On Being Moved

A Theological Anthropology of the Emotions

Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

I The surprise of the emotions

In October 2004, my mother-in-law died of breast cancer at the age of 62, not much more than a year after being diagnosed. Being the only member of the family experienced at public speaking – and indeed, at running funerals - I was quite willing to take on the duties of giving the eulogy at the funeral service when I was asked to by my father-in-law. In addition, since I was Jackie’s son-in-law and not directly related to her, I could be expected and indeed expected myself to maintain my composure in the delivery of the task in a suitably controlled tone, allowing the mourners to grieve in quiet privacy.

The tears, then, took me quite by surprise. I was not far into retelling Jackie’s life story – from her childhood in London to her arrival in Australia in the 1960s and her conversion to faith in Christ. At some point in this narrative, I was quite overcome by the occasion. My voice quavered; I could feel myself flushing red; and my face contorted itself. I could barely continue to read, because I couldn’t see the page in front of me. What words I could get out were squeezed out through my throat, and I found myself gasping for breath in between watery sobs. Afterwards my six year old son said to me ‘your face was all screwed up, Dad’.

I retell this story not because I am hoping to elicit sympathy but rather because of its ordinariness as an episode of the human emotions at work. The strong emotion seemed to come to me in a way that I couldn’t predict. It was completely a surprise. I was not feeling anywhere near this level of emotion before the service – not even as I rose to my feet to speak. It was as if there were a force outside of me working on me and causing me to lose self-control of my body in a way that was understandable but still within Anglo-Saxon culture somewhat shameful, especially for men. I am not normally conscious of doing things with my body that I don’t directly will. Yet in this moment, normal operations seemed to be suspended and the emotion took control of me.

It is an ordinary episode, but no less complicated for being so. Some of these problems no doubt relate to the difficulty my own culture and gender has with public expressions of emotion. Nevertheless, there is a universal in this particular. It illustrates how troublesome emotions are in thinking cohesively about human being. This trouble pans out in three overlapping ways, to do with agency, the body and reason.

The first difficulty is best explained by asking: in what sense was I an agent of my own sobs? Can I really speak in this way, of an emotion controlling me, since the emotion could not be anyone else’s? The sobs certainly emanated from my mouth and in my voice. They happened to and in my body. But I was not intending or willing to sob; in fact, I was willing the opposite. Yet I sobbed, and not some demon that had entered me, or some ventriloquist pretending to be me.

Second, at the moment of intense emotion, the human being seems to become almost alienated from his own body. Because these emotions are exhibited in such an obviously visceral fashion and yet carry with them unwanted consequences such as the stigma of cultural shame, the human subject may feel that ‘I’ am other from my physical body. There must be then a purer, non-physical form of ‘me’ – to which perhaps I can ascend once I am free of the untrustworthiness of my flesh. Even a more honourably perceived emotion like the feeling of loss shares enough in common with the more base desires of our bodies – feelings like hunger, sexual desire, need for sleep – that in experiencing it we still frequently experience this otherness from our bodies. Indeed, if I am to speak of some ‘higher’ set of emotions, where do I ‘feel’ them if not in my body?

Third, my perception of myself as a primarily rational creature is disturbed by the experience of strong emotion. But this is because of a hidden assumption that ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ are discrete centres of my person, with reason the more nearly ‘spiritual’ or more distinctly human of the two. Yet my strong emotion was in fact tied to rational propositions about the occasion. I did not feel at all the same way about the funeral, at which I had ministered, for a woman in her early forties who had committed suicide - even though the circumstances were arguably more tragic. I knew Jacky as my friend and mother-in-law, and as my wife’s mother and the granny of my own children. I could calculate what her loss would mean for us. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I felt about it.

