2 Intellect & Emotion
Intellect & Emotion The first polarization concerns the intellectual and the emotional. Some Christians are so coldly intellectual that one questions whether they are warmblooded mammals, let alone human beings, while others are so emotional that one wonders whether they have any gray matter at all.
Of the two extremes I feel bound to say that the greater danger is anti-intellectualism and a surrender to emotionalism. We see it in some evangelistic preaching, which consists of nothing but an appeal for decision with little or no proclamation of the gospel and little or no reasoning with people out of the Scriptures as the apostles did.
The same tendency is evident in the contemporary hunger for vivid, firsthand, emotional experiences, and in the enthronement of experience as the cri-
Bal anced Christianity terion of truth, whereas truth should always be the criterion of experience. I fear that this tendency is a semichristianized legacy of secular existentialism.
What seems to have filtered down into the public consciousness of Martin Heidegger's famous distinction between "authentic" and "unauthentic" existence is that we must break away from every convention and discipline and from every lifestyle imposed by these, which threaten our own personal authenticity. We must above all choose to be ourselves, and think and do only what seems authentic to us at the moment. In the light of this principle, I have heard Christian young people arguing in these terms: "I cannot be expected to believe a doctrine just because it is in Scripture, but only if it authenticates itself to me as being true. You cannot expect me to go to church or read the Bible or pray just because these are Christian duties, for I can do these things only if I feel like it.
And I cannot possibly love my neighbor (let alone my enemy) just because I am commanded to do so, but only if the Holy Spirit makes a love-relationship authentic and real."
Alongside the current insistence on existential experience goes a distrust and a despising of the mind.
The flight from reason is a marked feature of contemporary secular life, not least in the United States.
Intellect & Emotion
Richard Hofstadter has documented it very effectively in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. And a striking example of it may be found in Joe McGinniss's account of Richard Nixon's 1968 election campaign entitled The Selling of the President 1968. The campaign organizers were convinced that Nixon lost the election to Kennedy in 1960 because the latter had a far better television image. So they called in Marshall McLuhan to advise them on how to get Nixon to "project electronically," how to turn him from "a dry, humorless lawyer" into "a warm, animated human being." Poli tics, McLuhan assured them, is "only minimally a rational science." Elections, he insisted, are won not on issues but on images. "Get the voters to like the guy," and the campaign is virtually won.
It is, of course, a very serious situation when an educated nation is thus invited to surrender its political responsibility, to decline to debate the issues of the day or to make up its mind, and to vote instead by a gut reaction to candidates. But this kind of antiintellectualism is much more serious in the Christian church. For Scripture tells us that our rationality is part of the divine image in which God has created us.
He is a rational God who has made us rational beings and given us a rational revelation. To deny our ration ality is therefore to deny our humanity, to become
Bal anced Christianity less than human beings. Scripture forbids us to behave like horses or mules which have "no understanding" and commands us instead in our understanding to be
"adults" (Psalm 32:9; 1 Corinthians 14:20). Indeed, we are constantly told in the Bible that every aspect of the Christian life is impossible without the Christian use of our minds. (I have developed this theme of the Christian use of the mind in Your Mind Matters.)
Let me take one example, the exercise of faith.
Many imagine that faith is entirely irrational. But Scripture never sets faith and reason over against each other as incompatible. On the contrary, faith can only arise and grow within us by the use of our minds.
"Those who know your name trust in you" (Psalm 9:10); their trust springs from their knowledge of the trustworthiness of God's character. Again, "You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you" (Isaiah 26:3). Here trusting in God and staying the mind on God are synonyms, and perfect peace is the result.
In the light of this biblical emphasis on the place of the mind in the Christian life, what are we to say to the modern generation of emotional anti-intellectuals? I am afraid we have to say that they are loudly proclaiming themselves to be worldly Christians. For "worldliness" is not primarily a question (as I was
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brought up to believe) of smoking, drinking and dancing, or for that matter of makeup, movies and miniskirts, but of the spirit of the age. If we imbibe uncritically the mood of the world (in this case, existentialism) without first subjecting it to a rigorous biblical evaluation, we have already become worldly Christians.
"It is a fundamental principle with us," said John Wesley to an early critic, "that to renounce reason is to renounce religion, that religion and reason go hand in hand, and that all irrational religion is false religion."1
I feel obliged to add, however, that if antiintellectualism is dangerous, the opposite polarization is almost equally dangerous. A dry and lifeless hyperintellectualism, an exclusive preoccupation with orthodoxy, is not New Testament Christianity. There can be no doubt that the early Christians had been deeply stirred by their experience of Jesus Christ. If the apostle
Paul could write of "the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord" (Philippians 3:8), and the apostle Peter could say that Christians "are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy," (1 Peter 1:8) one can hardly accuse them of being gloomy or unfeeling.
The truth is that God has made us emotional as well as rational creatures. Not only are we warmblooded mammals, but human beings, capable of deep feelings of love, anger, compassion, sorrow and
Bal anced Christianity awe. I write about this with personal conviction because it diverges somewhat from my education at an English private school. I have no wish to bite the hand that nurtured me, for I recognize how much I owe to the educational privileges I was given. Nevertheless, I find myself critical of that distinctive feature of the private school tradition known as "the stiff upper lip."
