Is Joy Possible Apart from Feelings of Happiness and Delight?
“Many Christians spiritualize the word joy, contrasting it with happiness and portraying it as independent of emotion or pleasure. Some claim that joy is a fruit of the Spirit and therefore not an emotion.” - Randy Alcorn
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....do a quick word study on joy. New Testament uses are predominantly uses of the root word "chara", Strong's 5479, and has hints of grace in it. In the Old Testament, there are a range of words translated as joy, but most common variants of Strong's 8057, simchah, but there are also variants of the word "to shout" or even "breath" (ruach)
I guess we can argue how much our use of the word ought to derive from the etamology, but fun for reference. It would seem that in the New Testament, there is at least some hint that joy ought to be rooted in God's grace.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
The relationship between joy and emotions seems complex to me in Scripture. Likewise with peace and love. Jesus goes to the cross “despising the shame” but anticipating the joy to come. He is not ‘feeling’ joy at that moment, it seems. He lives out joy but does not feel it. This is often the case with love also. You do the objectively loving thing (‘not in word but in deed and truth’) and you may or may not feel all the emotions that normally go with it. But do we feel nothing even in those situations? Rarely, if ever.
So I think Alcorn is basically right—humans are feeling as well as thinking beings and what truly grips our intellect and will tends to grip our emotions as well. Maybe the reverse is not quite as consistently true, but isn’t unusual either.
Peace is an interesting one, and overlaps a lot with both joy and happiness. Are we ever content and unhappy and the same time? Certainly resigned and unhappy is ‘common to man,’ but content and unhappy?
The important part, in my view, is to avoid thinking of human nature in a way that tries to neatly divide our inner life into discrete components that can be isolated. We are not made that way. Everything is intertwined with everything else.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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