These difficulties are enough to engender a philosophical, psychological and anthropological discussion of the emotions, such as the US philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum provides in her masterful work Upheavals of Thought – The Intelligence of the Emotions.[1] The task of a theological anthropology, however, is to begin analysing questions like this in the light of a particular context of human life: namely, God. For a Christian anthropology, that context is framed by the themes of the creation of man and woman in the image of God on the one hand and the presence of sin in human life on the other. These two themes are set in tension with one another not just in the Biblical story, but in the existence of every human person. To what degree is this or that feature of my humanity reflect my likeness as a creature made in the divine image to the creator? Or is it in some way a result of that disorder of personhood that stems from my participation in human fallen-ness? But Christian anthropology will also speak of a destiny for human beings. The two themes of theological anthropology have their resolution however in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Theological anthropology, like all properly Christian theology, must speak an evangelical word, in which the image of God humankind is redeemed and perfected. It has, in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, a pattern to which human creatures will one day be conformed (Rom 8:29).

Returning to my troublesome emotions, then: was this event God’s will for creatureliness in me? Or was it an instance of sin’s distorting effects? If God has no ‘body, parts or passions’,[2] and yet my emotions are an irreducibly physical component of me, ought I in seeking to be more like him look to some future beyond or without my body? Or must I think of myself dualistically, as most of the Christian tradition has done, having a distinct ‘soul’ for the purer emotions like joy and hope as well as a body for my appetites like hunger and thirst? Has ‘reason’, or the ‘rational soul’, a more exalted seat in me? What would an account of the human emotions look like in the light of the resurrection of the dead? In what sense can the three problematic aspects of human emotion – to do with agency, body and reason – be addressed from a theological perspective?

The tradition of Christian theological reflection on human emotions has been marked by an understanding of the imago dei as the capacity for reason, on the one hand, and by a view of the human person as consisting of a separate, even independent body and soul, on the other. First, I will show how each of these is a problematic articulation of a scriptural concept. Second, I will revisit both concepts and show how they must not result in either a substance dualism or in a hierarchy of emotions. A theological anthropology which describes the human being as a divinely appointed speech agent offers a description of the place of the emotions in human life without resorting to an unnecessary, unscriptural and unchristological split between the body and the soul.

II Two problems in the traditional theological account of human being

a) The imago dei

The concept of the imago dei is the point through which any genuinely biblical and theological anthropology must surely pass. It is of course linked closely with the creation of humankind in Gen 1:26-28:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.

Exegetes and theologians are agreed that the phrase ‘the image (selem) of God’ indicates that humankind is to be the reflection of God to the creation. Unlike the other creatures, the human being is capable of being the conduit for the divine being in the world he made. The question is: in what exactly do human beings reflect the deity? The assumption of many writers has been that the image must refer to a particular capacity or ability given to humankind. That is: there is some capacity or function that is integral to God that is also fundamental for human beings.

If it is the case that the image of God is found in some capacity that human beings possess, it is not surprising that the imago dei has been understood over the course of Christian history is as the capacity for rational thought. The argument comes from two directions. On the one hand, it is rational thought that most obviously separates us from the beasts and the birds. Human beings could be said to be unique because of this capacity. As fallen creatures, we lapse when we give over ourselves to our passions and instincts, as the animals do. On the other hand, it would seem that God is distinguished as a being by his supreme capacity for rational thought, in knowledge and in wisdom. Human beings are not by being in his image in any sense equivalent to him in rational capacity, but it would make sense to see them as analogous to him in it.

This position is well-attested – even dominant - from the early church onwards. The church’s first major theologian, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c. 180) wrote of the human being as a being ‘endowed with reason, and in this respect like God’.[3] Gregory of Nyssa (c.335 – c.395) wrote of man as the ‘rational animal.’[4] The great African bishop, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) writes in his commentary on Genesis:

Man’s excellence consists in the fact that God made him to His own image by giving him an intellectual soul, which raises him above the beasts of the field.[5]

In this way, the image of God concept functioned as a kind of mediating principle for an analogy of being between humankind and the divine. The interpretation of the imago dei as rationality was then given further impetus by reference to the depiction of Jesus in the New Testament as the logos of God.

The gravest difficulty for the interpretation of the imago dei as the capacity for rational though is a lack of exegetical support. There simply is no obvious biblical connection between the concept of the image of God and any individual faculty belonging to human beings, including rationality. Any drawing of lines between the two notions is necessarily artificial. As Karl Barth wrote: ‘[I]t is obvious that their authors merely found the concept in the text and then proceeded to pure invention in accordance with the requirement of contemporary anthropology.’[6] What’s more, if the image of God in us is tied to our capacity for reason, then the path to our redemption must surely lie in the refinement of our reason by education and enlightenment. But perhaps worst of all: the ‘image as reason’ view is a distorted view of God himself, since his highest virtue, or signal property must be, on this account, his rationality.

