Understanding Conservative Christianity, Part 6

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

The Religious Affections

In the last essay I argued that we are not allowed to make up the elements of worship, and if we were, we could not be trusted to know where to stop. Those who doubt this thesis are invited to glance over the circus that calls itself evangelicalism today. This should be adequate proof that we cannot be trusted to invent the worship or order of the church for ourselves.

That being said, we face something of the same problem even in structuring the circumstances of worship. In the nature of the case, we must choose circumstances, and we may choose well or poorly. Our selection of circumstances may debase the authorized elements of order and worship. Therefore, the problem for us is, how can we tell which circumstances are useful to the church and which are detrimental?

Conservative Christians answer that question by focusing on the religious affections. Indeed, recognizing the importance of the affections is one of the principal features of conservative Christianity. Conservative Christians believe that orthopathy (right affection) is equal in importance with orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right conduct). Our choice of circumstances must be guided by a knowledge of what will foster ordinate affection (right feeling) toward God, toward holy things, toward our fellow humans, and toward the world.

According to Scripture, all right knowledge flows from right affection. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. Ordinate affections are a way of knowing, and wrong affections (passions or appetites) are capable of overwhelming understanding and overthrowing our piety.

Unfortunately, we live in a day when the distinction between affections and appetites has been lost. In the absence of this distinction, religious entrepreneurs have discovered what Madison Avenue salesmen have long known, namely, that people can be manipulated most easily by appealing to those varieties of emotion that used to be classified as passions. Not surprisingly, we now find ourselves awash in a sea of unregulated religious appetite.

Even fundamentalists have not avoided the problem. The antics of pragmatist fundamentalism will never foster a reverential love toward God. They constitute a methodological liberalism that is as obnoxious to conservative Christianity as theological liberalism.

Conservative Christians believe that heteropathy threatens the Faith as seriously as heterodoxy or heteropraxy. Therefore, they hold heteropathic fundamentalists to be just as badly in error as modernist liberals or prelatic sacerdotalists. Indeed, they believe that heteropathy (at least in its more serious manifestations) may be an apostasy, a departure from the faith once-for-all delivered to the saints.

How do we foster ordinate affections? First, we must learn to distinguish passions and appetites from right sensibilities. This requires us to learn to make distinctions between different shades of the same emotions. There is one love for spouse, another for offspring, yet another for parents or country. Not every love is worthy of being offered to God. There is a natural fear of vicious animals, a different fear of precipices, and yet another fear of failing an exam. We ought to fear God, but not with every kind of fear. The same may be said of every other affection, and we should become skilled at recognizing these distinctions before we assume the responsibility of teaching people how to feel about God.

We must also grasp the importance of the moral imagination. Unseen realities must be imagined, and they are imagined by the use of analogies. The most important unseen realities are moral. Our minds must be furnished with images that will help us to understand the true nature of these realities.

Indeed, God Himself is an unseen reality. That is why we are forbidden to make graven images of His likeness. The Bible, however, does not stint in its use of imagery to help us understand God’s nature. God is depicted as a shepherd, a wall, a strong tower, a husband, a warrior, a planter, and dozens of other things. These images shape our thinking, but they also reach beyond our reason and lay hold of our hearts. They teach us how God ought to be loved, feared, and enjoyed.

It is no use talking about loving God until we have some idea what kind of love He deserves. It is pointless to say that we mean to enjoy God forever if we are enjoying Him in a manner that debases His character. True, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him, but only when the quality of our satisfaction is suited to His nature. One does not enjoy holy things in the way that a drunkard enjoys a whiskey.

If we are serious about the affections, we will be on the alert for both sentimentality and brutality. We become sentimental when we love a thing more, or more sweetly, than is suited to its nature. We become brutal when we love a thing less, or more coarsely, than is suited to its nature. We sentimentalize God when we love Him for reasons that are really insignificant, and we become brutal when we neglect to love Him for who He is.

Sentimentalism and brutality are both forms of idolatry, and they are rife within American evangelicalism and fundamentalism. There is a whole class of hymnody in which Jesus is depicted more-or-less as the Christian’s boyfriend, and another class in which He is portrayed as the believer’s pal, buddy, or chum. In some circles the Lord is applauded as if He were a sports hero or a movie star. In others He receives the kind of adoration that teenage girls heap upon rock musicians. In most of American evangelicalism and fundamentalism, God is viewed as a kind of celestial dispensing machine who, in return for a few words of worship, will reward the worshipper with all sorts of good things. He is the cure and help for our loneliness, our financial difficulties, our codependencies, our fractured relationships, our eating disorders, perhaps our physical illnesses, and certainly the multiplicity of stresses that we meet in day-by-day life. Such a God exists purely to serve the worshipper, and He is the result of a religion that panders to the debased appetites of the worshipper.

Because they recognize the importance of ordinate affections, conservative Christians learn to distinguish affection from appetite. Indeed, they learn to recognize all sorts of shades and gradations within the broad categories that we typically use to describe our emotional states. They wrestle seriously with the problem of discerning what feelings ought to be attached to which objects. They develop skill at judging the emotional meaning that is fostered by the various circumstances of their worship. They reject sentimentalism and brutality. They regulate both their private devotion and their public worship according to ordinate affection. Without such sensibility, Christianity becomes a hollow shell.

God’s Two Dwellings

Thomas Washbourne (1606-1687)

Lord thou hast told us that there be
Two dwellings which belong to thee,
And Those two, that’s the wonder,
Are far asunder.

The one the highest heaven is,
The mansions of eternal bliss;
The other’s the contrite
And humble sprite.

Not like the princes of the earth,
Who think it much below their birth
To come within the door
Of people poor.

No, such is thy humility,
That though thy dwelling be on high,
Thou dost thyself abase
To the lowest place.

Where’er thou seest a sinful soul
Deploring his offences foul,
To him thou wilt descend,
And be his friend.

Thou wilt come in, and with him sup,
And from a low state raise him up,
Till thou hast made him eat
Blest angel’s meat.

Thus thou wilt him with honour crown
Who in himself is first cast down,
And humbled for his sins,
That thy love wins.

Though heaven be high, the gate is low,
And he that comes in there must bow:
The lofty looks shall ne’er
Have entrance there.

O God! since thou delight’st to rest
In the humble contrite breast
First make me so to be,
Then dwell with me.

This essay is by Dr. Kevin T. Bauder, president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). Not every professor, student, or alumnus of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.