Why Feelings Matter

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

It has become almost a cliché in Evangelical circles to say that most individuals under about the age of 45 cannot be effectively brought to faith through rational argument alone. That said the statement is largely an accurate one. Many of us who make up the generations born since the late 1960’s do tend to see the world through the prism of visceral experience. The emotive aspect of our being is often given more credence in interpreting reality for us than the cognitive aspect. Some say this is because we have been heavily influenced by the sensuality that our generations are often accused of embracing. Such an explanation is certainly debatable but let us assume, for the moment, that it is for the most part true. Is this automatically a bad thing?

When most conservative Christians hear the word “sensuality” they think of illicit sexual activity but this is, at best, a limited definition of the term. It can actually be applied to any experience that comes from and is connected to the five senses (“sense” being the root of the word.) Use this better meaning and sensuality becomes a morally neutral thing for the obvious reason that our Creator built it into us before the Fall of the human race. It is a part of the design God Himself called “very good” when he made us in His image. We were intended to know feelings by a Being who, it can be assumed from Scripture, also feels and feels deeply. Passion is part and parcel of the biblical narrative. There are no “Mr. Spocks” in the Bible, only emotive people relating to an emotive God.

But during the Enlightenment of the 18^th Century Western civilization started to believe reason was the best, perhaps even the only, way to know God or anything else. Rationalism became the spirit of the age in both the secular and the religious worlds and remained so for three hundred years. Modernism was the ultimate embodiment of the scientific approach to existence and has remained a powerful philosophy in the West. However it is not the only or perhaps even the dominant philosophy anymore. In the Post-Modern Age other ways of knowing reality have re-asserted themselves. The Greco-Roman culture that gave rise to Rationalism is becoming less a guide today than the Hebraic culture that existed before and in opposition to it. The Hebraic culture does not marginalize feelings. Read the Old Testament and you will see this is true.

The Church does not exist in a cultural vacuum. For better or worse the Bride of Christ has always been heavily influenced by the secular world around her. Our society is changing because we Westerners are coming to realize that the rational gods of Modernism are cold deities. The H.G. Wells and B.F. Skinners of the world have bequeathed to us nothing but an arid technological and deterministic interpretation of existence. Such an interpretation takes away the very richness of life God originally intended human beings to experience (and I use the word “experience” very intentionally). To the extent that this worldview has influenced Christianity it has taught us to assume that the mind is far more important than the heart.

“Never trust your feelings” has become almost a mantra in some of the more reactionary circles of contemporary Evangelicalism. Fair enough, however I would like to add “never trust your intellect” to that mantra and at the same time suggest a better one: “Trust God”. Truly trusting Him means we will ultimately allow our Creator to manifest Himself to us through both heart and mind. The younger generations do need to be open to both manifestations of the Divine but, for a time, as we are trying to find a balance it may be OK to be more interested in rediscovering the God our fathers often lost sight of in the pursuit of purely cognitive knowledge. We want to feel, to sense His presence and for this we need not apologize. For now, at least, this is the side of God many of us find most compelling.