Christianity and Emotions (Part 3)

This is the third of a series of articles dealing with the relation between Christianity and emotions. In the first article, I explained that emotions are a means of perception about reality. They allow us to understand something about reality that we could not understand without them. In the second, we looked at the relation of morality and emotions. I pointed out that because emotions are a perception of reality, they cannot have a moral quality. Emotions are no more moral or immoral than physical sensations. Rather, morality comes in at the point of the decision following the emotion. So fear is not a sin or a virtue. Fear is an opportunity, either for the virtue of courage or the sin of cowardice.

However, I do not think the fully describes the relationship between emotions and morality. This article is going to attempt to explain this relationship more fully and examine what exactly our responsibility for emotions is.

Earlier, in discussing the relationship between morality and emotions, I said there were some who thought that having or not having certain emotions could be a sin. I already dealt with that in so far as it involves treating certain emotions as intrinsically right or wrong. But there are some who would agree that there are no good or bad emotions, but would still say that having certain emotions at certain times is a sin. They would say that it is sinful, say, to feel anger at a personal affront or to not feel joy while contemplating God. They would say it is immoral to have an emotional state which is not the state which we “ought” to feel in those circumstances.

The problem with that should be obvious by now. We do not directly control our emotions nor can we always know what our emotions are. As Wesleyan-Arminians, we do not believe that God condemns a man for things which he cannot control; for things that are infirmities rather than sins. And having improper emotions is an infirmity--it is an uncontrollable fact which comes from living in a fallen world. Because our emotions are tied so closely to our bodies, so long as we have imperfect bodies, we will have imperfect emotions. To make the presence or absence of emotions a sin would be to throw us back into Calvinism and say that we can never live a truly righteous life until we have a glorified body.

But that does not mean we have no responsibility in relation to our emotions. We should not picture emotions arising unbidden and unconnected with our moral life, like bubbles bursting from a boiling pot in some forgotten corner of our soul. The book of Proverbs says: “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.” (Proverbs 16:32) To take control of our emotions is better, more admirable (and by the same token, more difficult) than winning a battle or storming a stronghold. The work of a soldier in the outer world is as nothing compared to the work of the soldier of the soul.

We have a duty to rule our own spirit, to conquer and hold captive our emotions and passions. The reason for this is obvious--as I said already, our emotions cannot be our guide. The man who ran away every time he felt fear, who fought every time he felt anger, and who gave up every time he felt despair would be, both in the spiritual and the secular sense, a fool--a moron as well as a malefactor.

This idea of ruling our own spirits has two ideas--first, of having the proper emotions at the proper time. Since our emotions are a response to reality, we should endeavor to make sure they do in fact correspond to reality. Second, it means to be able to choose our actions and attitudes without being driven by our emotions--it means being able to feel fear without being a coward; to feel anger without seeking revenge; to feel disappointment without throwing in the towel. It means following what is right (as we understand it) without giving way to our emotions.

The reason why such a course is advisable is obvious. But how to do it is less so. We cannot simply will ourselves to have or not have certain emotions. That is why, while it is probably a coincidence, I think it is appropriate that Proverbs uses the analogy of a soldier. One does not become a good soldier and, especially, one does not win a battle simply by willing it. Setting one's will is important, of course, but a soldier must also practice self-discipline and train himself in his skill if he wishes to succeed. It does not happen overnight. We cannot usually directly control our emotions, but our actions and choices do help determine what they are. To feel a flash of anger when someone hurts you may be involuntary and therefore innocent. But to feed that anger, to go back continually and fondle the feeling of anger, to imagine and plan revenge is not innocent. To feed your mind with songs and pictures which glorify personal anger is not innocent. That course of life will lead you to a point where you have become an angry person and therefore the anger you feel, while still an emotion and therefore technically outside the moral universe, is still your personal responsibility. Drunkenness is a physical state but it is also a sin because it is a result of a person's choices.

