The task given to human beings at the beginning of Genesis relates to the concept of dominion.[14] It is, of all the creatures, this one whom God addresses as his partner in the project of creation. For the Psalmist it is a matter of wonder: ‘what is man that you are mindful of him?’ (Ps 8:4). The human creature is called by God to be his presence in the world; and as the one addressed by God, is equipped by him for the task. The human person has both the capacity and the responsibility to relate to God – to hear and respond to his call, to speak to him, to enter into covenants with him, to represent him in and to the world. They rule the world, mediate the presence of God to it, and witness to his glory.

The Surprise of the Emotions

In October 2004, my mother-in-law died of breast cancer at the age of 62, not much more than a year after being diagnosed. Being the only member of the family experienced at public speaking – and indeed, at running funerals – I was quite willing to take on the duties of giving the eulogy at the funeral service when I was asked to by my father-in-law. In addition, since I was Jackie’s son-in-law and not directly related to her, I could be expected and indeed expected myself to maintain my composure in the delivery of the task in a suitably controlled tone, allowing the mourners to grieve in quiet privacy.

The tears, then, took me quite by surprise. I was not far into retelling Jackie’s life story – from her childhood in London to her arrival in Australia in the 1960s and her conversion to faith in Christ. At some point in this narrative, I was quite overcome by the occasion. My voice quavered; I could feel myself flushing red; and my face contorted itself. I could barely continue to read, because I couldn’t see the page in front of me. What words I could get out were squeezed out through my throat, and I found myself gasping for breath in between watery sobs. Afterwards my six year old son said to me ‘your face was all screwed up, Dad’.

I retell this story not because I am hoping to elicit sympathy but rather because of its ordinariness as an episode of the human emotions at work. The strong emotion seemed to come to me in a way that I couldn’t predict. It was completely a surprise. I was not feeling anywhere near this level of emotion before the service – not even as I rose to my feet to speak. It was as if there were a force outside of me working on me and causing me to lose self-control of my body in a way that was understandable but still within Anglo-Saxon culture somewhat shameful, especially for men. I am not normally conscious of doing things with my body that I don’t directly will. Yet in this moment, normal operations seemed to be suspended and the emotion took control of me.

It is an ordinary episode, but no less complicated for being so. Some of these problems no doubt relate to the difficulty my own culture and gender has with public expressions of emotion. Nevertheless, there is a universal in this particular. It illustrates how troublesome emotions are in thinking cohesively about human being. This trouble pans out in three overlapping ways, to do with agency, the body and reason.

The first difficulty is best explained by asking: in what sense was I an agent of my own sobs? Can I really speak in this way, of an emotion controlling me, since the emotion could not be anyone else’s? The sobs certainly emanated from my mouth and in my voice. They happened to and in my body. But I was not intending or willing to sob; in fact, I was willing the opposite. Yet I sobbed, and not some demon that had entered me, or some ventriloquist pretending to be me.

Second, at the moment of intense emotion, the human being seems to become almost alienated from his own body. Because these emotions are exhibited in such an obviously visceral fashion and yet carry with them unwanted consequences such as the stigma of cultural shame, the human subject may feel that ‘I’ am other from my physical body. There must be then a purer, non-physical form of ‘me’ – to which perhaps I can ascend once I am free of the untrustworthiness of my flesh. Even a more honourably perceived emotion like the feeling of loss shares enough in common with the more base desires of our bodies – feelings like hunger, sexual desire, need for sleep – that in experiencing it we still frequently experience this otherness from our bodies. Indeed, if I am to speak of some ‘higher’ set of emotions, where do I ‘feel’ them if not in my body?

Third, my perception of myself as a primarily rational creature is disturbed by the experience of strong emotion. But this is because of a hidden assumption that ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ are discrete centres of my person, with reason the more nearly ‘spiritual’ or more distinctly human of the two. Yet my strong emotion was in fact tied to rational propositions about the occasion. I did not feel at all the same way about the funeral, at which I had ministered, for a woman in her early forties who had committed suicide – even though the circumstances were arguably more tragic. I knew Jacky as my friend and mother-in-law, and as my wife’s mother and the granny of my own children. I could calculate what her loss would mean for us. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I felt about it.

These difficulties are enough to engender a philosophical, psychological and anthropological discussion of the emotions, such as the US philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum provides in her masterful work Upheavals of Thought – The Intelligence of the Emotions.[1] The task of a theological anthropology, however, is to begin analysing questions like this in the light of a particular context of human life: namely, God. For a Christian anthropology, that context is framed by the themes of the creation of man and woman in the image of God on the one hand and the presence of sin in human life on the other. These two themes are set in tension with one another not just in the Biblical story, but in the existence of every human person. To what degree is this or that feature of my humanity reflect my likeness as a creature made in the divine image to the creator? Or is it in some way a result of that disorder of personhood that stems from my participation in human fallen-ness? But Christian anthropology will also speak of a destiny for human beings. The two themes of theological anthropology have their resolution however in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Theological anthropology, like all properly Christian theology, must speak an evangelical word, in which the image of God humankind is redeemed and perfected. It has, in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, a pattern to which human creatures will one day be conformed (Rom 8:29).

