We all know it’s just a metaphor, right? When the New Testament talks about “the flesh” (as in Galatians 5: “the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these”) it’s talking about our sinful human nature. It’s a matter of the soul, not of literal flesh and bone, right?
Maybe that’s not completely true, if this Times article on recent discoveries in neurology is correct:
According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human.
They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music…
The insula also reads body states like hunger and craving and helps push people into reaching for the next sandwich, cigarette or line of cocaine.
What if this is the case, and it’s the neurons in our brain that are responsible for sexual immorality, fits of anger, drunkenness, and everything else on Paul’s list of big bad no-no’s? What if every moral decision we make could be traced back to physiological triggers, proving, gasp, that even things like homosexuality are caused by our biology? (I know – I should hand in my Fundamentalist Identification Card just for asking the question.)
The possibility could cause us to question the very basis of morality. After all, if God made us this way, why should we be held accountable for the things we do?
But the problem with this question is that it assumes we were born the way God intended us to be. In reality, things have drastically changed from God’s ideal since the fall of man in Genesis 3. Even physiological things. For example, part of the curse resulting from the sin of Adam and Eve was the multiplication of physical pain.
Somehow, our bodies changed when we left Eden. Isn’t it possible that those changes included a new predisposition toward sin that’s biologically hard-wired into our bodies? And isn’t that why Jesus came? To transform us spiritually and physically? To turn our bodies into living sacrifices? As Paul says it in Galatians 5, “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”
Maybe we could paraphrase that: “Those who belong to Jesus have overcome their insulas.”