It would be historically simplistic to claim that the understanding of the imago dei as the capacity for rational thought led directly to a denigration of what we now call by the almost impossibly broad term ‘the emotions’. Behind this description of the image was an attempt to account for the way in which the fall had affected the human person such that he or she was often mastered by unruly emotions. But if it is in the area of rationality that we are most like God and most unlike the animals, then it is not a great step to arguing that emotions are what we share with the animals, rather than with God. Or – and this is a more sophisticated strategy – the emotions are divided into two distinct kinds: the higher and more pure sort, or the ‘affections’, which are found in relation to the divine, and the more base ‘passions’ of our animal nature.[7] The problem is magnified if human nature is held to be a dichotomy between body and soul, as we shall see.

b) body and soul

If the imago dei hinges on Genesis 1:26-28, then the discussion of human ontology is a commentary on Genesis 2:7:

Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

How should the ‘breathing’ and the ‘dust’ be interpreted? Were they references to the two substances that together form a human person, the body and the soul? The Church fathers were vigorous in their defence of the psychosomatic unity of the human person against the prevailing Platonic anthropology - which held body and soul to be separable entities, with the person’s true identity held in the self-conscious soul. The Fathers did not accept the teaching that the body was merely the prison of the soul (as was taught in, for example, Plato’s Gorgias 493a) but rather affirmed the goodness of both as created by God. Nevertheless, they did teach that the soul was an independent entity; and despite the desire to maintain the unity of body and soul as necessary to constitute the complete human being, an essentially Hellenistic body-soul dualism became the norm in patristic Christian anthropology.[8] Tertullian, who wrote an entire work entitled A Treatise on the Soul, held body and soul to be separate and indeed separable substances conjoined at conception and torn apart at death. (27.1)

Regardless, the language of anima intellectiva or ‘rational soul’ came into use to describe what was imparted by God to Adam in Genesis 2:7. It was also equated with the ‘spirit’ of the human individual. It is there in the Chalcedonian definition in relation to Christology – Jesus is truly human on account of having both a body and a ‘rational soul’. The bestowal of rationality on Adam by the Creator in the form of his spirit or soul led inevitably to exaltation of this component as the superior one. The notion of the ‘rational soul’ was also the parent of the concept of ‘the mind’, which has subsequently engendered its own debates in the field of philosophy.

The resemblance of the philosophy Rene Descartes (1596-1650) to the dominant theological conception of human being is striking; and it is also the case that his influence was to be felt in the theology that followed him. For Descartes, human bodies are ordinary material things that have no mental properties at all. The mind or the soul is a completely non-physical and ultimately independent entity. As he wrote:

My soul, by virtue of which I am what I am – is entirely and truly distinct from my body that it can be or exist without it.[9]

Once more, we should note the sophistication of the account of human psychology that went alongside this tendency to describe human being in terms of a duality of substance. The ‘passions’, emanating from the body, were to be distinguished from the ‘affections’, which were under the command of the rational soul or mind.

The type of dualism bequeathed to the Christian tradition by Greek philosophy and then amplified by Descartes has been widely attacked, however, on a number of philosophical grounds. For example: how does the dualist propose to explain the apparent dependence of the mind or soul on the brain, which is a physical entity? How can an immaterial entity influence a material one? Increasingly, modern neuroscience is able to explain human consciousness in entirely physical terms. Cartesian dualism then looks metaphysically immodest, and we are compelled to ask whether it is theologically and biblically necessary. We can easily see how it has entered into the bloodstream of Christian orthodoxy from an external source, namely, Platonism, even if it has been somewhat modified in the process. Further, the reading of Gen 2:7 on which dualism is supposedly secured fails to note that animals are also animated by the spirit of life and can be called nephesh hayya (Gen 1:20, 6:17). Life as a work of the divine breath does not bestow any uniqueness on human beings.[10] The implication for our view of the human emotions is surely this: if Platonic/Cartesian dualism is unsustainable, then the division of the human emotions into discrete ‘passions’ and ‘affections’ would seem to be questionable at least.

