Book Review: The Cry of The Soul
Authors: Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III
Emotions are difficult. They are demanding – emotions want your full attention and they will not be ignored. They are fickle – emotions push and pull you; they raise you up and then drop you to the ground. They are powerful – who hasn’t made a decision that, in retrospect, seemed more emotional than logical? They are inescapable – you can’t help but respond emotionally to life.
Emotions are wonderful. They are intense – emotions demonstrate the importance of life and what is at stake during our time on earth. They are signs – emotions point to the truth that we are more than our biochemistry; emotions point us towards the ultimate joy we desire – God. They are imprints of the divine nature – emotions reveal that we are made in the image of God.
Emotions are difficult and emotions are wonderful. At times we wish we could shed our emotions and avoid the hurts of life. At times we wish we could bottle an emotion and carry it with us forever.
Regardless of how difficult or how wonderful emotions might be, we’ve got them. They are integral to the way in which we were created and therefore they reveal something about God’s plans and purposes for us. In this review of The Cry of the Soul by Dr. Dan Allender and Dr. Tremper Longman III, we are going to take a look at the nature and transformation of emotions. It is my hope that this might whet your appetite to learn more about the emotions you experience.
First, we will look at the nature of emotions. We tend to think of emotions as neutral, which is to say that emotions are neither good nor bad. Our tempers might flare but provided we do not lash out in action we consider ourselves to have acted righteously. We harbor malice in our hearts for an enemy but provided we do not act it, we consider ourselves sinless in the matter. Allender and Longman persuasively argue that this is not the case. They argue that emotions, just like our minds and hearts, are depraved and “as tainted as any other portion of our personality.” We should not be surprised that we feel anger when there is no true transgression of justice, that we feel contempt when we are in the presence of something other than evil, or that we feel shame despite God’s forgiveness. Our emotions are not pure; they are not reliable. They are as fallen as every other part of us.
We may feel angry, contemptuous, or ashamed but that does not mean we have the ‘right’ to feel this way. Sadly and curiously, we tend to believe emotions as discussion-stoppers. We say to ourselves, ‘I feel anger and therefore you are in the wrong. I feel shame and therefore I must be in the wrong. I feel despair and therefore this situation must be hopeless.’ We treat emotions as if they were the final authority – we say, ‘I feel it, so it must be so.’ We can all think of arguments in which someone else has, or we have, used an emotion as a discussion-stopper.
We have seen that emotions are not neutral; we have seen that emotions are not always reliable, and we have seen that we do not always have the “right” to our emotions. We have seen what emotions are not, but that leaves us with the question: what are emotions? Rather than give a dictionary definition, let’s use metaphors: emotions are voices and glimpses. Emotions are voices that tell us about the state of our soul (hence the title of the book, The Cry of the Soul). Emotions are the result of the rumblings in our heart. If we are angry, it means that our heart feels it is not receiving its ‘rights.’
Emotions are the voices that spring from the soul, but we need to realize that we cannot understand our soul without viewing it in relationship to God. Books like Chicken Soup for the Soul do contain some helpful thoughts, but they do not change the soul. Your soul can’t be ultimately changed by good things, only by ‘God things.’ Allender and Longman see that the soul is always understood in relationship to God and therefore our emotions reveal our relationship with God. If we are angry, somewhere in our hearts we believe that God has allowed true justice to lapse. As the authors write, “every emotion, though horizontally provoked, nevertheless reflects something about the vertical dimension: our relationship with God.” It might be our child’s insubordination that provokes our anger, but this anger is not morally neutral; it reveals something about our relationship with God. We are left asking, ‘why won’t God change my child?’
Not only are our emotions the voices of our soul, they are also glimpses. Our emotions give us a glimpse of the troubling truth that we live in a fallen world. Our difficult emotions reveal that life is not as it was intended to be. Our enjoyable emotions only serve to whet our appetite for more beauty than this world can contain. As the authors write, “emotion propels us into the tragic recognition that we are not home… we will never fully enjoy what we were meant to experience until heaven.”
Not only are emotions glimpses of our condition in a fallen world, they are also glimpses of the character of God. Throughout Scripture God reveals His emotions. Here is a smattering of the emotions God reveals: “the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24), “the Lord became angry with Solomon because his heart had turned away from the Lord,” (1 Kings 11:9), “arise, O Lord, in your anger; rise up against the rage of my enemies,” (Psalm 7:6), during the exile Isaiah laments to God, “Your tenderness and compassion are withheld from us.” (Isaiah 63:15). God experiences emotions.
We see this clearly in Christ. We see his emotions in his tears at the grave of Lazarus, in his derelict shrieks from the cross, in his sobs in Gethsemane, in his attachment to little children, in his pain at Peter’s betrayal, in his compassion for the sick, and in his anger with the Pharisees. Some of us are tempted to believe that emotions are below us and the way to be ‘spiritual’ is by avoiding emotion. As the authors write, “in many circles, passionate emotions are discouraged as unspiritual. You are considered godly if you can handle difficult trials with a detached and apparently unruffled confidence. But this conclusion is wrong. There are times when lack of emotion is simply the byproduct of hardness and arrogance.” The emotions of Jesus are a clear condemnation of a Stoic disposition. We have emotions and we might as well be authentic about it.
God does not pretend to have emotions in order to help us understand Him; rather, we have emotions because we were created in His image. Adam and Eve were emotional creatures. Emotions were a good part of our human nature, but because of the Fall our emotions – like the rest of us - are sinfully bent and are not in line with God’s emotions, much as our thoughts and actions are not in line with God’s thoughts and actions.
