Emotion and doctrine are often like oil and water.
Evangelicals tend to agree that emotions and doctrines do not mix. Here ends the consensus, however, for the chasm is great and fixed that yawns between the Christians of the warm heart and the Christians of the straight mind.
The warm hearts, if they take a moment from their transports of ecstasy to consider the state of their chestless siblings in the Lord, regard them with pitying unbelief. All that concern for creeds and theology, that finickiness to get it right about the doctrine of Christ’s two natures or the interactions of the Trinity—isn’t that just a great detour by which a person only succeeds in missing the personal blessings of the gospel?
The straight minds, on the other hand, who think that faith is chiefly a matter of right beliefs about God and Jesus, are suspicious of that slushiness they depreciate as “emotional religion.” Are not religious feelings just the passing effect of youth camp leaders’ personalities, and woodsmoke in one’s nostrils, and singing “Kum Ba Ya” as the campfire dies away? Isn’t the fact that we have minds what sets us apart from the lower reaches of the creation? If the Christian life is reduced to a bunch of feelings, what reason have we for thinking it superior to any other sentimental garbage that may come trucking down the pike?
Christians are not alone in dividing the mind from the heart and opposing the two. Just as evangelicals segregate themselves into camps of the orthodox and the pietists, Calvinists and charismatics, right thinkers and deep feelers, so the secular world divides into the rationalists and the romantics. If you think too clearly, declares the prejudice, you become an emotional cripple and a cold potato; if you live too much in your feelings, says the same prejudice, your mind is bound to turn all dark and gooey.
All these divisions and dichotomies are a sad mistake, a misunderstanding of what emotions are, and consequently of their place in human and Christian life.
Losing Our Cool
It is easy to think of cases in which emotions cause us to lose our cool. Think of a man sitting in the outer office, waiting to be called in to interview for the job that will make his career. He runs over in his mind the various things the interviewer might ask. He tries to relax, but notices a fluttering sensation in his stomach and a certain dryness in the mouth. Will he be able to talk when the time comes? What if he drops something, or blushes and sweats? When the secretary finally nods him in, his body feels heavy and awkward.
And indeed, the outcome is as bad as he could possibly have imagined: He stutters, and when the words do come, they sound like silly platitudes. Sweat drops down onto his glasses, blurring his vision. He fumbles for his handkerchief to wipe the glasses and knocks an ashtray onto the floor with his elbow. The interview was a disaster; anxiety caused him to “fall apart.” Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if he had been able to go into that interview with no emotion at all?
Or: A woman’s next-door neighbor is negligent about keeping his dog at home, with the result that the dog periodically spot-fertilizes her yard. Every time her children come into the house with fertilizer on their shoes, she seethes with anger. Disregarding the word of the apostle, she lets the sun go down on it—again and again.
After awhile, she finds herself unable to view her neighbor justly. He is known for his helpfulness to his neighbors and his affection for children—and animals. And on the few occasions on which she has complained to him about the problems in her yard, he seems to have had good intentions and has made short-term efforts to keep the dog at home. But she has grown sick and tired of the little green islands and their brown predecessors. And now she cannot see any good in the man at all. When she sees him, she never thinks of him in his aspect of compassionate and gentle Christian; all she can see in him is an offensive and negligent dog owner. She has been blinded.
So it is a common and familiar occurrence that emotions get in the way of our being effective and reasonable people. This is one reason that emotions have a bad name. But there is something else at work making emotions seem “irrational” to us. We tend to associate them with the stomach, the heart, and the sweat glands. We call them “gut reactions,” and call people who traffic in them “visceral types,” and say that they “think with their glands.” Or we associate emotions with moods like elation and depression, which can be induced by drinking too much caffeine or getting too little sleep. If emotions are states of the glands, then of course they can have nothing to do with being reasonable!
The Necessity Of Emotions
The cases of the anxious interviewee and the angry lawn owner show that emotions can make us unreasonable and ineffective (though they lend no support at all to the idea that emotions are nothing but “gut reactions”). In contrast, other examples can show how emotions are necessary for being reasonable and effective.
Take, for example, the person who sees hideous injustice being done, yet feels no anger. By his lack of emotion, this person shows that he is not a just person (at least not in relation to this kind of hideous injustice). But having a sense of justice is one aspect of being a mature, fully functioning, reasonable human being. This person shows by his lack of anger that he is missing something, that he is blind to an aspect of the situation. Furthermore, his lack of anger will very likely mean that such a person will do nothing to rectify the injustice. And so the blindness due to his lack of emotion leads to a kind of moral ineffectiveness.
