School of Theology - Sesh #3 - "The Puritans, Theological Anthropology and Emotions" with Keith Condie

Puritans
Yes, says Keith, it IS a meaningful term.
Defined by a particular mode of piety - theology as scientia affectiva practica.

Why are we talking about them?
A fairly similar theological pedigree to those in this room.
Yet, lived in a very different century than ours.

This, then, provides very helpful perspective for us as we're so enmeshed within our own culture.

Also, have a very good understanding of what makes people tick, and have very sophisticated pastoral technique.  They granted a very prominent place to the emotions.  For them, unless you engage the emotional part of the human brain people were not going to do what you wanted them to do.

Secondly, because they've had a significant ongoing influence.  Ie, J. I. Packer, Banner of Truth reprinting their works, John Piper's debt to Jonathon Edwards, Tim Keller, etc...

Essentially, they were 'warm hearted, without being wacko'.  *chuckles in the room*





Part 1: Puritan theological anthropology
Worth recognising their Augustinian and medieval heritage to begin with.  Particularly they drew on Aristotelian faculty psychology + the Bible.  Combined the science of the day with Biblical truth.

But, of course, we do that too. (ie, reading 'mind' and 'heart' as if the bible means by them the same things that we mean by them.  It doesn't.)

Baxter on anthropology:
Three general faculties of the human soul:

• Mental or Rational soul - only in humans
• Sensitive soul - also in animals
• Vegetative or Igneous soul - also in plants and animals

The three distinctive faculties of the rational soul:

• vital active power - it does things.  It achieves purposes.  Firstly, it kicks the will and intellect into action.  Secondly, it does what the intellect and will tell it to do.
• intellect (understanding)
• will

The passions are located in category two, the sensitive soul.  The part shared by animals.  A lower part of the human being.  Thus, the puritans are wary of it and aware of its capacity to distort things away from what God would have.

Though Fenner disagreed, and located them in the rational part of the being.  Edwards also locates the affections in the 'vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul'.

The corruption of the soul's workings due to sin

Baxter took the task of humanity as not to behave like an animal.  Milton took the same view in Paradise Lost.   'When our passions take over, that is the loss of human freedom, according to the Puritans.'  God's work of sanctification is to allow a right government of the body.  Keep all this dangerous bodily and emotional stuff in check.

The soul's relationship to the body

The Puritans had a very literal mapping of each element to a particular area of the body.  There could be a literal 'blockage' between your head and your heart!

Also, related to the four humors: black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm.  The Puritans said that these bodily humors affect your soul.  You have to care for your body, lest these bodily humors affect your soul.

Kutz note to self: how heavily does my anthropology (the one i've simply 'inherited' and could be completely rejected in 100 years) affect my application of theology?  Good ways?  Bad ways?

Part 2: The Puritans and 'emotions'

A breadth of terminology
The Puritans would, as per Augustine, hold that there was a moral content to emotions, but mainly in terms of what they were in response to and how they were directed, again as per Augustine.

Affections central to authentic spiritual life
"The affections are the Soul's horses, that draw her as it were in a coach to the thing that she affects: a man is moved by his affections." William Fenner, A Treatise of the Affections, sig. B2.
Also, Baxter, Sibbs, Edwards.

Puritans figure that you always do what you want.  Our affections show us what we are in terms of our religious life.

Edwards: These are located in minds, not body.  Recognises that holisticly our body and mind are connected and that they affect each other, yet the proper seat of affections is in the mind.  Ie, our spirit.  The spirit is capable of affections even when not connected to the body.

Part 3: The pastoral implications
Is the distinction between passions and affections helpful?


If they are all in the mind, then do they function as helpfully in being alarm bells for us? (not sure why this means they can't be that :s )


While the Spirit is at work to re-order our emotional lives, yet our emotional broken-ness, in the context of the gospel, has to be ok at a certain level.  Not loving God enough is not a fatal error in our condition.  (Wow.  Very interesting for me personally.)

Preaching and other pastoral work
Can't tell someone just to stop sinning.  They have a love of sin.  Must win the heart to a higher love.

