Jay Green from Covenant College recently reviewed Homespun Gospel, my book, and gave it a pretty positive review. The weaknesses he pointed out and places that were undelevoped were places I was aware of and were often places I intentionally didn't address. I don't bring this up to say "look how great." Instead I am more interested in the comments. In among several of the commentators, a tense interchange has developed over intellectual faith and emotional faith. Basically there is one commenter who is charging others with not loving God, claiming that the others don't have a heart for God, and Jesus told us to love not develop our intellect. Others have attempted to respond to this commenter that the Christian walk is about the intellect as well.
It is a common refrain and tension particularly in evangelicalism. Some have emphasized the heart. Some have emphasized the head. The problem is that this us not an either/or proposition. The greatest command is to love the Lord (Matthew 22:37), but that love is to come from both the heart and the mind. God doesn't want only our heart or only our mind but both. Now, is a particular individual going to tend toward one aspect than another? In other words, do individuals tend to love God more from her or his heart or the mind? Yes! Is one better than the other? Not necessarily, but unless you engage both, you are only giving God part of who you are. He wants it all. He wants you to engage all of it when you give yourself to Christ.
But with all that people talk about Christianity being a relationship rather than a religion, does this mean tending toward the intellectual actually working against God's intent for it? Isn't it all about love? Well, here again, it is overly simplistic to look at it this way. Think about it this way: what does Jesus tell the Eleven to do in sharing the message with the rest of the world? Well, in Matthew's Gospel he says that they are to make disciples--make learners, baptize them, teach them some more. Look through the book of Acts. Here are Jesus' closest followers going out to tell people about Jesus. What are they telling them? Are the going out and saying "God loves you"/"Jesus loves you"? No. Would they tell them this; does Paul emphasize this? Yes, but what Luke says the early disciples went around talking about Jesus being king and his resurrection proving that God was in charge. Furthermore when you really look at what people mean by "love" today and what the biblical writers mean by love, it is often very different.
But there is an important warning for those of us who favor the intellect. It is very easy to get prideful and assume we have totally figured out or that we are closer to God than others. It is also tempting to look at those who relate to God more easily through their emotions as being immature or lacking in depth. That is not necessarily the case. A judgmental attitude is wrong no matter whether we approach God more easily through our heart or head.
But wait, didn't you write a book that is judgmental about emotion? No. I wrote a book about a certain type of emotionality and some of the trouble it has produced. As I say in Homespun Gospel, the problem isn't sentimentality. The problem is not being reflective about how people have used sentimentality or what a spiritual diet of only sentimentality might produce. I am a very sentimental person at times. I don't have a problem with sentimentality per se. What becomes problematic is when we don't use our brains like we should.
The biblical text emphasizes the importance of wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. Readers are encouraged to meditate and study God's word. We are called to know truth--know truth. I don't believe these are necessarily best discovered in a Ph.D. program or in the classroom, but I don't believe they have to be excluded from there either. In fact, the more research i do and the more intellectual exploration I do, the more I love God. My heart is engaged when I better understand. That's me. Others can be moved first, and then seek understanding--they are moved to love God and then want to learn more about him.
Isn't the Bible just one big love letter? You don't need to think much to understand a love letter. Well, in one sense the overarching narrative throughout the Bible is the story of God's love for humanity, his expression of that love on the cross in the person of Jesus Christ, and his desire to see that love expressed in community both in this life and in the one to come. But there is so much more to the Bible to learn as well. Also, conceiving of it as one giant love letter. Also overlooks the creation of the Bible over centuries in different circumstances by different authors.
Ultimately the body of Christ needs those who desire to plumb the intellectual depths of God's love and those greatly moved by God's mind. We help each other to remember God is so vast that he cannot be completely understood and so loving that he cannot be out loved. When we can respect each other, we can do more work for God and less damage to our witness.
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