Or take a person who has been helped by another at great cost, yet who feels no gratitude toward her benefactor. Is she being, by her lack of emotion, reasonable and clear-headed? On the contrary, she, just like the one who failed to feel angry when he saw injustice being done, shows herself to be blind—blind to kindness and its beauty. And again, her lack of emotion will probably mean that she will fail to act reasonably and effectively. The feeling of gratitude leads us to interact with one another in ways that are very healthy and enjoyable—to return favors, to seek fellowship, to be glad in one another’s presence. But these are not typical behavior for an ungrateful person.
Emotions As A Way Of Seeing
What then about the evangelical consensus that emotions and doctrines do not mix? That is surely built on something like the assumption that emotions are “gut reactions,” while beliefs are matters of the head, the intellect. The answer is that this assumption is false. Emotions do not occur in the gut, even though there may be some typical accompaniments of some emotions that occur there. Emotions are ways of viewing things, and as such are very closely connected with our beliefs about things.
Even the distorting emotions that we have looked at do not distort our view of things in the way that a growling in the stomach or an itch might distort it—namely by distracting us from the right view of things. The overwhelming anxiety of our interviewee disables him by being itself an overpowering view of his situation. He perceives the interview situation as tremendously threatening and himself as threatened. This view of things leads to physical symptoms such as dryness of mouth, perspiring, and so forth. The physical symptoms, in turn, reinforce his view of his situation as threatening. This view keeps a person from taking an “objective” and “rational” view of his situation (prevents him, for example, from seeing that the interviewer is really very kindly and sympathetic). It does so by being itself a compelling view of the situation.
Our angry lawn lover is so angry with her neighbor that she can’t see the neighbor’s good points. Her blindness is like the case of the squirrel hunter who fails to see the beauty of the forest because he has it so intensely focused as a squirrel habitat. One view of the forest (as the hiding place of squirrels) has become so dominant that all others fade into the background. The angry lawn lover is blind to her neighbor’s good points, but her emotion of anger itself is not blind. It sees with a vengeance, quite accurately, that the neighbor is an irresponsible offender against lawns and human decency. But it causes her to lose sight of his good points.
The other two emotions I mentioned—anger at the sight of injustice and gratitude for some benefit received—are more obviously cases of “seeing,” since they seem to be a more accurate way of seeing their respective situations. Anger is a basic way of seeing injustice for what it is worth. Gratitude is essential to a right view of the gift, the giver, and one’s self as the beneficiary. So emotions sometimes make our vision less accurate, but at other times they are indispensable to “objectivity.” In every case, they are a matter of vision. Emotions do not occur in the stomach, or even in the heart—literally understood. Guts do not have views on things; people do.
One more observation: Not just any view on things is an emotion. I can see myself as offended by somebody, and still not be angry with her—if I don’t much care about the offense or the offender. And I can view myself as the recipient of a gift from someone without feeling gratitude—provided I don’t particularly care about the gift, or don’t want to receive it from this particular giver. To be an emotion, a view on things has to be grounded in an appropriate concern or way of caring.
Emotions And The Fruit Of The Spirit
Once we see that emotions are ways of viewing things, grounded in particular concerns, we can see that the Christian emotions are inseparable from the beliefs that constitute the “Christian world view.” Contrition, gratitude, compassion, and hope are among the very ways that the Christian beliefs bear fruit—indeed, the fruit of the Holy Spirit—in our lives. They are the beliefs’ “grip” on us. What is the point of affirming such things as God’s creator-ship and sovereignty, the sinfulness of the human race, and the divinity and substitutionary atonement of Christ if these affirmations do not transform our hearts by giving them that particular character that God has intended for his children? The relation between emotion and belief can be illustrated by considering two Christian emotions, contrition and peace.
Contrition is the “godly grief” (2 Cor. 7:10) of assessing your life or one of your deeds as having fallen short of the character to which God has destined us in Jesus Christ. It is to be sharply distinguished from just “feeling guilty,” in the way that a person who did not believe in the gospel might feel guilty about something she did. It is even less like feeling worthless, having low self-esteem, “having a low self-image,” being humiliated, and being ashamed of yourself. Christian teachers must be clear about the contrast between contrition and humiliation, since a lot of abuses come from a failure to observe the distinction. Some well-intentioned Christians try to make their children (and themselves) feel guilty and ashamed of themselves so that they will be good Christians; others react against the purveyors of shame, teaching a lot of silly and superficial and non-Christian things about “self-esteem” in the name of Christianity.
A Christian View Of Contrition
Let us return to the case of the lawn owner and her neighbor with the wandering dog. She becomes convicted that her attitude toward him has been unchristian. “Compared with the misfortune of being alienated from this Christian brother, and having my heart corrupted by prolonged anger, what are a few dirty shoes and bright spots in the lawn?” she says to herself. “Jesus died for that man’s insensitivity to his next-door neighbors just as he died for my pettiness and blindness; and furthermore, he died that the two of us, before God, might be reconciled, loving one another and living together as his children. What a glorious destiny God has ordained for us! Nothing short of the kingdom of heaven—and yet we live here like naughty little children, rebelling against his goodness and forsaking the happiness he wants us to enjoy. Lord have mercy.” This is the language of Christian contrition.