III The Human Being as a Whole Being

a) The Aristotelian dualism of Thomas Aquinas

The story of theological reflection on human nature and the emotions is not, however, one in which an unrestrained Platonism has held complete sway. The turn to Aristotelian psychology by Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) and others after him, including John Owen (1616-83) produced a friendlier account of relations between the body and the soul. Though Aquinas did link rationality to the image, writing that ‘intellectual creatures alone, properly speaking, are made to God’s image’[11], he was able to account for the rational soul as dependent on the body. The strength of the Aristotelian metaphysical system was its emphasis on particulars. Ideas do not exist apart from their expression. Thus, for Aquinas, the soul is the form of the body. Furthermore, ‘a human being is not a soul only, but rather composite of soul and body’ (ST 1 q 75 a4).

The strengths of Aquinas’s description are, first, that he emphasises the human person as a whole being, body and soul. The identity of the human person is not reducible to physical materials, but it is not other than that which is encountered in the physical being. Second, his description of the ‘intellectual soul’ as the image of God at least gestures towards the more Biblical concept of ‘the knowledge of God’. The anima intellectiva can then be understood as the human being’s capacity for relationship with God and not as an abstract notion like ‘rationality’. It is now my task to follow Aquinas’s hunch towards a (brief) reappraisal of human ontology and the imago, as we continue in our search for a persuasive theological account of the emotions and their role in human existence.

b) the imago dei as the whole being addressed by God

As US theologian Michael Horton points out:

For the biblical writers at least, ‘what is to be human?’ is ultimately a narrative-ethical rather than a metaphysical-ontological question.[12]

That is to say, it is the commission or task given to human beings at the beginning of the narrative of salvation history that better sums up the meaning of the image of God concept than any speculative attempt to assign it to some inner state or faculty of the human person.[13] This way of addressing the concept allows us to see the Christological references to the image in the New Testament – Col 1:15, 2 Cor 3:18 - in their proper light. What the image is can be seen nowhere more clearly than in the way in which the second Adam redeems and restores it and indeed fulfils it. Further, as Calvin saw, we are then invited to express this image by putting on Christ, as in Ephesians 4:24: ‘and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness’.

The task given to human beings at the beginning of Genesis relates to the concept of dominion.[14] It is, of all the creatures, this one whom God addresses as his partner in the project of creation. For the Psalmist it is a matter of wonder: ‘what is man that you are mindful of him?’ (Ps 8:4). The human creature is called by God to be his presence in the world; and as the one addressed by God, is equipped by him for the task. The human person has both the capacity and the responsibility to relate to God – to hear and respond to his call, to speak to him, to enter into covenants with him, to represent him in and to the world. They rule the world, mediate the presence of God to it, and witness to his glory.

It follows from this view of the imago dei that it is inclusive of the whole person, and not merely some aspect or faculty. As the Dutch theologian Hermann Bavinck writes: ‘Nothing in humanity is excluded from God’s image; it stretches as far as our humanity does and constitutes our humanness.’[15] It is with her whole being that the human person is to respond with love to God (Dt 6:5). If, then, we are point to certain special capabilities that are given to human beings, it is not imagine them as separable from the essential wholeness and unity of being in which she images the divine being. Too often the gifts that go with being created in the image of God have been confused for the essence of the image.

The human person is equipped by God for the task of mediating his presence to the world, to the glory of God. For the task of naming and ordering and ruling the creation, human beings have been given remarkable capacities in their physical bodies. This includes their remarkable capacity to reason. The human brain, endowed as it is with the faculties of memory, logical deduction, intuition and imagination, is not only able to recognize order in the world as it discovers it. It is also able to bring order to it. With their minds, human beings reveal themselves to be not merely observers of the natural world but able participants in it.

