Untrustworthy by Bonnie Kristian

Untrustworthy by Bonnie Kristian

Author:Bonnie Kristian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Living/Social Issues;Truthfulness and falsehood—­Religious aspects—­Christianity;Truth—­Religious aspects—­Christianity;Common fallacies;Christianity and culture—­United States;REL012110
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-03T00:00:00+00:00


6

Emotion

Feelings come and feelings go,

And feelings are deceiving;

My warrant is the Word of God—

Naught else is worth believing.

Though all my heart should feel condemned

For want of some sweet token,

There is One greater than my heart

Whose Word cannot be broken.

I’ll trust in God’s unchanging Word

’Til soul and body sever,

For, though all things shall pass away,

His Word shall stand forever!

—Anonymous, but commonly

attributed to Martin Luther

The conservative evangelicalism of my youth didn’t take a terribly favorable view of emotion. Feelings are mercurial and untrustworthy, I remember hearing. They’re often disconnected from reality—something we can’t escape, unfortunately, but can work to ignore as an impediment to right thinking.

Faithfulness to God and the truth would be impossible if we succumbed to emotion, I learned, whether through manipulation by other people or the workings of our own deceitful hearts. Jeremiah 17:9—which declares that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (KJV)1—was a familiar quotation. The Hebrew word rendered as “heart” in this passage (typically transliterated leb) is a broad term that encompasses the whole inner being, including what we would call the soul, the rational mind, the will, and the seat of emotion. It’s often the word used, for example, when the Old Testament records that someone “said (something) in his heart”—that is, he thought it.2

But when I heard that verse, “heart” was interpreted as it is in contemporary American parlance. It was understood to refer to the emotive, nonrational parts of us, which meant our feelings were something bad to be overcome by reason and Scripture through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Pop culture might tell you to “follow your heart,” but we would follow the Bible instead.

That context is the reason why, for years, I read Paul’s famous monologue of the divided self in Romans 7 (“what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do,” he confesses in v. 15) as a battle between the emotional fallen nature and the rational redeemed mind. I don’t think anyone taught me that interpretation in so many words, but linking the troublesome, ungovernable part of the self to feelings made sense given what else I’d been told about emotion. Of course the bad part of you produced the feelings, and the good part—the part that reflected the image of God and could be sanctified—was the reasoning mind.

The first stanza of the poem located at the beginning of this chapter was familiar to me too. In pithy, proverbial form, it communicates that our changeable feelings are a path to deception, an enemy of Scripture, and, by extension, a hindrance to our relationship with God. Shove those feelings down, if you are thus plagued, by reading the Bible.

I don’t think I knew at the time that these lines are typically credited to Martin Luther, an attribution that’s very probably false. I’ve been unable to find any citation of a specific source in his extensive writings, and anyway, the sixteenth-century German theologian didn’t write in rhyming near-modern English. It’s possible,



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