If our emotions give us a window into internal ‘reality,’ maturity involves cultivating affections that line up with external reality, with the new creation that’s blooming in this land of the dying.

This is a large topic that, as is the nature of blogs, I’m going to think out loud around the edge of. It’s common in Evangelical spaces to be told that you shouldn’t necessarily trust your emotions, instead we’re pointed to eternal truth found in the Bible. It’s common in more Charismatic spaces to be told to engage firmly with your emotions and that expressing them is important to God.

Those statements aren’t contradictory, and the desire to suggest that we should be careful of immediately trusting our emotions is wise. Just because God feels distant doesn’t tell us very much about how close he is or isn’t to us. Equally, the Proverbs are full of instructions to the young prince to master himself and exercise self-control; we must master our emotions and learn to not act from them. I would suggest that acting impulsively is not just acting quickly but acting based on our impulses; it’s possible to act from our emotional impulses long after an initial trigger.

Equally, the Psalms are full of clear demonstrations that engaging firmly with your emotions and expressing them to God is a vital part of Christian discipleship.

Some sort of reckoning between the evangelical and the charismatic impulses—and this is a very broad brushstroke description of two positions—is required to produce coherent thought; before we could attempt that we would need to reckon with a reality and a question.

The reality: we live in a cultural moment that tells us that our emotions are the best insight we have into reality. I doubt anyone would argue that sentence as a thesis statement, but we are constantly bombarded with the message that if something feels like it’s the case then we should act as though it’s the case. The world of living or speaking ‘my truth’ is not just a world with a competing set of epistemological claims to the Bible’s, it’s also a world that claims that our emotions (and our inner lives more generally) are a window into reality. This is the way of approaching the world that is wary of anything that unsettles or upsets us.

The weaker version of this argument is everywhere in our lives, even if we find the stronger version easy to scoff at. The inclination that if I’m upset then the person who upset me must have done something wrong is basically human. We all feel it. It’s impossible to reach back into the past, just as it’s impossible to know to what extent people several millennia ago experienced the psychological self like moderns do, but my basic assumption is that people must have had that intuition forever. If someone hurt my feelings, then they must be in the wrong.

Yet, if we take that original claim, that our emotions can’t be trusted, we can’t make the assumption that they accurately tell us the state of a situation. Rather, we need to find a way to consider the intent of the person that upset us, as well as the objective reality of the things they did or said. It may well be that we are conditioned due to our experiences to react to particular ‘triggers’ in a particular way. That does not mean the other person sinned against us, perhaps what they said or did presses on an old wound in our hearts and therefore our emotional reaction doesn’t have a huge amount to do with them at all. Assessing these things carefully is part of knowing ourselves, and Christian maturity leads to emotional maturity. Emotional maturity is not a lack of feelings but a careful parsing of them and taking them to God in a healthy way.

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