Emotional states and spiritual health
You have to take joy in God and love him with all your affections.
So does this lead to judging the quality of someone's spiritual life by the quality of their affections?  Does this lead to a mis-judging of someone's emotional state too?

Also, does the experience of down-times in affections leave one a slave to emotions?  (Well, Edwards would perhaps have a more nuanced view that would deal with this.)

If people simply hear 'do this, be this', then there will be problems pastorally.

Division between head and heart?
Edwards charts a helpful course between these two extremes.  Affirms the unity of our functioning as human persons.  Moves past some of the earlier Puritans.

Conclusion


In our world, feelings really matter.  Puritans don't have all the answers, but perhaps they are right in drawing a distinction between passions and affections.  Placing emotions within a moral framework.  Perhaps wrong in anthropology, in locating things in particular parts of the body, which marginalises the role of the body. (?)

They remind us that our great need to know God.  not acquaintance or notional knowledge, but to see God as he really is with the eyes of faith.

Their view of faith is deeply emotional, we ought to live as if the truth about God were really true.

Questions:
Q: What would they think of modern anti-depressants, etc ?
A: I think they would have acknowledged the place of medicine and science if it were helpful to deal with the bodily part of our functioning.

Q:
A: Edwards' final mark, however, the greatest one, was actiona dnwhether you were obeying God's will.

Q: Did I hear you endorsing the distinction between passions and affections?  Because it can go either way in a lot of parts of Scripture.  Is that distinction really a helpful one?
A: Not sure.  Because even Puritans would say that not all passions are bad.  Passions enable us to do stuff. The problem is that they want to get out of hand.  I take Andrew's point that they want to give some moral content to feeling states.  Perhaps those two words are not the way to do that.

Comment: This helps, because when I ask 'why' they don't know.  When I ask about the emotional reasoning, then things start to tumble out.

School of Theology - Sesh #2 - "What is at stake: a cultural overview of the emotions" with Andrew Cameron

How to get our bearings?

An experience of completely involuntary protection of his baby daughter when he saw a dog coming towards her out of the corner of his eye.  No thought, just emotion.  What was that?  A thought? No.  Emotion, yes.  Good?  Christian?

"We should beware of the misleading assumption that there is a single, orderly, naturla class of phenomena that is simply designated by different labels in different languages at different times.  The language of 'passion' and 'emotion' has a history in which various feelings, desires, sentimaents, moods, attitudes and more explosive responses enter and from which they exit, depending not on arbitrary philosophical stipulation but on an extensive network of social, moral, cultural and psychological factors.  R. C. Solomon.

Evans and Griffiths:

• more innate: basic emotions (Evans); autonomic bodily reflexes (Griffiths)
• somewhat innate: higher cognitive emotions (Evans); strongly expressed personal concerns (Griffiths)
• less innate: culturally specific emotions (Evans); social performances (Griffiths)

This range shows us that the word 'emotion' itself is a wrong word, as these three categories are so different as to resist being bucketed together.  Semantic range of the word is unhelpfully large.  Talking about different things and end up talking past each other. (Griffiths)



Recent History

Now, all sciences seek to study emotions in their various connections.

But, previously, there was a Cartesian view that emotions were animal spirits running through your body.

Moved to a Freudian view of a hydraulic model of emotions as a strong force pushing up against a valve, reflected in words like repression, contain, etc...  This model has some problems.

But then, James-Lange:

sdfa

Emotions arrive from their physiological reactions.  The mind responds to the body's reactions and interprets it as emotion.
Women who've had their eyebrows botoxed apparently feel less empathy, according to a study. :P

Behaviourism came next - F. Skinner "The 'emotions' are excellent examples of the fictional causes to which we commonly attribute behaviour."

'Evaluative judgements', but no less than a feeling - the cognitive view

We might resist emotions as simply cognitive, as just thoughts, yet thinking and feeling work together and each emotion is an evaluative judgement of the reality which we face.  A cognitive theory.

Something about emotions are 'thinkable'.  "I will kill that dog if it comes near my baby."  Emotions have their own logic.  Scripture seems to at some level assume this cognitive approach.

Matthew Elliott: "Rightly understood, our emotions are connected to what we focus on, what we know, what we value, and what we believe.  What we think and how we feel work together to point us to the truth".