But it is also the case that we are created as feeling-ful, or affectional beings. It is not enough for us to rule as creatures of sheer will or pure rationality – as if we could. We are called not merely to a dominion over the world, but dominion within in it. Our emotions serve us here in two ways. First, they turn us to our fellow human beings – those for whom we have affections. Our emotions alert us to our mutual dependence on one another for the fulfilling of the divine mandate. Second, our dominion is not intended to be a mere assertion of our wills over creation. We quite properly respond to what we encounter in it as it moves us. Even without a theological perspective, philosopher Nussbaum can observe that human emotions involve judgements in which

…we acknowledge our own neediness and incompleteness before parts of the world that we do not fully control.[16]

Are we different from the animals, then? Indeed, but the difference is not, to use Horton’s language, metaphysical-ontological as much as it narrative-ethical. We are creatures designed for a particular history – to partner with God in his project of creation. Wolfhart Pannenberg writes:

when it is a matter of the advantage of humans over all other creatures, the emphasis is not on intellectual ability but on the destiny of fellowship with God and the position of rule associated with closeness to God.[17]

Our capacity for speech is a gift given to us that we might serve the creation and the Creator. This gift has an extraordinary impact on our emotional repertoire. Giving voice to feeling leads to its refinement. As Cambridge theologian Sarah Coakley writes:

…it is surely the case that animals (even higher mammals) and humans experience emotion significantly differently [from each other] as a result of humans having the capacity for language … the “horizons” of emotion and feeling are vastly expanded by linguistic expression.[18]

The presence of ‘higher’ emotions – ones that cats do not by any measure feel – is not because the image of God has conveyed on us some metaphysical property, but because our physical equipment has been moulded for a particular purpose.

c) beyond body-soul dualism

In the discussion of human ontology, once again we find Scripture asserting the essential unity of the human person in every aspect. We are not thought of as a soul contained in a body; neither are we composed of two separate substances. It is rather that we can be considered from two angles. Each individual forms a psycho-somatic unity, not reducible to the component parts of the body but never less than them either. As Pannnenberg puts it:

the soul and consciousness are deeply rooted in our corporeality. Conversely, the body is not a corpse. It is an ensouled body in all its expressions in life.[19]

Though our English Bibles have traditionally translated the Hebrew nephesh as ‘soul’, is doubtful whether this translation captures the way the word is used in the Old Testament. We have already seen how in Genesis 2:7, the man ‘becomes a nephesh hayya’ – a ‘living being’. In this instance, it is not ‘soul’ that is meant, but rather his whole existence. As Wolff puts it: ‘man does not have nephesh, he is nephesh, he lives as nephesh.’[20] Nephesh is never given the meaning of an indestructible core of being as opposed to the mortal body.[21]

This usage is replicated in the New Testament. For example, Paul’s response to the scoffers in 1 Corinthians 15:35-49 offers a theology of new creation built upon the ideas of Genesis 1 and 2, and references Gen 2:7. As he explains, God has ordered bodies in different ways – the heavenly and earthly bodies differ in glory, for example, but are still parts of the creation order. So it is with the resurrection body and its relationship to the old earthly body. The contrast is made in four ways: perishable/imperishable; dishonour/glory; weakness/power; and psychikon/pneumatikon (15:42-44). Psyche is the word usually translated ‘soul’ (and was the LXX term for the Hebrew nephesh). But quite clearly in the context, Paul is meaning to contrast the life-force that came with the breath of God in the garden of Eden (psychikon) with the new life of the indwelling Spirit (pneumatikon).

The crucial piece of theological information for human ontology is that Jesus Christ is now in heaven reigning as an embodied person. Heaven is not somewhere, in other words, that only disembodied souls can enter. This is surely the truth that must govern the way we think about the body and the soul. Whatever ‘soul’ means, it doesn’t not mean something separable from our bodies as if we have a shadowy other haunting our every move. If we are in Christ when we die, we are ‘with him’ in the sense that we are with him in heaven now. Paul says to the (living) Colossians ‘our lives are hid with Christ in God’; and there is no sense in which he is saying there is a ‘soulish’ bit of them in heaven now. Likewise, post mortem: it is perfectly consistent with the New Testament to say we are ‘with Christ’ without saying that we have a ghostly other self actually located with him. Our ‘with-Christ-ness’ consists in his life and the promise it holds for our resurrection on the final day.

