanding of what love is.

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

Despite an estimated 7,000 spoken languages, love remains our native tongue.  The language of love unifies cultures even as it transcends them.  In every culture we find a priority placed on love, a concept whose definition spills over the brim into small rivers of related ideas.  The French, for example, use the phrase la douleur exquise, referring to “the enormous pain in your heart when you desire someone you cannot have.”  The Nordic language contains a word—forelesket—to describe “the euphoria you feel when you fall in love for the first time.”  Brazil even uses the Portuguese word cafune for the specific act of “slowly stringing your fingers through someone else’s hair.”[5]

In 2011 Yale Professor Simon May released a book called Love: A History, arguably one of the first modern attempts to write a history and philosophy of human love.  In his introduction, he points out that love is a unique experience—even when measured against other human experiences.  So, for example, if you take someone from a previous century and drop him into our current time period, he or she

“wouldn’t recognize our attitudes to morality, or freedom, or the position of women, or art, or race, or parenting, or homosexuality, or the Church, or travel.  He would be astonished to witness ordinary social relations—how the sexes interact, how children behave towards their parents, how black and white talk to each other, how gays touch—but he would quickly identify with what we think love is, or ought to be.”

The wheels of human progress grind ever on, yet “love seems frozen in time.”[6]  More than any other experience, love unites us and makes us emphatically human.  Modern society places limits on anger, on sadness, even on generosity.  Express any of these emotions “too much” and you may find yourself labeled as unbalanced.  People have anger problems, they struggle with lust, eating disorders and depression.  But love—ah, that’s something different, isn’t it?  When we place limits on our anger or sadness, we deem that a sign of emotional health.  But we don’t place such limits on love.  In fact, just the opposite: the more unrestrained our love, the deeper our devotion, the healthier we assume the lover to be.  We can’t dismiss this as merely an evolutionary adaptation or the product of social conditioning, for these might favor infatuation (or codependency) just as easily as genuine romance.  No; it’s almost as if love penetrates to a deeper level, as though the human soul bore the very fingerprints of a Lover beyond our immediate senses.

“…FIERCE AS THE GRAVE”

Christianity offers a unique perspective to the subject of love.  Paul tells the young pastor Timothy that “the goal of our instruction is love” (1 Timothy 1:5).  John’s biography of Jesus tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16).  The statutes of the Hebrew Scriptures may be summarized as loving God and loving one’s neighbor (Luke 10:27).

But Christianity also offers a vision of human love that is wildly vivid and intensely erotic.  Among the collected love poems of King Solomon, we read lines such as these:

“Set me as a seal upon your heart,

as a seal upon your arm,

for love is strong as death,

jealousy is fierce as the grave.

Its flashes are flashes of fire,

the very flame of the Lord.

Many waters cannot quench love,

neither can floods drown it.

If a man offered for love

all the wealth of his house,

he would be utterly despised.”

(Song of Solomon 8:6-7)

This is the stuff our pop stars and romantic poems can only reach for and dream of.  For the further we dig in the further we realize the inadequacy of human language to describe this experience, and the way that we have reduced this tidal force to quaint romantic myths.

For, you see, no one ever falls in love.  Love isn’t something we “fall into.”  It elevates us, ennobles and enriches us.  It lifts our eyes beyond the frail horizon of self; it calls to us in ways that makes the heart swell and the bones ache.  Do we not yearn for it?  Do we not burn and pray and weep for a love as “strong as death,” as “fierce as the grave?”

Yet we are also painfully aware that love can never terminate on itself, nor can any human relationship bear its full weight.  No; we must look beyond love itself to the eternity to which it points.  It is only understanding love’s true Source that we will understand love’s truest value.  And so tomorrow we begin at the place where our hearts first felt at home.

We must begin at Eden.

[1] Selena Gomez, “Good for You”

[2] Ed Sheeran, “Photograph”

[3] Katy Perry, “Unconditionally”

[4] http://fightthenewdrug.org/oh-the-irony-this-is-the-most-used-word-in-porn-comments/

[5] These and others taken from Adrian Catron, “What is Love? A Philosophy of Life,” from The Huffington Post, December 5, 2014.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adrian-catron/what-is-love-a-philosophy_b_5697322.html

[6] Simon May, Love: A History, p. xiii.

I knew what they were asking me.  Sure; they’d tried to cleverly disguise the question with another one, but I knew.

“How many kids do you have?”

The question came to me from a pastoral search committee.  I was applying for a job as an associate pastor, one whose job description had to do with a program oriented toward the intersection of faith and culture.  Yet this was one of the first questions I found myself facing. And I knew what I was really being asked: Are you married? 

