Thanks for posting, Grimmo. Good thoughts.

I also like seeing a link to Shane’s blog here. It’s a great blog and worth linking to.

Great post Tony. Point 1 is very helpful

Thanks Paul. Jonathan Edwards aptly captures the necessary relationship between the emotions (affections) and preaching:

“I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as possibly I can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with.”

Thanks for that Grimmo!

Thought provoking stuff…just goes to show we need to spend more time being affected by God’s word, before we preach/teach/tell others…

Akos

P.S. I won’t be nearly so offended next time someone labels my sermon ‘pathetic’

Yes, I agree. A message of life and death delivered with a deadpan manner is quite disconcerting…

Thanks for picking up the stuff on Greek rhetoric, makes me want to read more about it. Augustine mentioned stuff about being taught rhetoric (& teaching it?), but from memory he counted as next to worthless compared to the gospel - or maybe I’m confusing that with Paul in 1 Cor 2.

I suppose the word appropriate for each of the 3 elements is the key.

Yes, I do think emotional expression can become a ‘work’: there are churches where certain emotions are manufactured and others where emotions are discouraged.  But there’s also a class issue for Skips: lower-class men are less emotional than middle-class men, while lower-class women are more emotional than middle-class women (I perceive).  Note that this will affect church life and our homogeneous units!

Excellent!
Thanks so much Lionel.
Looking forward to heaps more!
cheers Di

Interesting comments Tony, particularly point 3. I wonder how diocesan border disputes could play into this also. It seems to me that Aussies churches seem much more reluctant to engage in saturation church planting.

Interesting thoughts - I’ve interacted a bit with how this might relate to the UK on my blog here: http://awakeforchrist.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/many-mustard-seeds-better-than-one-acorn/

How ‘churched’ is Seattle vs Sydney?

What happens when we take this lesson from the pagan world (which we are part of, and which is a deep part of us) into our Christian world?

Answer: better grades at College?

Thanks, Philip, for that ‘Sydney update’. I really like that wording (along with most Anglican forms) which actually approaches the confession prayer in the light of our existing relationship with God. It puts everything in a much more useful (and, IMHO, more accurate) light than those occasions when a confession prayer is employed in isolation.

“I am the hapless lackey of right-wing Christian America, the ruthless dismantler of everything good and virtuous at Westminster Theological Seminary (both the right and the left have advocated that one), a communist apologist for Islamic terrorism, a fundamentalist, a liar, a liberal (political and theological), an inveterate street fighter, a spineless girlyman, and a symptom of the crisis in American higher education whose very existence explains why so many young people leave college ill-equipped to deal with real life. I have also been told to go to hell, threatened with dismemberment, and told my career was going to be torched in an inferno of revelations about my professional and private activities.  An interesting, if somewhat eclectic and incoherent, list of threats, high crimes and misdemeanors if ever there was one.  Up to this point, (at least as far as I am aware), nobody has yet blamed me for the worldwide economic downturn, Swine Flu, or the popularity of the Jonas Brothers; but, hey, it is surely only a matter of time before the true extent of my evil is outed on the net.”

I like him already!

Hi Izaac,

Surely “awesome” counts as an emotional response right?!

That’s a nice catch there, Paul. Looking forward to his posts…

Hi Grimmo,
For more comments you could have followed Tony’s lead from the other day and mentioned more of your ‘emotional response’ to the conference. And for further effect, if it was right to express your emotions as an evangelical. It shouldn’t be what did you learn, but how did it make you feel?

It’s just not as thought provoking to mention such bland things as trusting God (embracing risk), repentance (acknowledge cultural baggage), and asking God to grow his church (prayer).

I read in one of Carl’s blogs that he hates contemporary christian music so comprehensively, he now recommends that we only sing psalms in church. How’s that going to work with the church planting movement?

good point Dave
I have been reading Psalm 16
v.11 is particularly striking.
my question is - should I not expect fullness of joy and pleasure from God now? (realised in Christ and fully consumated in the coming Kingdom yet still real now?!).

also I find it hard to not think of the language of the heart which is both our thinking and our desires (e.g Heb 4:12);  how we interpret and explain as well as what we want and worship.

