Feelings... nothing more than feelings...

Okay, here it is. I promised Michael a reply to his post about emotions and faith. It's a long response, and I'm not sure how much sense it will make, but here goes.

Back at the beginning of the month, Michael said:

I have always disagreed with the view that faith is not a feeling. I think that sounds good, and I know many western theologians teach that faith is only a "God initiated commitment of the will... despite how one feels." (Matthew Henry, Hank Hannigraf, etc.)

But an emotional awareness of God's presence is absolutely a part of faith. The thought that it is not a large part of faith is, in my view, completely wrong. We should not think that Paul, on the Damascus Road, simply gave mental assent to the person and teachings of Jesus without a significant emotional awareness that Christ just knocked him off his ass. Nor should we assume that David's emotions were "less than faithful" or "wrong" while he danced half naked through the streets of Jerusalem. Emotions are created by God. They are not evil or any more a tool of the devil than intellectualism is. Emotional awareness of God and an intellectual commitment of the will (without emotion) are both designed by God and useful for growing in faith.

With all our Bibles and commentaries and web resources and radio teachers and seminaries... it is so easy for us to take emotions out of the equation. For the person in other parts of the world who doesn't have all our teachers and resources... God uses emotions in a profound way - as a primary building block of faith.

Michael recognizes (and rightly so) that faith goes beyond the intellectual. Simply acknowledging a fact is not faith; otherwise, my religion could just as easily hinge on my undying belief in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or in the date of the Battle of Antietam. St. James highlights this when he points out that even the demons believe in Jesus on an intellectual level.

But where Michael slips, I think, is in making the issue solely between emotions and intellect. This is a hallmark of Protestant theology, inherited from the Reformation, which tended to render everything down to the intellectual or "spiritual" plane, in a pendulum swing against what the reformers saw as idolatrous reliance on icons and sacramentals for salvation.

Even today, Protestants often look askance at any physical manifestation of faith as works-righteousness or dead religious ritual. But we're not talking about salvation here; for the Christian struggling with an emotional wasteland, that's already been dealt with. Righteous works don't have to be done out of fear of Hell.

I'm going to flash back to my misspent youth for a moment, and quote a bawdy limerick I learned as a vulgar-minded boy:

"For the tenth time, dull Daphnis," said Chloe,
"You have told me my bosom is snowy;
You have made much fine verse on
Each part of my person,
Now do something -- there's a good boy!"

Is Chloe in any doubt about her lover's knowledge of her... er... attributes? Hardly. He's made his intellectual appreciation of her very plain. But the dimension that's missing is that of action. Should Daphnis be struck blind, or lose his power of speech, he won't cease to love Chloe, nor will she question his love for her, if his actions bear it out.

(Let's discreetly draw the curtain on the pair, shall we, and get back to more spiritual – and less lecherous – matters.)

Maybe a good place to take it up again is a consideration of the word "spiritual." Why is it, exactly, that we draw a dichotomy between the spirit and the body, but not between the spirit and the intellect, or the emotions? Why should the spirit be lumped in with the brain and the feelings, to the exclusion of the body?

Well, we see a certain amount of that in the Bible, especially in Paul. He frequently speaks of the carnal as something in conflict with the Christian's spirit. But nowhere does he suggest that the body should be dispensed with entirely, or indeed that it's evil in itself. That came later, with the Gnostics and the Albigensians. Rather, he points up the need for the Christian not to be ruled by his body; to remember that Christianity is more than just the physical.

Okay, so why am I restating the bleedin' obvious, and being really long-winded about it to boot? Because nobody ever pits the spirit against the heart. Nobody calls an emotionally-charged faith "dead." On the contrary, at least by the Evangelicals I grew up among, a church that practiced a lot of ritual was called dead, and recited prayers were derided as "pat." (Or worse, as vain repetition.) Spontaneity and fervor are seen as the best expressions of our love for God, and anything less seems kind of fakey.

But who's faking: the person who intersperses his prayers with the ubiquitous "andLordwejust" or the one who automatically descends to one knee upon entering a church? Neither is faking, necessarily. Nor is the Christian who suddenly bursts into song while driving down the road. What all of them are doing is expressing the fourth factor in faith: attitude.

I don't mean to leave emotions out of the equation entirely. What they are is something like the sensation in your hands. They can be positive, as when petting a cat, or negative, as when Kitty gets tired of being stroked and reduces your skin to tatters. Either way, they're both an indicator of our state and an enhancer of it. When we're strong in the Lord, we feel strong, which in turn makes it easier to act strong. It's a cycle, rather than a unidirectional cause-and-effect.

When David danced, he was acting out of an attitude of appreciation for God, and joy that his faith had been vindicated. When Saul converted, he was encouraging in himself an attitude of submission. When I genuflect, when Michael raises his hands in worship, we're both expressing physically something we've checked out intellectually and are now experiencing emotionally: an attitude of submission, repentance and appreciation for the Lord.

On a temporary basis, all the factors are dispensible. We can do without the physical, as many of the more stringent Protestant denominations insist on doing. We can do without the intellectual; I can't count the times some apologist's argument has caused me to wonder if I'm really just drinking Jonestown Kool-Aid. And we can do without the emotional, as I've learned during times of depression and burn-out. (That last is a really disturbing thought to some Christians; they think they've abandoned Christ if they have a bad day, and so they try to create the emotions within themselves).

But all of those things can come and go. What doesn't change is the basis for our faith: not a fact, but a Person. Paul says "I know Whom I have believed," not "what." And our faith is a combination of all those four things: body, mind, heart, and attitude. It's our response to a Person, an objectively real Person, and not just something we ourselves determine according to how we feel or what we think.

So yes, emotions count. They spring from our attitude, and they strengthen our attitude, whether it's a Godly one or a sinful one. But in the end, God won't greet us at the gate with "Well done, thou good and jubilant servant." Being faithful is a lot more than feeling happy.