Since the first external sign of deep inward emotion is often the trembling of the upper lip, to maintain a stiff one is to suppress one's emotions and to cultivate the virtues (masculine rather than feminine, Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin) of courage, fortitude and selfcontrol. What was simply not done was for a boy to weep in public; weeping was reserved for girls and babies. Since those prewar days, however, I have read the New Testament many times and discovered that Jesus was not ashamed to express his emotions. On two separate occasions he actually burst into tears in public, first at the graveside of a friend and then at the sight of impenitent Jerusalem. But then Jesus was not brought up in the British school system!
If it is a serious peril to deny your intellect, it is a serious peril to deny your emotions. Yet many of us are doing so. Alvin Toffler writes of some American young people who already exhibit the symptoms of what he calls "future shock." He refers to a tiny beach
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village in Crete whose forty or fifty caves are occupied by "runaway American troglodytes, young men and women who, for the most part, have given up any further effort to cope with the exploding high-speed complexities of life." A reporter visited them in 1968 and brought them the news of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Their response: silence. "No shock, no rage, no tears. Is this the new phenomenon?
Running away from America and running away from emotion? I understand uninvolvement, disenchantment, even noncommitment. But where has all the feeling gone?"2
Pamela Hansford Johnson, who reported the sadistic horrors of the "Moors" murders between 1963 and 1965, writes that killers for gain or for gratification are "almost always lacking in what the psychologists call affect, that is, any capacity for entering into the feelings of others." She goes on, "We are in danger of creating an Affectless Society, in which nobody cares for anyone but himself, or for anything but instant self-gratification. We demand sex without love, violence for kicks. We are encouraging the blunting of sensibility."3
One of the causes of our affectless society is television. For television brings into our homes, in endless succession, scenes of violence, brutality and tragedy
Bal anced Christianity which make such a powerful assault on our emotions that we cannot stand it. So we do one of two things.
Either we get up and switch it off, or we do something far worse: We continue to let the images flash across the screen while we switch off inside. We go on viewing, but somehow we remain emotionally unmoved.
Perhaps I may give an example from my own experience, not now of television, but of a performance of Handel's Messiah in the Royal Albert Hall. As the oratorio reached its climax with the Hallelujah Chorus, those majestic affirmations that "the Lord God omnipotent reigneth . . . King of kings and Lord of lords," and the final "Amen," I confess that I was deeply stirred. When the music ended the audience broke into a great roar of applause, which was a perfectly proper way of expressing their appreciation to conductor, choir, orchestra and soloists. But then, as the applause died away, all the people began reaching for hats and coats, laughing and talking and jostling one another as they made for the exits. Is it overly pious of me to say that I could not move? I had been transported into heaven, into eternity, into the presence of the great King himself. It was somehow not enough for me to clap for the musicians; I wanted to fall on my face and worship God. Am I odd to react with such profound religious emotion? Or am I right to ask what
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people are doing with their emotions that they can listen to an oratorio or attend a church service and remain apparently unmoved? I make no plea for emotionalism, for that is an artificial display, a spurious pretense. But emotions, genuine feelings legitimately aroused—these must be expressed, not suffocated.
What, then, is the true relation between the intellectual and the emotional? Muhammed Iqbal—the lawyer and poet who became president of the Muslim
League, paved the way for a separate Pakistan and worked for a new spiritual understanding between East and West—wrote in one of his poems,
In the West intellect is the source of life, In the East love is the basis of life.
Through love intellect grows acquainted with Reality, And intellect gives stability to the work of love.
Arise, and lay the foundations of a new world, By wedding intellect to love.
This is finely said. But intellect is not the prerogative of the West, nor love (or emotion) of the East.
Some nations and races may indeed have more of the one or the other, but intellect and emotion cannot be restricted to some temperaments or some cultures. For both are part of all the humanity which
Bal anced Christianity God has created. Both therefore belong to an authentic human experience.
In particular, nothing sets the heart on fire like truth. Truth is not cold and dry. On the contrary, it is warm and passionate. And whenever new vistas of God's truth open up to us, we cannot just contemplate. We are stirred to respond, whether to penitence or to anger or to love or to worship. Think of the two disciples walking to Emmaus on the first Easter afternoon while the risen Lord spoke to them. When he vanished, they said to each other, "Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?" (Luke
24:32). They had an emotional experience all right that afternoon. They described their sensation as a burning heart. And what was the cause of their spiritual heartburn? It was Christ's opening the Scriptures to them!
It should be the same today. Whenever we read the Scripture and Christ opens it up to us so that we grasp fresh truth in it, our hearts should burn within us. As F. W. Faber once said, "Deep theology is the best fuel of devotion; it readily catches fire, and once kindled it burns long."4
This true combination of intellect and emotion should be apparent in the preaching as well as in the
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understanding of God's Word. No one has expressed this better than Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who gives this striking definition of preaching:
What is preaching? Logic on fire! Eloquent reason! Are these contradictions? Of course they are not. Reason concerning this Truth ought to be mightily eloquent, as you see it in the case of the Apostle Paul and others. It is theology on fire. And a theology which does not take fire, I maintain, is a defective theology; or at least the man's understanding of it is defective.
Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire.5