Since I wanted the job, I gave a diplomatic answer, citing singleness as a God-given opportunity for ministry and service.

I was rejected within a day’s time.

The swiftness of their response (and others like it) came as a valuable lesson: what was on my resume would never be as valuable as what was on my left ring finger.  Marriage.  Children.  These were the unspoken “qualifications” I was deemed to lack.  And I suppose many in the church also feel that these are the standard by which we are judged—what it means to be happy or at least “normal.”

My point is simply this: while I can hardly compare my experience to those of others, I recognize that talking about God’s supposed “design” for love, marriage, and family presents a certain difficulty.  For some this standard shines as a beacon of hope; for others a harsh glare of judgment.  I understand that for many people, it’s hard to talk about God’s “design” when your experience doesn’t match the picture on the box.

But don’t you see?  We need marriage, we need families to form the social institutions we depend on—regardless of whether we’re married or single.  Yet in recent years these institutions have become more fluid, measured not by absolute standards but by personal perspective.  Recent court decisions regarding same-sex marriage only amplify this issue in the public square.  Christians have often been accused—sometimes rightly—of adopting a posture of condemnation rather than compassion.

At Tri-State Fellowship, it has never been our desire to target specific sins, as though sexual sin were somehow worse than all others.  No; this sermon series has less to do with exposing sin and everything to do with extolling virtue.  But first, we need to pause to examine just how virtue got lost in the sea of individualism.

NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE

Throughout our series, we’ll be adopting an approach used by Dale S. Kuehne in his book Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking Relationships beyond an Age of Individualism.  Kuehne (whose name rhymes with “cane” or “lane”) gives us three different ways of understanding human culture:

• tWorld: The “tWorld” is the world of tradition.  It’s the world of the Bible, but also cultures whose emphasis is on social obligation rather than personal satisfaction.
• iWorld: The “iWorld” is the world of the individual. If the tWorld was asking: “how can we benefit?” the iWorld asks: “how can I benefit?”
• rWorld: The “rWorld” is the world of relationship.  It’s not quite a return to tradition, but instead envisions a society that unifies around public virtues and not merely personal preferences.  And, for Kuehne as well as ourselves, these virtues can be found in the pages of Scripture.

It seems almost too obvious to say that we live in the “iWorld.”  The term itself is a reference to the various “iDevices” that have become part of our world: iPods, iPhones, iPads.  We have become a world of absolute individualism—and this has had a profound effect on our morals.

How so?  In the tWorld—the world of tradition—human societies could be organized around absolute standards.  For most, this meant the pages of the Bible.  But the iWorld has come to assume that things like “truth” and “morality” are the inventions of society.  They are “social constructs,” nothing more.  And if man invented them, then is he not free to reinvent them?

Thus, says Kuehne, the iWorld has reduced sexual ethics to three basic imperatives:

1. One may not criticize someone else’s life choices or behavior.
2. One may not behave in a manner that coerces or causes harm to others.
3. One may not engage in a sexual relationship with someone without his or her consent.[1]

In such a world, virtue can impose herself only as a set of shackles.  Follow Jesus, and there’s a good chance you’ll be accused of bigotry and hate.  In the iWorld, Christianity represents a throwback to an era when women were consigned to the kitchen, and blacks to the back of the bus.  Why stand in the way of social progress?

AN INVITATION TO THE “rWORLD”

Our series aims to answer this very question.  Each week, we’ll examine how things like love, gender, and sex have been understood by the tWorld, how they’ve been distorted by the iWorld, and how they can be renewed in the rWorld.  It is in the rWorld, the world of relationship, that our hearts find their true home—starting with the most important relationship of all: a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.  None of us are perfect; all of us are broken.  It is only by being “in Christ” that we find hope and renewal.  Therefore, the gospel grants us both confidence (because we are secure in what Christ accomplished) and humility (because we know that salvation was achieved for us, not by us).  It is with both these attitudes that we approach this subject.

Why is love so important?  What is the purpose of family?  Now, more than ever, we need a robust theology of sexuality and marriage. We need a renewed understanding of human love; we need a reaffirmation of its enduring value for society.  We need a refined understanding of human relationships—one that avoids the extremes of treating sex either as a deity to be worshiped or a disease to be feared.

This series is an invitation to do just that.  And yes, even a young, single pastor has some things to share about God’s design for marriage.

[1] Dale S. Kuehne, Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking Relationships beyond an Age of Individualism., p. 71.