Without imagining that I have here resolved the question of human ontology – about which streams of ink continue to flow[22] - we may at least point to the Bible’s understanding of the essential cohesion and unity of the human individual. Our capacity for emotion belongs to our whole humanity and, like the whole of our humanity, is both ‘very good’ and a sign of our limitedness as creatures. The effects of the fall do not draw a line in us turning a soul against a body, but cut right through us in every aspect: reason, will and feelings. Our reason and will are as corrupted as our feelings.

IV On Being Moved

What does our examination of the human being as a creature called by God, body and soul, for the task of dominion mean for the ‘problem’ of the emotions with which I began? As in all theological anthropological questions, we are faced with trying to understand what in our humanity is part of our ordinary creaturely being and what in us is fallen. From the example of my experience of overwhelming grief, I isolated the three areas of agency, the body and reason as the points at which our emotions seem to complicate our humanity. It is now time to revisit each of these.

a) ‘responsive agency’

We are creatures apt to be moved by our experiences in the world. This seems to cut across our intentionality. We intend to do things, and yet we find that our emotions rise up against us, and that we do not what we would, but what we would not. There is no doubt that at times this is evidence of the awful impact of sin on the human individual – that war within the self that Paul so vividly describes (‘I find another law at work in me’). But it is also the case that we can use our will to overrule emotions that are telling us true things about the world and the right way to live in it. If we register revulsion at the sight of evil and it prevents us from doing it even when we intend to, it is an entirely appropriate response. Suppressing disgust, grief or joy may be just as much evidence of the effects of the fall as evidence of a redeemed self-mastery.

As God’s ordained agents for dominion within the created order, we are called to exercise our agency responsively – that is, with due regard to the world that we encounter. The world we now inhabit is not what it was, nor what it will be. Just as we are rightly exhilarated by beauty of the world and so recognise its deep goodness, so it is fitting that we groan with longing for it to be redeemed. We observe this of course in the life of Jesus – he is ‘deeply moved’ (ἐμβριμώμενος) by the sight of his friends grieving over Lazarus (Jn 11:38); and he has compassion (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη) on the crowds (Mt 9:36) because they were ‘harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd’. He is moved by these encounters, and these emotions condition his agency. My response of grief at my mother-in-law’s funeral, disturbing and visceral though it was, was entirely and appropriately human. My emotions were in fact telling me a truth about the world and my experience of it.

b) bodily feelings

The Christian tradition did in fact always have a positive regard for the body, however much this was compromised. The Bible’s insistence on the unity of the human person reminds us that feelings never occur to us somewhere else other than in the body. We know of no human experience that is non-bodily. Christian eschatology points not to a final separation of the soul from the body, but to a renewed and resurrected bodily life – ‘the redemption of our bodies’ (Rom 8:23).

As unified beings, then, our emotions are not other than us, or alien to us: they belong to us as an aspect of our whole being – or rather, an experience in our whole being. However exalted or complex these feelings might be, they don’t take place in some other non-bodily part of me. My emotions are no less neurological and chemical states than my cat’s; my capacity to contemplate my death, to experience ecstasy, to know regret, to feel guilt and shame, to hunger for contact with that which transcends me emerges from my divinely given ability to name and speak about my experiences – a gift that resides in my body.

The combination of the gifts given to humankind in the body is a call in itself to relationship with the divine being. But there isn’t with in us a specifically non-material bit, including a set of special feelings or affections, with which the non-material divinity may more easily interact. There isn’t some centre of non-material experience that is more sanctified or sanctifiable. Paul prays holistically for the Thessalonians: ‘May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Thess 5:23). As part of our embodied experience, our emotions are partly susceptible to our ordering and cultivation of them through discipline and habit. Our incomplete self-mastery in the area of the emotions awaits the liberation and transformation of bodies, along with the rest of the creation.[23]

c) thinking and feeling as components of knowing

Finally we turn to the often problematic relationship of our emotions to our reason. We feel that the faculty of reason is often clouded by our emotions, somewhat to our embarrassment. We honour the dispassionate perspective of a judge or the cold objectivity of a scientist in a laboratory. We know that a pure emotionalism would be a moral and social disaster. But the older tradition of theologians was onto something when it spoke of the human need for knowledge of God, even though this was often translated as ‘reason’. ‘Knowledge’ is properly a personal category and contains within it not merely our assent to the propositions of some truth but our personal appropriation of it.

