Biblical Anthropology– What is Man (Made Of) – Emotions

• Emotions – Intro and General Impressions
  • Discussion Questions
    • Are people more or less emotive today than yesteryear?
    • In which way are emotions counter to faith?
    • In which way are emotions helpful to faith?
  • Quotations
    • “Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life…”  – Jeffrey Eugenides
    • “Anger … it’s a paralyzing emotion … you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don’t think it’s any of that — it’s helpless … it’s absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers … and anger doesn’t provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever.” – Toni Morrison
    • “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” – Jonathan Swift
    • “Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.” 
      ― Charles Darwin
    • “Choices will continually be necessary and — let us not forget — possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them.” 
      ― Elisabeth Elliot
    • On the right balance of reason and appeals to emotion in sermon writing:  “The warm emotions are kept from exhaling, and becoming vapory and obscure, by the systematizing tendency of the logical faculty, and the hard, dry forms of logic are softened, and enlivened, by the vernal breath of the emotions.”  Shedd.
  • Definition – An affective state [it comes on you and changes you] of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate, or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive and volitional states of consciousness.  Random House Webster’s Dictionary . 
  • Examples
    • Anger, jealousy, happiness, 
    • Covetousness, bitterness, self-pity, love, fear, desire, contempt, shame, hope, despair, surprise
    • John Koenig – “A Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows”
      • Greek – longing for a disaster
      • Chinese – longing to feel again as you did as a kid
      • German – the dread of getting what you want
      • Sonder – The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it.
  • Emotions are difficult to talk about
    • Deep – Proverbs 20:27 The spirit of man is the lamp of the LORD, searching all his innermost parts. 
    • Personal – Proverbs 14:10 – The heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares its joy.
    • Misleading – Proverbs 14:13 Even in laughter the heart may ache, and the end of joy may be grief. 
    • Interwoven – with physiology, personality, internal and external circumstances, weather, habit, memory, the supernatural 
    • Rapidly successive – Psalm 42-43
    • Clint Eastwood

• Image of God and Emotions
  • God not frigid or boring
    • Prophets
      • Exodus 34: 6,7
      • 2 Samuel 12:1-6
      • Psalm 7:11
      • Psalm 103:13
      • Isaiah 62:5
      • Isaiah 63:9
      • G. Campbell Morgan – in Jehovah’s word through Jeremiah we hear “the challenge of wounded love.” – Jer 2:5, 31-32, 3:14, 19,20
      • Jeremiah 14:17, 18
      • Jer 15:6
      • Ezekiel 6:9
      • Zeph 3:17
      • However, there’s a. big asterisk to all the talk about God’s emotions.  He doesn’t experience them like we do.  The talk of God’s emotions in the Scripture are accommodations to how we experience them.  “Thus, as to God’s love and all other emotions—jealously, hate, etc., we then must say that they are an analogy of our emotion….God indeed has emotion, but his emotion is far beyond and even not the same as our emotion. Divine impassibility presents, first of all, the transcendence of God’s emotion…– Amos Oei
    • Gospels
      • Matthew 14:14
      • Matthew 26:38
      • Mark 3:5
      • Mark 9:19
      • John 11
      • Others?
      • An austere, distant, unfeeling Being is Plato’s God, not ours.  A distant impersonal universal rational principle determining all that is and occurs belongs to the Stoics, not to the Scriptures.  How different is the minutely attentive, passionately desiring God we see in the person of the Savior.  His sensitive encounters with the Samaritan woman at the well, with Nicodemus at night, with the distraught sisters at Bethany, with a guilt-stricken, dejected Peter at the lake, betoken a kindly, affectionate regard for individual humanity, not just for man in the abstract or in the mass.  Let it never be thought that the Son of God died for just a species or part of a species.  He ‘loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus’ (John 11:5).  He surnamed at least three of His disciples (Mark 3:17-18).  He took note of many that appear with names in Scripture because of His notice and of many others, such as the poor widow with her mite, who do not.  The Master knew not only the stars by name. – Horton
  • N.T. Apostles reflect this wealth of emotion
    • Acts 20:36-38; Acts 28:15
    • Romans 9:1,2
    • 1 Cor 2:3
    • 2 Corinthians 6:11-13
    • Philippians 3:27
    • Phil 4:1
    • 1 Thessalonians 2:17-19
    • Philem 12 – “guts”; put this in the vernacular
    • James 5:13
    • 2 Peter 1:5-7 – “brotherly kindness,” “charity”
  • See emphasis of poetry (40% of O.T.) and music 
  • Summary – For man is not adequately conceived in Greek fashion as a reasoning animal or in Roman fashion as coldly locked into his destiny by universal reason and will.  He is a being that loves – in ways that no other animal can.  His deepest desire is to be loved and valued worthily – a desire able to be fulfilled when he freely responds to the same desire in his Creator and Redeemer.  It is not just his reasoning apparatus that dignifies him and makes him desired by God and able to return the love of God.  It is also, and especially, the feeling, desiring part -that which in the smallest child can respond to God and be offered to God as a gift.  This above all He would have and shape into a reflection of Himself… – Horton
  • Such is man’s nature, that he is very inactive, any otherwise than he is influenced by either love or hatred, desire, hope, fear or some other affection.  These affections we see to be the moving springs in all the affairs of life, which engage men in all their pursuits; and especially in all affairs wherein they are earnestly engaged, and which they pursue with vigour…Take away all love and hatred, all hope and fear, all anger, zeal, and affectionate desire, and the world would be, in a great measure, motionless and dead. – Jonathan Edwards
• Challenges
  • Should we hate?
  • Do not fear
  • Rejoice in the Lord