James 4:1-x as an example of emotions as involving cognition, the higher-level emotions articulated there.

You can have a commitment to a cognitive view of emotions and still see them as feelings.



Mistaken syllogism of many preachers:
A feeling can't be commanded.
But love is commanded.
Therefore love is not a feeling.  (And I won't tell people to change their emotions or strive after certain emotions.)

So if you only give a fact, and then expect it to trickle down to emotions but don't push to help that happen, Elliott says that there's a problem there.




'Emotion', passion or affection

• a moral (and social) contextualisation of the passions and affections;

Passion - thought of as that which drives anti-social bahaviours

Affections - thought of as that which drives us toward others

Yet, we've moved toward 'amoral' emotions.  Emotions aren't bad or good, they just are.  We feel that that makes no sense.  More the younger generation, while some of the older generation probably still hold to some of the hydraulic view.

Cameron is sympathetic to the passion and affection view, but the Bible has a more nuanced view again of how these things work.  Virtues and vices are helpful categories with which to divide up our human experience.

Elliott's proposal

Much to recommend Elliott's work.  

Cameron wants to say that we can have some, indirect, affect on how we feel about things.

Not so sure about this four-fold thing.  Likes the fact that he says we are able to affect some indirect level of control.  This is his four-fold toolbox.

• focus
• know
• value
• believe

Why do I think it's shaky?  Because it looks past a deeper theological truth, that we can be helpless, and completely beyond the ability to pull ourselves out of certain emotions. (Psalm 88) (Romans 5:5)  By the Spirit a new capacity to love and to change is brought upon us.

Does Elliott's strategem fall into the problem of his own critique of the 'trickle-down' approach in that it requires a level of thinking that would be beyond many?

Augustine vs the Stoics
For Augustine, our deepest longing is related to our telos.  And our emotions are connected to what we love as a result.  It is through the work of the Spirit that we are re-aligned to our proper telos.

Whether emotion is good or bad depends on how it is directed.  It is used well when it aligns us toward our proper telos, and is harmful when it moves us away from our proper telos.

Hits the Stoics hard when they say that the emotions are all bad, even human compassion.

Emotions area  good gift of creation, but they can be demonised depending on the love or telos that they are directed towards.

So, was Andrew's feeling to the dog good?
We'd have to know something of the telos of me, the dog and the baby.  The stoic would say that you shouldn't have had the feeling, you lost your apatheia, your cool.  The evolutionary biologist would have said that it's neither here nor their, you're engineered to pass on your genetics and the reality of what you felt, just is.  No meaning.

Augustine would ask how that emotion was directed.  The wrong thing would have been to feel nothing, and to let the dog hurt the baby.

Question time:
Q: Would you distinguish between instinct (the dog incident) and emotion?
A: We've got two roads, that serve us in different ways, a low and high road.  Looking over from a distance, or diving in.

Q: How would we tweak Elliott's project?
A:

Q: Back to the two-tiered thing (instinct/emotion), are you suggesting that we can address both roads?  The higher centres and the more basic emotions too?
A: A bit hard to know how to address the more basic ones, because of their nature, happening at such an instantaneous level.  But we should talk about them, discuss them.  Give us space to debrief.

Re-Q: Do you try to stir up some of those basic emotions within preaching itself? (Eg. Get a person angry when preaching about the right anger of God, etc.)
A: Yes, a good thing.  There's been concern about doing it and whipping people up to a mob, but probably not a real danger of that in our context.

Then some more I missed, got a phone call...

School of Theology - Sesh #1 - Sermon on Phil 1 by Richard Gibson

The talk is based on Philippians 1:8

For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus.

After the EI (Emotional Intelligence) boom, should we crave emotional intelligence?  Is there something that we've missed.

Yearn - an intense desire with the implication of need.  The word Peter uses to describe a baby's craving for its mother's milk.

Phi 1:8 is an expression that, despite being secure in being loved, Richard says he doesn't hear people say to him too often.  Very expressive.

"with the viscera of Christ Jesus" - the heart, the entrails, the bowels (not as good on a birthday card).  Paul's emotions are shaped by Christ Jesus.  The phrase is instrumental, describing by what means Paul yearns for them.



