[Midweek Edition] Brief Review: FEEL by Matthew Elliott

Matthew –

Of course, I agree that love is the primary motivator for the Body of Christ, but I strongly disagree with your reduction of love to an emotion. Sure, love has an emotional facet, but to reduce love to emotion is, I believe, a gross misrepresentation. If we believe that Jesus is the perfect embodiment of love, let us look carefully at his life. There are certainly times when he is emotional (e.g., weeping at the death of Lazarus), but his life is not one driven by emotion. For instance, take the Garden of Gethsemane; Jesus has some emotions of apprehension (“Lord, if you be willing, take this cup from me”) but those emotions are submitted to obedience/faithfulness.

Maybe, as you say, emotion does play an essential role in religion, but I would argue that Christianity is not a religion, and to the extent that it is religious it misses the way of Jesus. Greg Boyd makes this point well in his new book THE MYTH OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.

My comments about self-deception/rationalization were directed specifically at the “Done” chapter, which I read several times through… Yes, I agree that there is value in listening/paying attention to our emotions, but there is a big epistemological question that the “Done” chapter does not address, namely how can we be certain that our emotions are connected with the objects that we believe them to be? I believe that others can help us sort out this mess to some extent, but to imagine that we can sort it out by ourselves by listening to the emotions is a gross over-simplification.

Thanks for further explaining your perspective.

Grace and Shalom,
Chris Smith
Editor
The Englewood Review of Books

Thanks Chris for your thoughtful comments. Your viewpoint is of course what the evangelical church has been teaching for a generation, and a lot could be said in response. We could, for example, go to ideas from Edwards, Aquinas, Wesley and others to show that this viewpoint is not universal among the great theologians. We could talk about how the anti-emotion bias got started in the church by those trying to mesh the Bible with Stoic and pagan philosophy. We could go to explaining what emotion is in order to dispel the notion that it is not all that important in our spiritual lives. To do all that, you will need to start by reviewing my book for pastors and scholars “Faithful Feelings.”

Let me just say a couple quick things.

1) The idea that agape, phileo and eros are three distinct kinds of love is debunked by recent linguistic studies and comes up short in the evidence from the New Testament – see “Faithful Feelings.” It simply is a philosophical construct put on the text, but not in the text itself.

2) For one good example, 1 Corinthians 13 seems to dispel the idea that love is not an emotion. If love is action or commitment and not emotion how could you give you body to be burned and yet not have love?

3)The Jesus of the Bible was very driven by his emotions, how many times are we told he healed feeling compassion? In the garden, using your example, we are told in Hebrews that it was joy that compelled him to the cross. We are not simple beings and can have different motivations all at the same time. The woman giving birth endures through the pain for the love of her child, but still hates the pain. The man going to battle is compelled by love of country, but still does not want to endure the awful brutality to come. The fact that Jesus grieved over what he was to endure while still being compelled by love is nothing against emotion, it just says he was human.

4) The problem with “Done” you point out is certainly not unique to emotion – anything we face in the intellectual world is the same. Interpretations, and false interpretations, are made for the Bible all the time. How many times have we sat in a sermon and said to our spouse “That is not what this text says.” We must guard ourselves in this in every interpretation of any fact. So this is not an argument against emotion being crucial to spirituality.

Finally, my friend, be careful that what you say is not just an excuse for not being where you need to be in your passion and desire for God. It is very easy to be lukewarm when we take emotion out of the picture – then our expectations for ourselves are greatly lowered. This is in fact, I believe, the great danger in what we teach. If agape love is not emotional, we can then live by duty and be content. Where God wants us to live passionately by the heart, loving him with all we are. Emotion leaves us no excuses to live halfway. On the other hand, if we do not need to feel it we can still be OK without a changed heart and that leaves the church, so tragically, in the lukewarm state we are in. It is no coincidence that so many of the great leaders in past revivals taught that love was the great thing we must feel toward God, that is what revives the soul – knowing that God desires new hearts, not dry duty.