How Negative Emotions are Good: The View from Creation
by By Eric L. Johnson, Ph.D
Western culture loves the mind. We’re terribly impressed with the power of the human intellect and its technological accomplishments. However, while becoming enamored with our minds, we developed a bad attitude towards our emotions, particularly our negative emotions (the unpleasant ones, like anger, anxiety, and sadness). After all, we’re told, emotions are irrational and ephemeral. They surely can’t be trusted as a source of knowledge. The truths of logic, by contrast, are everlasting. So, we come to believe the mind is vastly more valuable in life than the emotions.
We develop this bias early on. We’re told from a young age not to be “so emotional.” And that’s because babies are all emotion. As a result, being emotional gets associated with being immature. Young children have temper tantrums, they can’t reason with their fears, and they easily get their feelings hurt. So, our parents often resorted to quick fixes. “It’s not that bad.” “There’s nothing under the bed.” “Don’t be such a baby.” “Stop that crying!” After a few years, we become aware that our negative emotions are not wanted, so we learn to “put a lid on it,” and keep our emotions to ourselves, not allow them to “get the better of us.” As a result, some of us lose touch with our emotions. Males, in particular, have been socialized to be strong and not let emotions influence them (their own or those of others), so they especially tend to keep their emotions to themselves.
Making things more complicated for Christians, in the church, we may have been taught that negative emotions indicate a lack of faith. “If you really trusted in God’s goodness, you wouldn’t feel any anxiety about the future, you wouldn’t get angry at people who sinned against you, and you wouldn’t get sad when someone you love dies, because they’re in a better place.”
And emotions are also contrasted unfavorably with the Bible. “Emotions come and go, so Christians need to base their lives on God’s word, the Bible, because its truth never changes. When I was being discipled, I remember someone likening the Christian life to a three-car train, with the Bible as the engine, the Christian sitting in the passenger car, with the emotions consigned to the caboose. That way, the Bible alone informs our beliefs and decisions, with no influence from our emotions.
There are good reasons for our culture’s preferring the mind over the emotions. Learning to regulate them by the mind (with the help of others) may be the major accomplishment of childhood. Without that skill, we can’t cooperate with others or benefit from schooling. Plus, negative emotions are by definition unpleasant. It’s understandable that parents would spend a lot of energy helping their kids “put a lid on it.”
The problem I’m pointing to is the stark dichotomy. Mind, good; emotions, bad. For if that’s all we believe about emotion, we’re actually closer to Stoicism, than biblical Christianity. In the Christian scheme of things, emotions are fundamentally good, because they are part of the human creation. Moreover, in the Bible, God himself is revealed as being emotional. Remember his angry reaction to the sculpting of the golden calf (Ex 32:10) and his expressed delight in Jesus (Mt 3:17). That suggests that our emotions contribute to the image of God.
Yet, as a young adult, I was a Christian stoic. I lived in my head and was very skeptical of emotion’s influence on people’s beliefs and decisions. But then I started reading Religious Affections by Jonathan Edwards (1746). In a time of great religious awakening, this pastor-theologian made a compelling case that our emotions are integral to the Christian life. They’re especially important, because they indicate what’s important to us. If we know facts about God, but have no emotion about him, Edwards wrote, we’re probably not actually a Christian.
That book sent me on a journey of re-evaluating the goodness of emotion and its place in the Christian life, and I began to realize we’re using them all the time in our daily lives, at a subliminal level, because our emotions reflect our values, so they’re subtly guiding everything we do. We pursue what we perceive to be good for us and we avoid what we perceive to be bad for us, and these “concerns” inform our emotion system, which has two corresponding compartments. Positive emotions are activated when we perceive something good (perhaps the sight of a friend we haven’t seen in a while) and negative emotions are aroused at the thought of some evil (like the sight of someone who once hurt us). Our created emotion system is, therefore, meaningful – it communicates meaning (analogous to a language system!), particularly our values. So, it is far from being irrational.
What do you think? Is the West biased towards the mind, or not enough? And what about the church? Is it possible for us to find a better balance between our minds and our hearts than we find in the West? And as Christians, do we need to? Please leave your comments below. This is the first in a series on the emotions, and I’ll take spend some of my time responding to your thoughts.