Returning to my troublesome emotions, then: was this event God’s will for creatureliness in me? Or was it an instance of sin’s distorting effects? If God has no ‘body, parts or passions’,[2] and yet my emotions are an irreducibly physical component of me, ought I in seeking to be more like him look to some future beyond or without my body? Or must I think of myself dualistically, as most of the Christian tradition has done, having a distinct ‘soul’ for the purer emotions like joy and hope as well as a body for my appetites like hunger and thirst? Has ‘reason’, or the ‘rational soul’, a more exalted seat in me? What would an account of the human emotions look like in the light of the resurrection of the dead? In what sense can the three problematic aspects of human emotion – to do with agency, body and reason – be addressed from a theological perspective?

The tradition of Christian theological reflection on human emotions has been marked by an understanding of the imago dei as the capacity for reason, on the one hand, and by a view of the human person as consisting of a separate, even independent body and soul, on the other. First, I will show how each of these is a problematic articulation of a scriptural concept. Second, I will revisit both concepts and show how they must not result in either a substance dualism or in a hierarchy of emotions. A theological anthropology which describes the human being as a divinely appointed speech agent offers a description of the place of the emotions in human life without resorting to an unnecessary, unscriptural and unchristological split between the body and the soul.

Two Problems in the Traditional Theological Account of Human Being

  a) The imago dei

The concept of the imago dei is the point through which any genuinely biblical and theological anthropology must surely pass. It is of course linked closely with the creation of humankind in Gen 1:26-28:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.

Exegetes and theologians are agreed that the phrase ‘the image (selem) of God’ indicates that humankind is to be the reflection of God to the creation. Unlike the other creatures, the human being is capable of being the conduit for the divine being in the world he made. The question is: in what exactly do human beings reflect the deity? The assumption of many writers has been that the image must refer to a particular capacity or ability given to humankind. That is: there is some capacity or function that is integral to God that is also fundamental for human beings.

If it is the case that the image of God is found in some capacity that human beings possess, it is not surprising that the imago dei has been understood over the course of Christian history is as the capacity for rational thought. The argument comes from two directions. On the one hand, it is rational thought that most obviously separates us from the beasts and the birds. Human beings could be said to be unique because of this capacity. As fallen creatures, we lapse when we give over ourselves to our passions and instincts, as the animals do. On the other hand, it would seem that God is distinguished as a being by his supreme capacity for rational thought, in knowledge and in wisdom. Human beings are not by being in his image in any sense equivalent to him in rational capacity, but it would make sense to see them as analogous to him in it.

This position is well-attested – even dominant – from the early church onwards. The church’s first major theologian, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c. 180) wrote of the human being as a being ‘endowed with reason, and in this respect like God’.[3] Gregory of Nyssa (c.335 – c.395) wrote of man as the ‘rational animal.’[4] The great African bishop, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) writes in his commentary on Genesis:

Man’s excellence consists in the fact that God made him to His own image by giving him an intellectual soul, which raises him above the beasts of the field.[5]

In this way, the image of God concept functioned as a kind of mediating principle for an analogy of being between humankind and the divine. The interpretation of the imago dei as rationality was then given further impetus by reference to the depiction of Jesus in the New Testament as the logos of God.

The gravest difficulty for the interpretation of the imago dei as the capacity for rational though is a lack of exegetical support. There simply is no obvious biblical connection between the concept of the image of God and any individual faculty belonging to human beings, including rationality. Any drawing of lines between the two notions is necessarily artificial. As Karl Barth wrote: ‘[I]t is obvious that their authors merely found the concept in the text and then proceeded to pure invention in accordance with the requirement of contemporary anthropology.’[6] What’s more, if the image of God in us is tied to our capacity for reason, then the path to our redemption must surely lie in the refinement of our reason by education and enlightenment. But perhaps worst of all: the ‘image as reason’ view is a distorted view of God himself, since his highest virtue, or signal property must be, on this account, his rationality.

It would be historically simplistic to claim that the understanding of the imago dei as the capacity for rational thought led directly to a denigration of what we now call by the almost impossibly broad term ‘the emotions’. Behind this description of the image was an attempt to account for the way in which the fall had affected the human person such that he or she was often mastered by unruly emotions. But if it is in the area of rationality that we are most like God and most unlike the animals, then it is not a great step to arguing that emotions are what we share with the animals, rather than with God. Or – and this is a more sophisticated strategy – the emotions are divided into two distinct kinds: the higher and more pure sort, or the ‘affections’, which are found in relation to the divine, and the more base ‘passions’ of our animal nature.[7] The problem is magnified if human nature is held to be a dichotomy between body and soul, as we shall see.

  b) body and soul

If the imago dei hinges on Genesis 1:26-28, then the discussion of human ontology is a commentary on Genesis 2:7:

Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

How should the ‘breathing’ and the ‘dust’ be interpreted? Were they references to the two substances that together form a human person, the body and the soul? The Church fathers were vigorous in their defence of the psychosomatic unity of the human person against the prevailing Platonic anthropology – which held body and soul to be separable entities, with the person’s true identity held in the self-conscious soul. The Fathers did not accept the teaching that the body was merely the prison of the soul (as was taught in, for example, Plato’s Gorgias 493a) but rather affirmed the goodness of both as created by God.

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