This brings us to our second point. If emotions were part of our created nature and if Christ died and rose again to redeem us as whole humans, then He must be willing and able to work sanctification into our emotions as well as our thoughts and actions. This is our second point, the transformation of emotions.
Much of modern psychology attempts to directly change negative emotions and attitudes into positive emotions. For example, if you are sad you need to figure out how to be happy; if you have low self-esteem you need to build high self-esteem. Based on this assumption, we try to suppress negative emotions and try to put on positive emotions. We try to change our emotions by sheer willpower or by utilizing behavior mechanisms, such as snapping a rubber band on our wrist to inflict pain at the onset of negative emotions in order to condition ourselves to avoid the pain by avoiding the emotions. I am not saying that willpower and some behavior mechanisms are completely wrongheaded, but I do believe they do not delve deep enough into the human heart. They attempt to deal with the emotions rather than dealing with the soul from which the emotions spring.
If such attempts cannot change our emotions, what will? The authors are right to argue that, “we are not machines that can be repaired through a series of steps – we are relational beings who are transformed by the mystery of relationship.” The relationship that has the utmost potential to change us is our relationship with God.
(Book Review Continued)
How can this relationship change us? First, we need to be honest and authentic before God about the emotions we are experiencing. This might sound easy but it is incredibly difficult. When we are honest about ourselves, we realize the sin lurking in our hearts and “to be aware of what we feel can open us to questions we would rather ignore. For many of us, that is precisely why it is easier not to feel.” We would rather not ask ourselves why we snapped at our spouse, why we envy our classmates or coworkers, or why we can’t stand to be around our distant relatives. Assessing our emotions forces us to ask painful questions about life in the raw and while “all of us prefer to avoid pain… even more we want to escape reality.” We would rather pretend we are fine than deal with our folly; we would rather look away than address the issues around us. But our emotions creep up and force us to acknowledge the pain within us and surrounding us.
In order to authentically understand our emotions, we need to realize that “our emotions are based on our response to how others deal with us.” As the authors argue, “our feelings are provoked when people relate to us in one of three ways: 1 – they move against us (in) attack, 2 – they move away from us (through) abandonment, 3 – they move towards us (in) love. In the context of a sinful, fallen world, our emotional responses to these relational movements can generally be characterized as fight or flight.” This diagram illustrates the author’s argument:
If we sense someone is attacking us, we will either fight against it with anger or we will flee from them in fear. If we sense someone is abandoning us, we will either fight against it by trying to posses them in jealousy or by giving them up in despair. If we sense that someone loves us, our sinful hearts often fight against this through contempt of their affection or we flee from it due to some shame that such love might uncover.
While this is not a comprehensive diagram, we must admit it is probably a good deal more comprehensive than what we are currently using to understand our emotions. Therefore, it deserves our full attention.
So first we need to listen to our emotions and understand them; second we need to come before God to plead for mercy for whatever sin might lurk in our emotions. As the authors argue, “our core problem is not a lack of information – it is flight and rebellion.” Too often we think that understanding the problem is enough. It is good to understand our emotions, but we must then repent before God of whatever sinful stain accompanies our emotions.
How can we understand which parts of our emotions are sinful and what parts are righteous? Given that emotions are glimpses of God’s character, we need to look at God’s emotions in order to determine the purity of our emotions. The authors are right to say that, “all emotions, including darker ones, give us a glimpse of the character of God.”
Let’s take jealousy as an example. There is a righteous side to jealousy and a sinful side of jealousy. God is jealous (Deuteronomy 4:24). He is jealous for our affection. He wants our exclusive worship and He is jealous when we worship other gods. Our jealousy can be righteous like God’s or it can be sinful. An example of righteous jealousy would be a spouse protecting the exclusivity of the marriage relationship against encroachments by someone else. An example of sinful jealousy would be a boy forcing his best friend to give up all other friends in order to have an exclusive friendship. Some relationships are meant to be exclusive and in these cases jealousy is appropriate. In other cases, the relationship is not exclusive and therefore jealousy is sinful. The authors work their way through the divine and shadow side of anger, fear, jealousy, desire, despair, contempt, and shame. If you have experienced these emotions, I believe it would be worth your time to read through this book. If you have not experienced these emotions, please check your pulse.
Now that we have learned how to uncover our emotions before God and repent of our sinful tendencies, we can pray for God to transform our emotions and look to God to accomplish that transformation. We pray to God, “for it is God who works in us both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). We do not have access to our hearts. We can’t tinker with them and therefore we can’t transform with our emotions. We need God to transform our emotions. In addition to prayer, adoration transforms us more and more into the image of God. When we look to God in worship we become more and more like God. God has built us in such a way that we become like what we worship. If we worship money, everything comes with a price tag. If we worship power, everything becomes a threat to our power. If we worship God and submit ourselves to Him, we will conform more and more into His image and not only think more in line with His thoughts and act more in line with His actions but we will feel more in line with His emotions. Our hearts will be broken by the corruption that breaks God’s heart, our loves will be ordered according to His loves, and our joys will be rich because they will be the very joys of God.
Given our look at emotions, I thought it would be appropriate to turn our attention to a passion fueled book: Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy. This is Vanauken’s autobiographical look at his blissful romance with his wife, their friendship with CS Lewis, his wife’s death, and the severity and tenderness of the love of God. We will look at this book in two months.