I wonder whether the call for a wholehearted evangelicalism falls into this well and is a little more helpful than emotional evangelism.

it is deeply felt and profoundly experimental because it is undeniable relational - and expectantly so….

thanks for the post Tony
I think you are right in that there are now many Australian contexts, where if we are going to be effective in mission, we not only need to thinking carefully about how we do evangelism, but also create models of church that help facilitate that.
it is surprising how we keep looking to the US for this, when our context seems more akin to Europe or the UK.
it is interesting to see that Steve Timmis has recently been appointed as the Acts 29 Europe director - maybe an indication that they see the Crowded House model as a way forward?
any thoughts?

this is so true of me, too! thanks for being so honest. i was very hesitant to start a blog for ages because i feared how it would so easily feed my pride. now that i have started one, it’s a constant effort to not check my stats daily, not be disappointed when they’re low and not be really pleased with myself when they’re high.

I’m glad this conversation is taking place - thanks for kicking it off (or at least kicking it along!) Tony.

I wonder if the discussion could be sharpened up by a bit more clarity on the various meanings that your word ‘expect’ (as in ‘you’d expect the godly Christian to feel a very wide range of things’) can have.

For example, there is the complicated mixture of emotions that the Bible in its sober realism teaches me to ‘expect’ that I will experience as a frail and sinful person in a stale and weary world.

And then there is the old-fashioned sense of ‘expect’ as something we do with the eyes of faith (as in ‘Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum’). 

The two senses are not unrelated, of course.  It is because God knows my vulnerability to a kind of chronic, low-level middle-aged grumpiness that he commands me (over and over again!) in his word to ‘rejoice in the Lord’.  And it is because God knows how easily I settle back into a complacent, self-satisfied smugness that he commands me to ‘weep with those who weep’ and so on.

We should not expect too much of the flesh.  But neither should we expect too little of the Spirit to give those things (including joy and zeal and so on) that he commands.  I suspect that quite often, in my emotional life, I am guilty of the latter problem.

My MTS Apprentice has pushed me to finalise a reading list for him.

Remember this is in the MTS training area 2 - theological thinking - to stretch beyond really basic.

I have picked 8 topic areas with the book to read (and in some cases a second option if the first has already been read).

1. Doctrine of Scripture - Packer’s Fundamentalism and the Word of God else Peter Jensen’s The Revelation of God.
2. Biblical Theology - Goldsworthy’s Gospel and Kingdom (in the “Trilogy”); else his According to Plan.
3. Doctrine of God - Broughton Knox’s The Everlasting God (in “Selected Works” until published separately later this year); else Packer’s Knowing God; else Bray’s The Doctrine of God.
4. The Atonement (including justification) - Stott’s The Cross of Christ; else Jeffrey et al’s Pierced for our Transgressions.
5. Sovereignty of God - Sproul’s Chosen by God; else Packer’s Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God
6. Historicity of Bible - Blomberg’s The Historical Reliability of Gospels.
7. Gender - Daniel Doriani’s Women and Ministry; else one of Grudem’s works.
8. (And your feedback caused me to add this one…) Doctrine of Church - Chester and Timmis’ Total Church is what I can think of at this stage, taking the only recommendation made above, although perhaps supplemented by an article or two from Knox or Robinson!

And if he tells me he has covered one of these areas, then I will try something on eschatology, possibly Peter Jensen’s At the Heart of the Universe; although I’ve just ordered Venema’s newish book The Promise of the Future, which might be too heavy?

@Michael, I recall a very similar conversation with a young man a few years ago. In my experience it is important to help the person identify what is causing that feeling.  The most common I have come across are:  Guilt over a past or present sinful activity, and feeling as though knowing the Lord is simply not making a real impact on the person. 

I wonder if there are (at least) two aspects to this whole issue.  On the one hand there can be a wrong theological emphasis on emotions, which results in elevating feelings above the truths in which we are called to believe and trust.  On the other, there is a tendency to downplay emotions as though they are not valid or shouldn’t be expressed. 

The School of Theology on this sounds really worthwhile.

@Michael: evidently I misunderstood you spectacularly! I apologise.

@Luke - I think you are misunderstanding me completely. And I don’t get what you are talking about with ‘official evangelical agenda’.

My point is exactly that the debate is going on NOW and yet the soonest we can put on the conference is in 2011,  - which is a shame in that we would like to contribute to it now. It is we at Moore who risk missing the boat.