That's why we need to remember the distinction I made in a previous article about the two forms of courage. It is a noble thing for a man, fully under the power of fear, trembling in every nerve, to face his fear and for some higher cause disobey the dictates of fear. But it is a more useful thing if he can learn to conquer and discipline his fear so that he can face danger without shaking and pain without flinching. The first kind of courage is merely an act of the will, but the second kind is a discipline that must be acquired over time.

And how do we acquire such discipline? I am not personally in the position to describe the process in detail, but I think I can say something in a general sense. We train and discipline our emotions in the same way we train and discipline anything else--by practicing. My choir teacher in high school once said that practice does not make perfect, but practice DOES make progress.

Whenever we face danger, whenever we face fear and chose to act in a fearless manner, we are building the habit of courage. Whenever we face a situation in which we ought to be happy and behave as if we were happy, we are building the habit of joy. A man who continually does a brave action despite feeling scared may find in the end that he is no longer scared. The man who acts in pity for his neighbor without the feeling of pity may wake someday to find that he has become compassionate. The raw, unordered soil of our emotions can be turned to definite channels if dug out by the actions of the will.

But it is not merely a matter of the volition. In this matter, the imagination or the poetical side of man is very important. That is one of the reasons why fiction and poetry are essential to the human race. Fiction gives us a safe training ground for our emotions, it allows us to feel things without causing too much trouble. It bears exactly the same relation to our serious emotional battles that a group of kids playing Pig in the backyard bears to the NBA. In the same vein, there is a reason why nearly every human society (up to the present) has had war songs and patriotic songs--they exist to inspire and build-up courage.

But it doesn't end with immaterial things. Take birthday cakes, for instance. Why do people eat birthday cakes? What is the meaning and purpose behind this practice of treating a purely arbitrary date with extraneous and irrelevant festivities? It is to build the habit of feeling a birthday as an occasion of joy, as a milestone on the path of life, as a stepping stone to the goal of maturity. (The tradition was started by our ancestors who believed that life, in itself, was good. How long it survives in our modern nihilistic culture remains an open question.) The same can be said (in part) for the ceremony and ritual which surround weddings, funerals, and other holidays. These are all ways of enforcing the emotional reaction to the reality involved in these situations.

And this sort of thing occurs in religion as well. A man in a church service on a given morning may not feel especially joyful. That does not mean he is a sinner and is cut off from God; it is often simply a natural result of the process of life. But if, as he comes into church, he puts himself into singing a song such as “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee” or “To God Be the Glory” he may come through the music and poetry to remember who God is and what He has done and through that begin to rejoice. The same follows through for religious songs and ceremony which deal with different emotions. For instance, though I am not certain of this, I think this is why God ordained fasting as a means of grace. It is not because there is anything meritorious about going without food. But a refusal to eat is often a result of deep concern or grief. So if we know there is a matter over which we should be concerned or grieved, we can act as if we felt that concern (even if we don't) and so by doing we will come to feel it.

We train and regulate our emotions by the choices we make, by the influences we surround ourselves. It is like an actor rehearsing a part, going over and over it before the time comes when he actually has to perform it before an audience. Now, we should note, that this procedure is much the same regardless of whether we are training the right emotions or the wrong ones. Bad habits and good habits are formed in essentially the same way. All this can help build certain emotions, but it cannot tell us what emotions we should be building. For that, we must look to tradition, to reason, and to revelation.

The second thing to note about all this is that it is a human process--or at least, it is the human side of a process. But if we are Christians and we are striving, by God's grace, to train our emotions so that we can be the people God wants us to be, then it is not merely a human process. It is an act of grace. But human action and grace are not mutually exclusive unless we make them. It is specifically at that moment when we are working out our own salvation with fear and trembling that God is working in us both to will and to do because of His good pleasure. Of course, this is not the only way God works. God can give a person an emotion to meet a specific need without any preparation. But that doesn't change my point. God sometimes gave the apostles the power to heal sickness, but that doesn't discredit the study of medicine.

