Josh Moody serves as senior pastor of College Church in Wheaton, IL. His latest book Burning Hearts: Preaching to the Affections looks at the value and importance that affections have in our walk with Christ and how to preach in a way that stirs those affections.
1) Alot of conservative expositors like yourself might get nervous at the idea of appealing to the emotions. Why is this?
“Conservative” is a word with a wide semantic range. I think of myself as a biblical expositor. That is, I am trying to explain, articulate, apply, deliver, and proclaim the gospel as revealed in the Bible, and the particular aspect of that gospel as it is revealed by the Holy Spirit in the particular passage in front of me. When that happens sometimes we conserve and sometimes we repent.
I think there are many explanations we could imagine—as multiple as the personalities and backgrounds of people who teach the Bible from Africa to India to America to Britain—but the solution is to give careful attention to the meaning of the text in front of us. Clearly the Psalms, for instance, are intended not only to teach us something about God but also to bring our whole person (thinking, feeling, and willing) into line with God.
At this point it is worth underlining the definition of “affections” that we offer in the book: affections are not the same as emotions. Affections are the thinking-feeling-willing unit, a person’s “heart” and the heart in biblical language is not the same as sentimentality, but includes the whole spectrum of what we call thoughts-feelings-will. If by “appealing to emotions” we mean “manipulating emotions to get the person to do what we want him to do” then I am thoroughly, determinedly, vigorously opposed to it.
Are we therefore not to engage our emotions at all? If that were the goal much of the Bible would have to remain untaught. The solution is a biblical understanding of the “heart”, and preaching that does what Jesus did when he taught his disciples on the road to Emmaus. He “opened the Scriptures” to them and they said afterwards that their “hearts burned within them.”
The goal of this book is to help us see how to do that “burning hearts” a little better.
2) Is this discomfort a reaction to a kind of emotionalism we sometimes see in evangelicalism?
Evangelicalism is such a broad movement I don’t know how to answer the question. Some branches of evangelicalism are sufficiently far aware from emotionalism that you might have to enter what would seem like a different universe to discover anyone with tears in their eyes. Other branches of evangelicalism are touchy-feely in extreme. Balance is the key, and that is what we are trying to encourage.
Affections are the thinking-feeling-willing unit, a person’s “heart”
3) You say that we live in an "age of affections." So is preaching to the heart simply faithful cultural exegesis?
No, “preaching to the affections” is preaching like Jesus, Paul, our great evangelical forebears of Edwards, Whitefield, and Spurgeon.
That said there is little doubt we live less in an “Age of Reason” (which was what the eighteenth century was called) and more in an “age of affections” (with our contemporary tendency to emphasize the visual and emotive). Given that cultural reality, there is a strategic, as well as a textual, rationale for doing what Jesus, Paul, Edwards, Whitefield, Spurgeon, not to mention Chrysostom, did, and doing it in our own day.
4) How does a preacher hold together the rational, thinking part of theology and the part that stirs the affections?
Imagine two people who see a sunset over the Grand Canyon. One describes all the various causes of it—the rotation of the earth, the way that light is refracted through the atmosphere, the spectrum of light itself—and then wanders off and turns his back on the sunset without being changed. Another person describes the same factual elements too. But he also weeps with joy or smiles with delight or quietly squeezes the hand of his wife next to him as they look at the sunset together. Which one has truly understood the sunset? The one who merely understands the factual elements of it, or the one who sees the beauty of it too?
Or, imagine the last day when we stand before the judgment throne of Christ. What is the difference in understanding between those who are saved and those who are not saved on that day? The unsaved will see God in all his power and might. The difference is that they will not love it. While the saved will delight and exult him.
When we engage with God with all our being—thinking, feeling, and willing—we truly understand. To have our “affections” engaged is actually to understand better than merely to grasp the facts. It is to “taste and see that the Lord is good.” It is the difference between knowing about honey and eating it.
To have our “affections” engaged is actually to understand better than merely to grasp the facts.
5) If you could give a pastor or church leader one piece of advice about preaching, what would that be?
Well, if I had to give any pastor or church leader only one piece of advice about preaching, it would be: Preach the Bible. That is, get out of the way. Let it speak. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t try to add some snarky snazzy spin. There is power in the Word. Speak it. Explain it.
Luther on this is excellent: “While I and Melanchthon supped our beer, the Word was at work.”
Preach the Word. No more. No less.
Daniel Darling is vice-president of communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Activist Faith.