Hi all,

I think that Michael’s point is very important. For arguing, preaching, communicating and talking to your neighbour across the back fence.

Here’s an excellent little article on the nature of argument as the Greeks taught it 2000(ish) years ago. Good argument involves 3 things: logos, ethos and pathos. I won’t give it all away, but you can read the article here.

http://www.figarospeech.com/teach-a-kid-to-argue/

@Tony: thanks for your thoughtful comment. I look forward to seeing part 2

@Michael: I think perhaps you are over-estimating the significance of Moore College in the oversight of these things. Why would it be “too late” for anything in 2011, unless you think we have to wait until then for it to be on some official evangelical agenda? Aren’t we all talking about it right now, in 2009?

I think TP’s question: “So what is the call for a more emotional Evangelicalism really asking for?” is a good one. And it is important not respond too cynically.

I think part of the answer has to do with assurance - or at least, a subjective assurance to accompany the objective assurance I can point to in the cross. I remember a pastoral interaction with a young minister’s kid who said (with tears) ‘look, I know all the right answers, and I even believe them, but my heart is cold towards God’...

What should I have said?

Thanks Tony - I guess we are all ‘feeling’ our way on this.

And yes, a School of Theology will be some thinking about feeling, but it will hopefully not be only that. I am keen to make sure that we have at least one sermon to go along with the school.

Partly I think the problem is that we forget that our feelings are one of the instruments we use to know things. ‘Knowing’ something or someone is not merely a matter of rational thought, is it?
So the division between thinking and feeling is often made artificially. We often start (as I think you have here!) with an intuition or a sense that something isn’t right, a ‘feeling’ if you will, and then seek rational (by which I mean more deductive) answers to complement our first felt reaction.

Our brains our part of our flesh, after all!

And, by the way: I’ll take Calvin over pomo thanks very much!

Thanks for the comments all.

Craig, what you’re asking for is very reasonable! It’s only what I think we would all want when we’re feeling low or spiritually dry; that is, to be encouraged and supported and gently restored by our brothers; to have the reality of our feelings acknowledged while being graciously pointed to the gospel as the remedy.

I wonder though whether a bit of closer definition would also help. That is, some of the feelings I have really don’t matter very much; they are product of my circumstances, disposition, body chemistry, particular stimuli, etc. They may not be indicative of my spiritual state at all. But other feelings may be linked to my affections, to what I love or loathe—but more that in part 2.

Michael, you’ve mentioned this idea before somewhere, and it’s intriguing—that we suspect our emotions, but fail to direct the same suspicion at our rationality. Very pomo of course, but not less insightful for being that. Or should I say no less Calvinist, because one of the differences between Catholic and Reformed anthropology is ‘total depravity’—that sin extends to all parts of our personality, including the mind.

I suppose the difficulty is that it is only by rationality (in the sense of thought and argument) that we would be able to express such an idea, assess it, and agree or disagree. And I assume that the MTC School of Theology about ‘feelings’ would also be an exercise in rational thought (in this sense), not a feel-fest.  So would it be true to say that ‘feelings’ are a different sort of thing than ‘thoughts’, and that therefore the categories of ‘truth’ and ‘suspicion’ don’t apply in the same way to each?  (Looking forward very much to 2011!)

Luke, seems like you’re making quite a similar point to Craig—not a wish for wild emotivism, but a degree of honesty or transparency in expressing what we’re feeling. I think the criteria here is love. We don’t have a license for dumping emotions on others just because we’re feeling them, especially if those emotional outbursts would be sinful, damaging or unhelpful for the other person! Our world highly values the Authentic Expression of Me as a good in itself; the Spirit-filled person values self-control for the sake of others as the good life. And there are plenty of occasions in which honestly sharing how we’re feeling is enormously helpful for other people (e.g. because they discover that they are not alone in their feelings).

But you’re dead right—when it becomes a veneer of niceness and stability as a way of protecting our reputation as ‘together’ people, we’re fooling ourselves as much as others.

TP

Well you’ll all have to come to our Moore College School of Theology in 2011 to find out some more! The working title of the conference is ‘True feelings’.

