Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Emotions
Posted by at 8:54 AM
"What this amounted to was that the Christian life in its best form starts to sound like it's mainly an emotional experience--the kind of spiritually orgasmic elation that everyone should want and strive for."
Above quote from Nate.
(Confession: I'm not concise. I'm working on it, so cut me some slack. ;) )
This quote sparked a lot of thinking and reflection about the role emotions play in the faith of Christians. Sometimes, from my personal life experience and observation of others living out their faith, when a believer is feeling "down and out" the recourse is to, for example, listen to some uplifting music. (This could be your run of the mill CCM stuff or something more beautiful and classical.) The point is that whatever music you might listen to at that time is meant to lift your down and out feelings, relieve them and replace them with a better sense of joy or happiness or peace or contentment. Why? Because it just sucks to feel depressed.[note] But isn't this - the music or whatever vehicle you and I may use to pull ourselves out of our dark emotions - just a crutch? And if so, is it an unhealthy crutch? Or does it have its place? I'm not one to say we should dwell in our misery, but sometimes the misery is there for a reason... a character shaping, God-teaching, refining moment. Just think of Job or David or Paul or Peter. It seems that God really does teach us a lot in the "valleys" of life. Is there a better approach to our negative emotions than avoidance or trying to rid ourselves of them immediately?
I see this also as a rampant pattern - and at times, a problem - in present day Christendom, and I must say, specifically in Protestant circles. The "this" is the seeking of or reliance upon or glorying in an emotional high, which Nate also brought up in the quote above. So here is a second question. What is the role of emotions in Christianity and faith?
I believe that emotions are part of our makeup, and as such, are from God, given by God. Thus, I believe emotions can be a very good thing, and we don't need to Stoicize ourselves and isolate ourselves from our emotions. I also know, however, that we are fallen, and as such, are hearts are deceitful above all things, and that sometimes our emotions can lead us into serious medical and life threatening conditions - such as clinical depression. So what is the proper role of emotions, how are they redeemed, or how do they intersect with our faith in a meaningful way and not one which merely propogates a shallow Christian life reliant on emotions and emotional experiences? (Feel free to also comment if you have witnessed other problems that a reliance on emotional experiences may cause; I'm not making an exhaustive list or case necessarily for why this is a problem, though that is my position.)
here's another thought, I guess. as far as "the misery being there for a reason goes," something else occurs to me. I mean, beyond just the refining of character and the learning-things-from-the-experience, it occurs to me that the misery might be there just because there's something that needs to be done in order to glorify God. I'm thinking of Jesus Christ here, "the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God" (Hebrews 12:2). After all, Jesus was without sin, and being God in the flesh, He was also omniscient*. He had no deficiency of character or knowledge that his sufferings could have been intended to correct. He endured his sufferings simply because there was a human race to be loved and redeemed! Now, we're a far cry from Jesus, and often our suffering is on account of sins that we need to overcome by God's grace. But sometimes, you've just gotta despise the shame in order to get through to the joy.
* I know there are some who consider part of Jesus' "emptying of Himself" (Philippians 2:5-9) to encompass the laying aside of His omniscience. (N.T. Wright is one such guy.) Nonetheless, I think my point still stands--even if any of Jesus' sufferings were intended to "teach Him about the human experience" or somesuch, His agony on the cross had as its primary goal the salvation of mankind and the payment of their sins.
1) You can go by your charts (You know they're accurate, but maybe you're reading them wrong...) and ignore what you see.
2) You can try to get rid of the clouds somehow and maybe get to see the mountain.
3) You can build a little fake mountain and put it up on the edge of the ship so that everything looks right.
This has been a parable for:
His Word tells you that you are His beloved child, and that you are worthy and honored and blessed. But there are wierd circumstances that make you feel totally different from that sometimes - Worthless, shamed, and cursed.
1) You can ignore the feelings and go by what you know is true.
2) You can try to get rid of the things that make you feel that way.
3) You can pretend to feel good or distract yourself from how you feel.
I would say:
1) = Stoicism.
2) = Antidepressants, music, feasting with friends, good clean living.
3) = Drinking, drugs, sexual promiscuity.
Sometimes it's super hard to tell the difference between #2 and #3 - That's why #1 is safest and best.
In very fact, stoicism is what we should all be striving for. What Epictetus presents is only one form of stoicism, just as the Plato presented at St. John's is only one interpreted reading of Plato.
Plato and stoicism played integral roles in the early church. If one looks into this connection, which I do not have time to explain, one will find that the way the early christians read Paul, John and the Scriptures was not in light of some pre-determined christian hermeneutic that we so often presume to have today, but in light of philosophical thought. Their methods highly differed from our methods. Neither is better, yet we can learn more from theirs than ours for two reasons:
1) they (sorry not to mention their names yet: the Church Fathers, Irenaeus, Origen, Maximus, John Chrysostom, Athanasius) established the thought of the christian church which all christians live within.
2)those "spiritual" methods which we frown upon today, i.e. stoicism, must be stressed a great degree more than those which we so often rely upon, i.e. emotions. We must be seeking an "iconoclastic" center in our being which transforms and transcends thought and instinct, and utilizes those parts of us which we ignore. Therefore the Church fathers can be unbelievably valuable in a search for a type of thought which at least tries to avoid the problem that Kristi is pointing out.
Sorry about the rambling nature of this comment. It was written very late at night.