Religion: Emotion or Reason?

Religion: Emotion or Reason?

About a month ago my wife Jane and I were on a wonderful car trip through the southwest of the United States. We spent three nights in Williams, Arizona, a town about 55 miles from Grand Canyon National Park. It was our base for our visits to the park. On the morning we were scheduled to leave Williams headed for New Mexico, for reasons I need not explain here (we’re both OK), we ended up in an urgent care facility in Williams. We had to wait about two and a half hours to see a doctor. As we sat in the waiting room someone was playing a radio. On the radio a woman was preaching in a very evangelical style. She was vociferously proclaiming the typical evangelical message: You’re all sinners and you’re in for it in the next life unless you take Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior in this life. What struck me about her preaching was less its totally unoriginal content than how emotional it was. The theology she preached was more than a century old and tissue paper thin, but it was clear that the purpose and effect of her preaching was less to convey a well thought out theology than it was to convey emotion. What she said did what her evangelical theology always does. It started by reducing Christianity to a fear-based religion, then offered relief from the fear it engendered through personal pietism, personal faith. It distorted Jesus’ message of personal and social transformation in this life to a message about God requiring some purely personal commitment in order to gain heaven in the next life. It draped that message in emotional pleading and emotional appeal. It struck me more powerfully than it ever has before that this woman’s kind of Christianity, which sadly is the Christianity most people both inside the church and outside it know, succeeds not because it is grounded in solid theology but precisely because it appeals to people’s emotions. It is nearly purely emotional Christianity presented in a nearly purely emotional way.

Perhaps those of you who have read my books or followed my posts on this blog can see how different my Christianity is from the emotional Christianity of that woman on the radio in Williams, Arizona. I know full well that I am a very head-oriented person. All through seminary I heard it so often that I got sick of it: “Tom, we know you’ve got all the head stuff. Where’s the heart?” Indeed when I appeared before what was then the Churches and Clergy Committee of what was then the Washington North Idaho Conference of the United Church of Christ seeking approval for ordination in the UCC the Committee approved me but asked me to submit some more writing to show that I actually do have a heart. I think the perception of me as exclusively head-oriented comes from people who don’t know me very well. Underneath my rationalistic exterior I’m actually quite a sentimentalist. Still, my approach to my Christian faith has indeed always been quite philosophical. I wrote my book Liberating Christianity mostly because I believed, and believe, that Marcus Borg, the most widely read proponent of a revised, post-modern Christianity, is (was—he’s now passed away) philosophically superficial. I firmly believe the statement I heard once somewhere that the heart cannot love what the head cannot accept. My entry into Christian theology and indeed into Christian ministry began with a study of Paul Tillich, the greatest philosophical Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, and of Douglas John Hall, a less well known but brilliant Canadian theologian who is also very philosophical—he studied with Tillich at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Before I could commit myself to the Christian faith I had to find a way of understanding it firmly grounded in solid ontology and epistemology. I had to find a way to understand the faith other than the literalistic way  in which it is still mostly understood today. I found that way in Tillich and Hall. Without that philosophical theological grounding I never would have become a convinced Christian, much less an ordained Christian pastor.

So one could conclude that there are, broadly speaking, two different ways of understanding faith. One is emotional. It appeals less to a person’s thinking than to a person’s emotional reactions. The other is what I will call rational or reasonable, but I need to explain what I mean by rational and reasonable. I don’t mean merely logical. I don’t mean rationalistic in the way so much western thought became rationalistic during the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I mean grounded in reason, but I mean reason in the broad sense in which the Germans use the term. I mean grounded in solid, well thought through philosophical and theological concepts. By reasonable or rational I mean a faith grounded in the academic disciplines of the higher criticisms including philosophy and all of the tools of contemporary intellectual analysis. I mean a faith grounded in those criticisms but a faith that goes beyond cognitive analysis to a deeper understanding that isn’t purely emotional but that isn’t merely analytical either. I mean a faith that respects and values human reason but that transcends it. I mean a faith that understands the limits of human reason. I mean a faith that understands that truth is much more than mere facts. If you really want to understand what I mean by it read Liberating Christianity. That’s where I set out what I mean most fully and systematically.

So are these two ways of understanding the faith the only possibilities before us? I don’t think so. One of the great insights of German rationalism, especially as developed by Hegel, is that history progresses through dialectics. The movement of human understanding comes primarily from a synthesis of two previously existing understandings. I think Christianity must become a synthesis of the emotional and the rational. I suspect that my preaching and pastoring have been insufficiently emotional, but I don’t mean by that that we should reduce Christianity to the faith of that woman on the radio in Williams. Rather I mean that Christianity must address and appeal to the whole person. Head and heart. Body, mind, and soul. A Christianity with paper thin theology cannot meaningfully address the existential dilemmas of today’s world, but neither can a Christianity that is purely rationalistic, one that operates only in the head. Christianity must be grounded in both thought and emotion. It must express and appeal to both thought and emotion. I’m not at all sure that I am able to form that synthesis. Like I said, I am a very head oriented person. Yet there must be people out there who can do it and who are doing it. They, I believe, are the ones to show us the way forward.