I think Craig is right. There is, in our subculture, a kind of imbalanced suspicion of emotions/affections - a suspicion not shown to our rational minds, which are just as prone to sin and distortion as our feelings. The response to this i reckon is not to plunge into emotivism or to make a rearguard defence of rationalism at all costs: it is to give a proper account of the place of feelings in the Christian life. We are hoping to do that in 2011. It may be too late!

Thanks for this Tony, and brilliant timing - I’ve just written a blog entry on a very similar topic (influenced somewhat by Tim Keller: http://audienceofone.org.uk/2009/06/true-belief/) and your article has got me thinking again. I look forward to part two, as I think the distinction between emotions and affections is not one I’ve made for simplicity’s sake, but could well be crucial.

*So what is the call for a more emotional Evangelicalism really asking for?*

Good question. For me, I think it’s a case of having emotional experience validated in some way. So being able to say, “You know, I feel really far from God at the moment” without having someone jump in and say, “It doesn’t really matter how you *feel* though - the truth is that God has brought you near through Christ” or whatever. You want someone to show some empathy, step into your world a bit rather than rattle off a glib answer.

Interesting post.

Personally, I don’t think evangelicals have a problem with *experiencing* emotions; we have a problem with expressing them openly.

Our meetings are relatively emotionless. Our conversations are guarded and often fail to express the depths of what we’re feeling.

I think this perpetuates via an expectation that we should seem to be stable, well-adjusted, “normal” Christian people. Too many times, this is just a pretense we make at the expense of sharing in each others lives as we should.

Of course I agree that the whole “victorious Christian life” emotional rubbish is exactly that. But I wonder if we’re a bunch of recluses too.

Great topic to grapple with Tony. I feel the dilemma!

Archie Poulos spoke recently on the emotions and affections at our AFES apprentice conference and he was very instructive. His Briefing article too was superb on this distinction: ‘Worldly passions, holy affections: How to cultivate a discerning mind’, The Briefing #366, March 2009. Well worth reading!

Tony, I think the call for more emotional evangelicalism is often based on a flawed understanding of how emotions, rational thinking and faith in the Lord are related.  The mistake comes when people seek to sheer emotions off rational thinking.

For example, if I confess what I believe based on the Bible’s teaching then I am using ‘head knowledge’.  But that is not enough; I should also express emotionally my love for God or how I feel about his love for me as a separate activity.  But is this right?  I don’t think so!

Surely emotional responses and facts go together.  I remember recently in church a man being overcome with emotion as prayed a congregational prayer of confession.  He did this as he confessed the fact of his sinfulness and the extraordinary mercy of God. The facts he was confessing led to his emotional response. I have known others (me included) to become emotional when teaching the truths of the Bible from time to time. 

The problem comes, though, when we are told we must express certain emotions to be authentic in our response to God, especially when I am encouraged to feel in a certain way uninformed by the wonderful truths of the Bible.  Emotion based on nothing, or a wrong understanding of God is hardly authentic!

Hey Tony,

Great to hear evangelicals talking about emotions! I love it….all power to you brother.

In Him,

Sarah Balogh

Hi Luke,

Sorry for the late reply, I have been off air for a few days. Your take is basically correct. But I think I want to push it a bit further. I want to argue that Grace and the Lordship of Jesus aren’t mutual correctives to each other, but are part of the one big true picture about who God is and who we are.

So legalism is dealt with both by understanding the gracious Lordship of Jesus and licentiousness is dealt with by understanding the gracious Lordship of Jesus.

Thanks, brothers. It’s an honour to struggle alongside you to serve our great God faithfully.

Anthony,
If true then it would be a good thing for Darlene to jump up and down as changing “Jesus” to “shepherd” takes it from being a definitely Christian song to one that any theistic religion could use.

There’s also the problem with the line “mountains bow down and the seas will roar at the sound of your name” (writing this from memory of the song - I don’t have access to the lyrics).  Whose name is it if “Jesus” is changed to “shepherd”?

I recently stumbled across the following information, albeit a little late.

American Idol recently did a benefit concert, at which all of the contestants sang ‘My Jesus, My Saviour’ in full. Except, the first run of the concert, broadcast across the US, the first line was amended to ‘My shepherd, my saviour’. The second time around, the original lyric was reinstated. Wonder if Darlene asserted her copyright?!