Lutheranism, According to Science

Confirmation students and their parents are diving into Martin Luther’s Small Catechism this month, and what better place to begin than the Ten Commandments. Our discussion last week revolved around a number of questions: “Are you naturally a rule-follower or a rule-bender? How can rules be good for us? Is it possible to follow the rules all the time? Does it ever make sense to break the rules?”

Judging from the nuance in our responses, we have a complicated relationship to the rules. Luther and the 16^th-century reformers would resonate, I think. They were faced with a dilemma: If official church policy was to fleece the poor by selling them promises of salvation printed on paper, then the reformers could not abide it; otherwise the good news of God’s free grace would be lost. Under pressure to relent from his protest against indulgences, Luther famously said, “I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.”

The church’s rules were harmful, so they had to be broken.

Of course, we’re liable to break the rules even when there’s good reason to follow them. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” the Apostle Paul concedes in today’s reading from Romans. In other words, stumbling is the human condition. But another core Lutheran theme is that our faults and failures don’t repel God; God embraces us by grace, never forsaking but always forgiving and renewing us.

That’s a divine promise long foretold. In the early sixth century before Christ, at a time when the walls of Jerusalem were leveled, the temple was in ruins, and many in Israel were led away to exile in Babylon, the prophet Jeremiah declared a vision of hope:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

The sign of the first covenant– the law of the Lord etched on stone tablets[1]– had not guaranteed peace and security. So God promised a new sign, a law to be inscribed not on the exterior but the interior, on the people’s hearts.

For Christians, that promise comes to full expression in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Martin Luther calls him “a mirror of the Father’s heart,”[2] which is to say Christ reflects God’s deepest desire to repair the world God loves, and therefore he enacts a gospel that works at the deepest level of our intuition, that is, at the level of the heart.

If that’s a new rule, it’s the rule of love, namely God’s love for us. And how are we to respond except to love the Lord our God in return, and likewise to love our neighbors. Those are Jesus’ two great commandments, or rules, which we would have heard today if we’d read the Gospel assigned for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost.[3] As Luther puts it, “I will… give myself as a Christ to my neighbor, just as Christ offered himself to me.”^[4]

A grace-filled, relational theology is the Reformation’s chief legacy. But Luther and company could never have known that one day that theology would be supported by science. Bear with me while I geek out a little.

Lisa Miller is a psychologist at Columbia University studying the relationship between spirituality and the brain. In recent years, she and her colleagues have made a number of discoveries about the benefits of the spiritual life, but none more encouraging than the following:

What I find perhaps the most beautiful in this body of science is that the same neural correlates through which we experience a direct, authentic relationship to God, the higher power, whatever one’s word may be, the same neural correlates through which we experience an authentic, direct relationship to the source of life are the same neural correlates through which we feel the loving presence of this source through fellow human beings and fellow living beings.

This commonality in the neuro seat of transcendent relationship brings together a humanist who says my ultimate understanding of life is human’s relationship to human with, on the other hand, perhaps an Orthodox Jew or an evangelical Christian who has a, if you will, God-centered or divine-centered understanding of relational spirituality.

As you do unto others you do unto me, because there is one core deep seat of relational spirituality.

In other words, brain science has revealed that divine and human love are linked; it’s through the same structures and activity patterns in the brain that we map our encounter both with God and what Miller calls “the ultimate presence in one another.”[5]

Friends, the reformers cherished the love of God such that they refused to allow any church policy to constrain it, even at the risk of life and limb. You might say that conviction was written on their hearts. And it’s written on ours, too– God has created each of us with an innate capacity to experience divine love and reflect that love to others. As Lisa Miller puts it, there is a “knowing of the heart”^[6] that Lutherans might call faith active in love. And it’s through that deep knowing that we’re drawn into the ongoing work of reform, not only for the church’s sake, but also that we be part of the shared human project to “build a better world.”[7]

[1] Exodus 34.

[2] The Large Catechism, in The Book of Concord, 440.

[3] Matthew 22:37-39.

[4] “The Freedom of a Christian,” Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings, ed. John Dillenberger, 75.

[5] Hidden Brain: “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” October 5^th, 2026; see The Awakened Brain, 222.

[6] The Awakened Brain, 221.

[7] Ibid. 224.