Hi folks! Thoughts on the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie and the CU houseparty will hopefully follow soon, but I just thought I’d share this…
Over on the TrueU.org discussion boards, I joined in a discussion entitled “Emotion vs Devotion”, and how many Christians have stigmatised “religion” and “works” in favour of “experiencing God”. Here’s my response…
The problem is that people go to extremes. No, to be more accurate, the problem is that people aren’t extreme enough – they only go to one extreme at a time. Following Jesus encompasses our entire being – intellect, will and emotions. You can divide up the Christian life into three elements that roughly correspond – knowledge, action and experience. All are vital to the Christian life.
Unfortunately, people tend to focus on one at the expense of the others. Knowledge alone without action or lived experience of the reality of God in your life is dead. But high-powered emotional experiences are also of little value to the Christian life if not rooted in the truths of the Bible, and if they don’t lead to practical obedience to God’s will. Equally, if we go out and try and do all sorts of good actions – social work, caring for the poor and so on – if we aren’t doing those out of a love for God, aren’t basing our actions on his word and aren’t proclaiming the truths of the Gospel, then our Christian life is again empty. The genuine Christian life needs all three elements.
The modernist objection to Christianity was in the area of the intellect – “where’s the evidence? where are the arguments?”, and any appeal to action or experience and emotion was dismissed as anti-intellectual. With postmodernism, you get the opposite – people want to see the lived reality of the Christian life, and are inclined to dismiss any attempts to justify Christianity on a rational basis as oppressive power-politics.
We need to fight the battle in that place where the enemy is attacking us. If people’s rejection of Christianity is in the area of the intellect, then we need to engage with them in that area and show the reasonable arguments for our faith. If people’s rejection of Christianity is in the area of experience and emotion, then we need to engage them in that area by showing them the lived reality of life lived following God in a community of believers.
However, we cannot ignore the other areas. Many Christians tried to jettison anything in their faith that wasn’t strictly rational, and so you ended up with a rejection of the miracles of the Bible. Many Christians dismissed of the role of emotions in the Christian life. Both of these were a big mistake.
Many Christians now are beginning to wake up to the need to swing round and show people the lived reality of the Christian faith through personal experience and emotion. That’s the area where the battle is being fought the hardest, and it’s right that we are making sure we are living out genuine Christian community, living the Christian life in a real way that people can see is genuine. We should have still been doing that all along, of course, but it’s right to focus our energies on putting that right. But the danger we must not fall in to, but which many Christians are falling into, is then neglecting the rational side of things. Even if people find it unpalatable, people still need to know the rational side of Christianity, need to know the truth of the faith, just as people still needed to know the emotional and practical side of Christianity when they were demanding just the rational arguments. The danger that emergent Christianity and the so-called emerging church faces is that it is losing its grounding in the firm foundation of the truths of the Gospel.
The challenge is to live whole-heartedly for God – extremists who are extreme in our love for God not just in our minds and and not just in our emotions, but with our entire being – intellect, emotions and will. Our witness also needs to be in all three areas – speaking the truth, acting in obedience, and demonstrating the lived experience of a life of love, peace and joy in service to God.