I realize there are some people who would call this dishonest--who would say it is dishonest for a person who is not brave to act as if they were; for a person who is sad to act as if they were happy. If our emotions were merely subjective facts about our own psychology, then it would be dishonest to misrepresent them. But emotions are more than that. They are a response to reality. We cannot directly control or even always know how we feel at any given time. But we can choose how we act and so align our actions and attitudes with the emotions which (though we may not actually feel them) would be the appropriate emotions to feel at the moment.

However, while it is not necessarily dishonest, I believe there is a danger in all this. It can turn into what I would call accidental hypocrisy. This is not the hypocrisy of a man who knowingly says one thing and does something else. For a man to belt out the national anthem with his hand over his heart while he knows that he has already made a deal with the enemy to betray his nation is intentional hypocrisy. But there are people who quite honestly believe that they are brave and patriotic and would be willing to die for the sake of their country SIMPLY BECAUSE they feel that way while singing the national anthem. This is accidental hypocrisy; it is thinking that we are a certain way simply because we feel a certain way.

That is one of the primary dangers in regards to religious emotion. It is easy to get caught up in the emotion of a church service and think that we are saints, fully dedicated to God and His work, when really it is only an emotion and the as soon as temptation comes up, we will give right in. The issue here is when we take our own emotions as reality rather than as a means of perception about reality. And conversely, a man who is sad and discouraged may come to think that this means he is lost; that his own emotions prove God's displeasure. That is the danger; that we will believe that we are what we feel, that we will take our feelings as the ultimate reality. And when we do that in regards to religion, we make our emotions an idol.

I do not mean that anybody explicitly worships their own emotions, any more than any covetous man burns incense to his bankbook. But the covetous man is an idolater (Ephesians 5:5) because he treats money as more important than God--and some emotionalists are idolaters because they treat their own emotions as more important than God. Many people speak of the danger of an overly intellectual knowledge of Christianity; the danger being that we will come to know God intellectually without having a personal knowledge of Him. C. S. Lewis described the nadir of this course as being those who care nothing about God except what they can say about Him. This is a real danger. What people mention less frequently is that there is an equal danger on the other side--that we will replace a personal knowledge of God with an emotional knowledge. Because our emotions, just like our intellect, are a means of knowledge. The facts about God in a book of theology are not God. And neither are the feelings in the heart of a Christian. A telescope is not the sky. Our intellect and our emotions are means of perceiving reality but they are not the reality itself. Peter Kreeft, drawing from Lewis, makes a distinction between looking at something and looking along it. Our emotions should be looked along--used as a pointer to turn our eyes to God--not looked at as if they were an end in themselves. When we look at them they become an idol. (Jesus Shock, 122-123)

And this danger, the danger of coming to worship our own emotion, is a serious matter. It turns the end into narcissism, into the worship of ourselves. So some people (especially on social media) treat their own emotions and expressions of them as something solemn and sacred. The idea that it might be necessary to change how they feel or not to express their feeling strikes them as sacrilege. These emotions may even be “right” in the sense of being a proper response to reality but they are given a value beyond their worth. In Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat, the town bully Andy Foger deliberately splashes mud on Tom, and Tom is described as being filled with “righteous anger.” To feel anger when someone is mean to us is a natural human impulse and is not, in itself, wrong, any more than feeling pain is wrong. But to think that because we have a particular emotion, even a justifiable one, that it is “righteous”--that our own individual experiences take on a transcendent character, that they are, of themselves, of ultimate value--is to make our feelings an idol. That is why James warns us that “the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” (James 1:20) Wrath is sometimes a proper and even a necessary emotion to feel (see Ephesians 4:26), but in so far as it is only a human thing, it is limited and cannot accomplish the will of God.

If we look at God, we can place our emotions in their proper place. If we look at our emotions, we will never get God to be in His proper place.