Not just for the Philippians

• 1 Thessalonians 2:17-3:10 - Such great joy and feeling for those who had stuck with him through thick and thin
• 2 Corinthians 1:23-2:11 - Such is his feeling of grief over those with whom his relationship is difficult and whose faith is troubled.
• 2 Corinthians 11:28-29 - Not just to those with whom he's shared the extremes of emotion, good and bad, but he has a similar emotional burden for all the churches.
• Romans 9:1-5 - similarly, for his national brothers, Israel.

Paul expresses this publicly as a model for his hearers

Philippians 2:1-2 - Paul appeals to us to be transformed by the reality of the affections of Christ.  Should thus Philippians 2 be thought of as a hymn to Jesus' splagkna?  Humility, sure, but would Jesus 

So, do we need EI?  (many say the Sydney diocese does!)

Seems a bit like a fad.  Can't deal with things like anguish and other similar emotions.

But I know I want to be like Paul.  The affections of Christ brought to him the afflictions of Christ.  Paul was content to have death working in him, and life working in those he worked for.

Want to be more like Paul in the way he genuinely loved and longed for people, burdened to pray for them.  I want his tender heart.  To genuinely love deeply and so also genuinely serve.  

I want to be conformed to the image of His Son.  The tender-hearted mercies of the father and the compassion of the Son came up with the incarnation, not sure EI could do so.  The deep longing, in the gut, the entrails, of God spilled out in the gospel of the cross of Christ.

The garden of gethsemane shows that you can't have Christ's affections, without Christ's afflictions.

Warning: Theology ahead!

On Wednesday and Thursday I'll be heading down to the annual Moore College School of Theology. The topic this year is "True Feelings: emotions in Christian life and ministry".  Should be good.

I'll be live-blogging most sessions, I imagine, and posting an 'index' to all my posts at the end for your easy reference.

Wednesday is:

• A sermon on the affections of Christ - Richard Gibson
• What is at stake: a cultural overview of the emotions - Andrew Cameron
• The Puritans, Theological Anthropology and Emotions - Keith Condie
• Am I a man? The passions of God - Gerald Bray (really looking forward to this one)
• Whose tears? Jesus and his emotional life - Richard Gibson
• "He rejoiced in the Spirit" The Spirit's Perfecting work on the emotions - David Hohne
• Theological Anthropology and the emotions - Michael Jensen

Thursday is:

• From sad and mad to glad: The Pilgrim's Passions - Rhys Bezzant
• Together, with Feeling: corporate worship and the emotions - David Peterson
• Preaching, the Gospel and emotions - Peter Bolt
• Music, singing and the emotions - Rob Smith

Phew!  That's going to be intense.  Definitely going to need a trip to The Local Taphouse in there.

A non-frequent privilege

Being witness to people being humble and repenting is a beautiful privilege.

The problem with envy and jealousy...

... is that they take a dissatisfaction with God and the circumstances that he's placed you in and project them onto a (often innocent) third party.

They turn love to hate. (Genesis 4, 1 Sam 18:6-9)
They distract disciples from following. (John 21:18-22)

Cain's problem wasn't Abel, Saul's problem wasn't David and Peter's problem wasn't John. Their problem was with God, and simply focussed on someone else.

Nasty, nasty stuff that, by the above definition, crouches at the door just when you're most down.

Summary of the 3-part gospel cure:

1. When we're dissatisfied or in trouble, the gospel says come to God directly to lodge your complaint. Let God have it (in both senses), don't take it out on someone else.
2. The gospel teaches us that God owes us nothing, but has given us grace upon grace upon grace. He doesn't owe us, he owns us.
3. The gospel is the message of a pearl more valuable than anything you've ever known. A person you'd sell everything you own in order to know. In a heartbeat and with a smile on your face.
   
   If you know Jesus, you've got the pearl. Why be jealous of someone holding a bag of rubbish? (Philippians 3:7-8)

But Lord!

18 Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” 19 Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, “Follow me!”

20 Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. (This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and had said, “Lord, who is going to betray you?”) 21 When Peter saw him, he asked, “Lord, what about him?”

22 Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You, follow me.”