JC Disciples
Hearts and Minds
It's something of a commonplace notion that ``We live in a culture that prizes the intellectual above the emotional.'' I feel that this is a misdiagnosis of the actual situation. In our culture intellectual effort is valued in a purely utilitarian fashion. The products of technical development are accepted, basically uncritically, insofar as they are useful in some fashion. The automobile and television are prime examples of this, as is much of what goes on in the medical field.
However, the intellectual life as a means for making sense of our existence is given almost no play. The icons and heros of our society, the role models, are almost all entertainers; there is probably not one significant living American role model who is not an entertainer (I count professional athletes as entertainers) or perhaps a politician---politicians being almost forced into roles as entertainers of sorts instead of purveyors of intellectual truth.
This was not always so. To give just one example, the Lincoln-Douglas debates were characterized by long (literally hours long, in fact), carefully reasoned arguments. One anecdote talks about how the crowd was cheering Douglas as he spoke. He raised his hands and said something to the effect that such a response was not appropriate and the purpose of the debate wasn't to stimulate emotions but to arrive at conclusions about the right thing to do.
In effect the average American takes a positivistic view of the intellectual life. For the typical American, thinking about the meaning of life is kind of like taking long lonely walks about sex. They really have nothing to do with each other. The intellect is to serve science, and science can tell us nothing about what it means to be us. The emotions are the only source of meaning. Science may have more prestige than feeling but to the average person science in its reality is inaccessible; it is merely an incantation.
Emotion, on the other hand, is cultivated and celebrated. It serves as the touchstone of truth and morality. To say that something is `academic' or `theoretical' means that you can ignore it for all practical purposes. Virtually every public attempt to get people to act these days is directed at the emotions. The problem with doing this is that it treats the hearer as an object rather than as a subject. When someone appeals to your emotions, that person really wants a thought-free response, or at least a response where thinking is marshaled in the service of emotion. If the emotion can be made strong enough, a response can be almost guaranteed, at least in some people.
I think there are several bad results to this.
- The person is caused to act in ways that may not be in his best interest. Advertising, for example, causes people to go into debt to buy the things they are convinced they need.
- The person develops the habit of responding to emotions without thinking about it. This leaves him more susceptible to manipulation and lessens his self-control.
- In a competitive situation, the bad tends to drive out the good. If, for example, one political party starts marketing its candidates instead of making the intellectual case for their position, the other party is hard-pressed to avoid doing the same thing. Perhaps one of the worst things Nixon did was to perfect the marketing approach to running for office. There's a book, I think it's called THE SELLING OF THE PRESIDENT 1968, that documents this. Admittedly there were low points before Nixon---Johnson's use of the little girl being nuked was particularly egregious, but Nixon's approach was considered and systematic.
This is why the issue of emotion in the Church is so important to me. The Church as it currently stands reflects the culture. The radical split between mind and emotion that exists in our culture shows up almost verbatim in the church. A church is often either intellectually oriented, in which case it tends to be lifeless and stifling, or it emphasizes the emotions, in which case it tends to be undiscerning and (intentionally or not) manipulative.
My own view is that the bible calls us to heal the split between the mind and the emotions. There are several places where I see this---the Great Commandment being just one; God calls us to yield ourselves wholly to him and incidentally unite all the disparate aspects of our being. Paul, in 1 Cor. 14 says, ``I will pray with the spirit and I will pray with the mind also; I will sing with the spirit and I will sing with the mind also.''
Nevertheless there is a sort of order or motion that is good here. Paul talks about being `transformed by the renewing of our minds'. The way I see it is that the life with God will touch us at every level; at the level of the heart and the mind and everywhere else. But it is by turning our minds towards God, by hearing his word and being persuaded by it, that we find ourselves responding. Our response is not only intellectual; it is at every level of our beings. But it is mediated by the intellect. In the intellect we hear the word of God; in the intellect we are led into truth and convinced of sin. We also apply the intellect to test all things, holding to the good and avoiding evil. It doesn't stop there but it begins there. If it stops there it is unfruitful; if it doesn't begin there it is false.
Note that there is no demand that everyone in the Church be intellectuals; the body, when it is functioning correctly, will raise up those who have an intellectual bent and they will put that bent at the service of the body; it will also raise up those who are emotionally more sensitive and they will put THAT sensitivity at the service of the Church. And the two will complement one another and work together and not fight. Right.
There is a real problem in the Church with the emphasis on experience. Several people have noted this. I guess I may not be saying anything original, but my criterion is simply that valid experience is a result of something else. I think that when one is seeking experience one is missing the mark. One will tend to be manipulative instead of preaching the gospel. It's the Holy Spirit working through the word of God that produces life, not our attempts at emotional stimulation. And the Holy Spirit has no necessary connection to our emotions---e.g. there is not one place in the bible where it talks about `feeling the spirit.' Again, it's not my intention to deny or denigrate emotion here, just to properly order things. I don't deny that God works in and through the emotions. But I do think that while it's proper to seek understanding of God with the mind (though not to demand that it will always occur in short order), it's not proper to seek after emotional experience. Instead, the result of seeking and finding the living God will be a response in the emotions as well as the mind and everything else.
Now someone might ask me, ``What about my support of those who rejected certain interpretations of scripture on the basis of the way they felt about it?'' Here I think I would latch on to the idea of a broader view of the intellect than only rationality. I think there is a type of intuition, based on practice in drawing rational conclusions, going beyond them to the next step, and dragging one's reason along behind, that operates in a trans-rational fashion. For example, mathematical research often works by intuitive leaps where the real time-consuming work is filling in the gaps the intuition leaves, but where the actual creative leap is made almost instantaneously---or one might perhaps say rather that it's the culmination of on the order of 20 years of study.
For the Christian I think the Holy Spirit can also inform this intuitive process. As we're told, the Spirit will lead us into all truth.
So I think that for a Christian there's a knowledge of God that's analogous to, say, a mathematician's knowledge of group theory. New stuff comes along and it either fits or doesn't; the mathematician will say, ``That can't be right,'' without knowing (at that point) why it isn't. Similarly the Christian will say, ``That doesn't sound like Christ to me.''
One must, however, be humble about this intuition (in the same way that one must be humble about one's rational calculations). One must try to fill in the blanks because that's the only way the intuition can be made public. I can't follow your leap unless you can follow it yourself. And the leap could be wrong.
A problem with such leaps is that they are compelling in their appeal. There's a kind of snap that occurs in the mind and one says, ``Yes! That's it!'' It's hard to say, ``No, that wasn't it.'' But that's where the spade-work of filling in the rational connections must come in. In an argument it's fine to say, ``That doesn't feel right to me;'' nevertheless at some point one has to say, ``That isn't right because....''
Actually this intuition plays a major role in all rational calculation. It's like playing chess. A good chess player knows what moves to look at, and where to expect opportunities. A poor chess player will waste time looking into, and making, unfruitful moves because his intuition is not trained or fails him. Similarly someone who has listened to God will know, so to speak, where God is headed, will be sensitive to God's heart. But it's all provisional. We can never be sure we're hearing him clearly at a particular point; we have to come before him constantly and renew our hearing, yielding ourselves to him again and opening up to him again. We are not the truth; our intuition is not the truth; our feelings are not the truth; our rationality is not the truth.