The theological understanding of the human person as a whole being helps us a great deal here. Conceptually, we are held back by our tendency to make nouns like ‘reason’ and ‘emotions’ when we are really talking about ‘verbs’, such as ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’. Making these concepts into substantives means we tend to go looking for a separate bit of ourselves that corresponds to the two notions. In fact, feeling and thinking are like the two hands with which we grasp the world and they together serve us in gaining knowledge. Just as without good thinking we are prone to inappropriate feelings, so without our feelings we are actually incapable of proper thinking.

What we call our ‘subjectivity’ is actually vital for us to gain knowledge of the world, of ourselves and of God. The so-called ‘objectivity’ of the scientist or judge is actually a practice of re-orienting and focussing a person’s subjectivity to a different end. In fact, losing sight of the role of our feelings in knowing things leads to the hubris of rationalism in that we forget that we know from within the world and its history and not from some perspective only God has. Recognising the limits of our knowing is vital to our properly and humanly knowing – and is properly part of the scientific method bequeathed to us from the seventeenth century. The knowledge that the distorting effects of sin cut across our thinking as well as our feelings leads us to an appropriate and in fact liberating self-suspicion – reminding us to check and re-check the things we think we know.

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[1] Martha Craven Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought : The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

[2] Article I of The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion

[3] Against the Heretics 4.4.3

[4] Of the Making of Man 8:8

[5] Gen. ad lit. vi, 12

[6] CD III.1.193 cited in Cortez, p. 19.

[7] See Thomas Dixon

[8] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey William Bromiley, 3 vols., vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), p. 184.

[9] Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Laurence Julien Lafleur, 2nd rev.ed. ed. (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), p. 132.

[10] Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament (London: SCM Press, 1974), p. 22.

[11] Summa Theologica, Ia q. 93 a.2,

[12] Michael Horton, “Image and Office: Human Personhood and the Covenant,” in Personal Identity in Theological Perspective, ed. Richard Lints, Michael S Horton, and Mark R Talbot (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006), p. 181.

[13] This is view of Alistair I. McFadyen, The Call to Personhood : A Christian Theory of the Individual in Social Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). and also Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “”Human Being: Individual and Social.”,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. C.E.Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

[14] ‘The strongest case has been made for the view that the divine image makes man God’s vice-regent on earth’. Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1987), p. 31. See also Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, p. 159-61.

[15] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3 vols., vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2003), p. 561.

[16] Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought : The Intelligence of Emotions, p. 19. Interestingly, Hans Walter Wolff summarises nephesh as ‘needy man’.

[17] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, p. 182.

[18] Sarah Coakley, “Postscript: What (If Anything) Can the Sciences Tell Philosophy and Theology About Faith, Rationality and the Passions?,” Modern Theology 27, no. 2 (2011): p. 358.

[19] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, p. 182.

[20] Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, p. 10.

[21] We ought to notice, too, that in none of the passages usually listed in defence of the distinct ‘soul’ idea is the word ‘soul’ (in its Greek or Hebrew form) mentioned. In fact, in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus it seems quite specific that there is a physical afterlife – after all, the Rich Man asks if Lazarus can cool his tongue with his finger. The word ‘body’ in Paul’s usage need not be contrasted to ‘soul’, either, since he could easily be speaking of his old, decaying body in contrast to his future embodied existence. Furthermore, it seems a doubtful theological method to sketch a view of the human person on the basis of these references. They don’t seem to be teaching us specifically about the composition of the human person, nor about cosmology. In the case of the parable in Luke 16, Jesus is using the pop-theology of the day rather than making a concerted case for a particular view of the afterlife. That’s not his point.

[22] See for example John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting : Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, [Updated ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich. Leicester, England: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. ; Apollos, 2000). and Nancey C. Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?, Current Issues in Theology (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

[23] ‘Personal bodies’ enactments of existential hows expressive joyous hopefulness involve disciplining their emotions, such as anger, to be appropriate response to the triune God drawing them to eschatological consummation, and that involves learning to discriminate among feelings easily confused with one another.’ David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence : A Theological Anthropology, 1st ed., 2 vols. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), p. 522.