This is a large topic that, as is the nature of blogs, I’m going to think out loud around the edge of. It’s common in Evangelical spaces to be told that you shouldn’t necessarily trust your emotions, instead we’re pointed to eternal truth found in the Bible. It’s common in more Charismatic spaces to be told to engage firmly with your emotions and that expressing them is important to God.
Those statements aren’t contradictory, and the desire to suggest that we should be careful of immediately trusting our emotions is wise. Just because God feels distant doesn’t tell us very much about how close he is or isn’t to us. Equally, the Proverbs are full of instructions to the young prince to master himself and exercise self-control; we must master our emotions and learn to not act from them. I would suggest that acting impulsively is not just acting quickly but acting based on our impulses; it’s possible to act from our emotional impulses long after an initial trigger.
Equally, the Psalms are full of clear demonstrations that engaging firmly with your emotions and expressing them to God is a vital part of Christian discipleship.
Some sort of reckoning between the evangelical and the charismatic impulses—and this is a very broad brushstroke description of two positions—is required to produce coherent thought; before we could attempt that we would need to reckon with a reality and a question.
The reality: we live in a cultural moment that tells us that our emotions are the best insight we have into reality. I doubt anyone would argue that sentence as a thesis statement, but we are constantly bombarded with the message that if something feels like it’s the case then we should act as though it’s the case. The world of living or speaking ‘my truth’ is not just a world with a competing set of epistemological claims to the Bible’s, it’s also a world that claims that our emotions (and our inner lives more generally) are a window into reality. This is the way of approaching the world that is wary of anything that unsettles or upsets us.
The weaker version of this argument is everywhere in our lives, even if we find the stronger version easy to scoff at. The inclination that if I’m upset then the person who upset me must have done something wrong is basically human. We all feel it. It’s impossible to reach back into the past, just as it’s impossible to know to what extent people several millennia ago experienced the psychological self like moderns do, but my basic assumption is that people must have had that intuition forever. If someone hurt my feelings, then they must be in the wrong.
Yet, if we take that original claim, that our emotions can’t be trusted, we can’t make the assumption that they accurately tell us the state of a situation. Rather, we need to find a way to consider the intent of the person that upset us, as well as the objective reality of the things they did or said. It may well be that we are conditioned due to our experiences to react to particular ‘triggers’ in a particular way. That does not mean the other person sinned against us, perhaps what they said or did presses on an old wound in our hearts and therefore our emotional reaction doesn’t have a huge amount to do with them at all. Assessing these things carefully is part of knowing ourselves, and Christian maturity leads to emotional maturity. Emotional maturity is not a lack of feelings but a careful parsing of them and taking them to God in a healthy way.
I think that’s true as far as it goes. It’s vital to gain that sort of mastery in a world that wants to immediately rush to the hurting with comfort. Sometimes we also need to take a moment to parse what’s actually going on, to challenge the way we feel—or at least to understand it—and to learn some form of resilience. Sometimes we do just need to get over it.
However, I think it might just be half the story, hence my question.
The question: if that’s the case, why do we experience emotions? The ‘evangelical’ approach that simply says not to trust our emotions can feel cold and can inadvertently set us up with an anthropology that assumes we’re the proverbial brain-on-a-stick.
If we’re whole human persons, who act and think and feel, then our emotional life must be a significant part of our humanity. The lack of appreciation of the physical in our view of the world is a problem. We see this writ large across modernity, but it’s as true of evangelicals as anyone else: life is rich and textured and full of meaning. The smell of breaking bread and the glug of a newly poured bottle of wine require our bodies to appreciate; these sensory experiences themselves help us encounter true reality which is deeper, richer, and wilder than we usually allow ourselves to imagine. Enjoying a hunk of bread and a glass of wine also require our emotions, as good gifts cultivate affections in us. We are meant to be joyful and full of gratitude. Those are feelings, I call them affections rather than emotions because we’re not talking about natural reactions to things but cultivated dispositions of the heart that take years to mature like a fine wine; using a different word, even if just a synonym, gives us a sense that perhaps we can have some mastery of what we feel as well.
There are, I think, two directions we can answer the question of ‘why do we experience emotions?’ Strangely, both are about encountering reality. Our emotions do contain truth, and we can trust them. The challenge comes in learning what exactly they are telling us and therefore what we can trust them to do.
The first direction is simply that they tell us what we’re feeling. If we get upset, we know that something has been painful within our hearts. What we don’t immediately know is what or why, the trigger may have little to do with the cause. Something is revealed to us about ourselves. We can feel the emotion as part of a route to discovering what. Sometimes they might be appropriate reactions to someone else’s folly, or even our own sinfulness writ large across our lives. Sometimes they are anything but. We need a certain level of self-knowledge to determine this. This doesn’t have to involve lots of psychology or navel-gazing, but knowing yourself in truth is required for maturity. We assume that our emotions tell us something about ourselves, and in that sense are a window to reality. We don’t necessarily do what they’re suggesting, they don’t tell that sort of truth, but they are telling us something if we can learn how to read them.
The second direction is vaguer: our emotions are important because there are true emotions mature humans feel. We aren’t mature yet, we’re maturing but true maturity comes in the resurrection. In the meantime, we can cultivate the affections that we understand to be the kingdom way. We can in this sense obtain some, albeit developing, mastery over our emotional lives.
I’ve recently read C.S. Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress, which for all its flaws is a fascinating window into his early thought. The place of desire as the key to finding the way to Jesus is a seed in this work that blossoms into his greatest work Till We Have Faces. Right desire is what we need, wrong desire can be a step on that path. We might think of James K. A. Smith’s work on desire as the solution to a truncated anthropology; we are at our heart lovers, or worshippers. What we truly desire is important. Cultivating desire of the Lord through the means he has given us is part of what maturity involves.
In essence, if our emotions give us a window into internal ‘reality,’ maturity involves cultivating affections that line up with external reality, with the new creation that’s blooming in this land of the dying.
Can we trust our emotions? Are they a window into reality? Helpfully, I’ve said yes and no. We need to consider and teach on these subjects so that we learn to be whole human persons, rather than those tossed about by every wind of sentiment. We need to learn to desire what is worth desiring.
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