Contrition is a way of viewing a situation through the lenses, as it were, of Christian doctrines. Two strongly in evidence here are the Atonement and the kingdom of God. A person feeling fully Christian contrition construes himself as cleansed by the blood of Jesus and destined for the perfect fellowship of heaven. The “grief” involved in this emotion is the acknowledgment of having fallen so far short of this gift and blessed destiny.
Being founded upon the fundamentally happy vision of God’s forgiveness and expected kingdom, the grief is quite different from the plain guilt that a non-Christian might feel concerning her moral waywardness. The contrition, insofar as it is truly Christian, does not have the ultimate seriousness that guilt-consciousness has. (The humor is suggested by the slightly comic expression, “naughty little children.” There is a real seriousness and sadness here, but mitigated by its occurring as an episode in the divine comedy.) Since the person who feels fully Christian contrition construes himself so exaltedly, he can hardly be accused of having low self-esteem. But on the other hand, the basis for the Christian’s very high self-esteem is not power and achievement and “success,” or vaguely “positive” thinking; it is, instead, that he has internalized the message of God’s love.
A Christian View Of Peace
For our second example of a Christian emotion, let us look at peace. Everyone, I suppose, wants “peace of mind,” and almost nobody has it. But what most of us have in mind here—Christians as well as secular people—is something rather distant from New Testament peace. We mean freedom from the hassles of “insecurity.” We don’t like living under the threat of being vaporized during a church picnic by a nuclear device; we would prefer not to wonder whether our spouse could pay off the mortgage if we suddenly died; we don’t take kindly to wondering whether our teenagers are on drugs; and we “feel uneasy” about the economy and job situation. We would like to have peace of mind; we would like all these insecurities and unknowns to be settled and tied down, and to know that everything is going to turn out all right. And so we buy life insurance and send our kids to a Christian college and do what we can to make sure the job will still be there next year. Yet we may still remain anxious and distraught.
The peace that passes understanding passes it, in part, because it passes by all these very understandable devices and goes for something more radical. Not only may bad things happen—they probably will. God does not guarantee any penultimate security. But in the peace that passes understanding the Christian finds tranquility of spirit despite the possibility of bad things happening—and indeed, in the very midst of their happening. This peace is founded upon the presence of God in the midst of turmoil, insecurity, and attack. In fact, this peace comes out most saliently, in the Christian who has it, in just those times of upset. Everything may be riot and turmoil and attack up here, but underneath are the everlasting arms. This is one aspect of Christian peace, and the doctrines on which the emotion rests are those of God’s presence, his sovereignty, and his everlasting love.
The other aspect connects less directly with ordinary secular concerns, and speaks to our being (or having been) at enmity with God. Here peace is not just the absence of insecurity and threat, but the absence of war. Peace is reconciliation: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ … while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son …” (Rom. 5:1, 10). Just about everybody would like to be free from anxiety and enjoy the transcendent feeling of security. But here we are in the presence of something deeper and more mysterious, for this sense of peace, and the joy it includes, depends on our having a fairly vivid sense of being enemies of God. It supposes that we acknowledge having tried to hurt God, to thwart his purposes and establish ourselves in his place of authority. In Christ we have been brought back into a happy fellowship with God; from his side we have been forgiven, and from ours we have learned to bow to his purposes and join him in them. The Christian feeling of peace is the vision of God and ourselves that is shaped by these beliefs, so alien to the secular mind.
Theology And Emotions
Emotions are not to be dissociated from doctrines. Emotions are an essential way of “seeing,” and such seeing is always associated with beliefs. Our theology is there to originate and shape the Christian emotions, and our emotions are the way the Christian beliefs put their roots down into our souls. Some feelings may indeed depend on inessentials—like the captivating personality of the camp leader or the artificial hilarity of the camping fellowship. These moods will pass when one goes back to old surroundings. The mature joy and hope and peace, however, which are shaped by stable Christian beliefs, will not be so dependent on passing circumstances.
The connection between our beliefs and our emotions is essential in both directions. Unless our “theology” shapes our emotions, then our Christian talk will be nothing but hot air. Though our talk about creation and redemption be ever so biblical and orthodox and even sophisticated, there will be a deep sense in which we don’t know what we are talking about.
On the other hand, unless our gratitude and peace and love for one another are chisled into shape by a fairly definite training in the Christian beliefs, there may be indeed nothing distinctively Christian about them; they may be vague moods or raw feelings or a mere inner response to hand clapping and joviality and dim lighting and soaring organ music.
