China was not exactly top of mind as my wife and I sat down to read a chapter of John Ortberg’s Soul Keeping. We hardly expected to find any profound insights into the thinking of Chinese Christians in a book written by an American pastor primarily for an American church audience.
Yet there it was, right in the middle of a chapter on “Sin and the Soul:”
There is real neurological evidence for the power of spiritual reflection to make us aware of our sin. Christians actually use a different part of their brain to self-evaluate than non-Christians. In a study conducted in Beijing, researchers compared which part of the brain people used to evaluate both themselves and others.
The study, entitled “Neural Consequences of Religious Belief on Self-Referential Processing,” was published by six researchers in Peking University’s Department of Psychology in 2008. They discovered that non-religious subjects used one part of the brain to evaluate themselves but another part to evaluate others. Christians, on the other hand, used the same portion of the brain to evaluate themselves and others.
As the researchers explained:
Christianity strongly encourages its believers to surrender to God and to judge the self from God's perspective. We used functional MRI to assess whether this religious belief is associated with neural correlates of self-referential processing distinct from that of non-religious people. Non-religious and Christian participants were scanned while performing tasks of personal-trait judgments regarding the self or public persons. We found that, while self-judgment was linked to better memory of traits related to the self than to others, self-referential processing induced increased activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) for non-religious participants but in the dorsal MPFC for Christian participants. In addition, the dorsal MPFC activity was positively correlated with the rating scores of the importance of Jesus' judgment in subjective evaluation of a person's personality.[1]
According to Ortberg, the researchers hypothesized that Christian subjects used a “Jesus reference point” for self-evaluation. Rather than using their own subjective lens to look at others, this “Jesus reference point” caused them to see both themselves and others in light of Christ’s character.
The study seems to confirm from a scientific perspective the theological truth that followers of Christ can be “transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2 NIV). In Ortberg’s words, “Prayer, meditation and confession actually have the power to rewire the brain in a way that can make us less self-referential and more aware of how God sees us.”
Is the gospel making a difference in the lives of people in China? Yes, in more ways than we realize.
Image credit: 苏州市 (Suzhou) by 张越东 via Flickr.
Brent Fulton
Brent Fulton is the founder of ChinaSource. Dr. Fulton served as the first president of ChinaSource until 2019. Prior to his service with ChinaSource, he served from 1995 to 2000 as the managing director of the Institute for Chinese Studies at Wheaton College. From 1987 to 1995 he served as founding …View Full Bio
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