I don’t know how much you subscribe to the Meyer-Briggs Personality Types but it is, at the very least, an interesting talking point. The third letter in one’s personality type, Feeler or Thinker, is to illuminate how one goes about making a decision. If you are a Feeler (F), then you use your emotions and “gut” to make a decision as opposed to a Thinker (T) who makes decisions based on logic and reason. I think there is a chasm, amongst Christians, on how we should approach our faith. Should we emphasize our intellect over our emotions? The Feeler would argue that reducing Christianity to an intellectual enterprise would sap one’s love for God and it would be yet another discipline to master. On the other hand, the Thinker would argue that an emotion-driven iteration of Christianity is vulnerable to the waxing and waning nature of the Christian life.
The answer is insultingly obvious: we need both.
The genesis of my spiritual journey began in a budding Korean church in Seattle. While I am eternally grateful for my God-fearing parents, I know that they never really catechized me. And the stigma is true: the immigrant church doesn’t do a great job of discipling the younger generation. I never received proper theological training. I couldn’t even tell you what predestination was. All I was ever told was to love God and love people. And to never sin.
And so my entire Christian life, up to college, was steeped in an emotionally charged ecosystem. We were driven by our feelings from the praise to mission work.. It’s no surprise, then, to find out that today, less than 10% of my youth group graduating class still faithfully attend church.
This started to really bug me. Even as a proud member of Team F, I knew that Christianity was more than the emotional flavor of the month. And so I started to do my own digging. I whet my appetite with more C. S. Lewis than I could handle. I engorged myself with J. I. Packer’s Knowing God. I was getting increasingly voracious after every Tim Keller book. Without me knowing, the pendulum swung violently the other way–I looked down upon people that were emotion-based Christians. I vowed never to go back to that way of expressing and experiencing my faith.
In the middle of my frenetic search for God, God called me to ministry. And though I first refused and refused again, God got his man and I finally took up the call to go to seminary. Seminary was many things, but it was, first and foremost, the thing that affirmed my calling. I entered with many questions and doubts, yet after my first class, I knew I was in the right place. If my zeal for theology was glowing embers coming into seminary, by the time I got out, it was an all-out forest fire. From a Christian who viewed everything through my heart to a Christian who was driven only by the mind, I was determined this was the only path to truly live as a Christian.
Here’s the irony of it all: Thinkers are usually astute at making a pros and cons list. They live and die by the ledger of the cost-benefit analysis. Yet, I never saw what I became when I was this cold, calculated robot. I was cold and cutting. I was judgmental and short-tempered. I could spew out brilliant insights I was reading from obscure theologians, but I would fail to love people, and more importantly, God.
I have cooled off a lot since then. God has been gracious by humbling me, even when I do ask for it. The constant erosion of my soul was needed as God continued to bring on waves upon waves so that the sharp, jagged rocks eventually smoothed out into beautiful and brilliant stones. And while I am hardly a finished product, I see that the answer lies somewhere in between. We need emotions paired with intellect.
I’ve been reading a lot of Francis Schaeffer these days and this past week, I stumbled upon his Letters of Francis A. Schaeffer, his collections of letters to friends. In an especially poignant letter to one of his former students, he writes this:
Thus, we cannot start our human reasoning autonomously and have it come out right. But with the open Bible before us, we do not have to park our reason outside the door. Emotion in Christianity can be right or it can be wrong. We should have emotion as a result of knowing how much God loves us and knowing we belong to him. But the emotion can never be the basis of our faith. The basis of our faith is the content of the Bible; the emotion should be a natural result. (124)
I especially like that last line. Emotion should be a natural result of our faith that is rooted in Scripture. An emotional Christianity is exhausting because it’s unpredictable. An intellectual Christianity is drab because it lacks fervor. We need balance in our approach because ultimately, that was what Jesus perfectly embodied. He expressed his emotional intelligence with his unmatched empathy. He flexed his intellect with the brightest minds by quoting Scripture and leaving the Pharisees stupefied by their meager attempts to trap him. But what was he really trying to teach? What is the goal of this duality? It is to love God. That’s it. That’s the goal.
You are surely right that God does not say, “you have to go out and learn all there is to know about Me and then worship Me.” But He does say that we are to love Him enough to study the Bible to know what He has to say. We shouldn’t get caught up in an abstract scholasticism about God, but we do have to love Him enough to find out all we can find out about Him in the Bible so we can love Him more and more. (124)
Wherever you find yourself on the spectrum of emotional vs intellectual, may you find yourself in the middle as a way to love God with all you are.
