The emotional core of love: the centrality of emotion in Christian psychology and ethics.

Elliott, Matthew

When thinking about emotion both theologians and psychologists have struggled with the same issues, and come to many of the same conclusions. Until relatively recently, the majority of researchers in psychology have downplayed and discounted the importance of emotion (Haviland-Jones, Gebelt, & Stapley, 1997; Koteskey, 1980). This is clearly evident in published research, especially research related to love. Searching PsycINFO under the subject heading, "Prosocial behavior," yields 3,316 sources, but there is no "Prosocial emotions" subject heading and the titles of only five publications include the phrase. In my work in biblical studies, research is similarly skewed. The idea of love has been thoroughly examined when it comes to lexicography, historical context, and theology but there is almost no literature that examines the concept in terms of what the loving Christian is to feel emotionally. I believe that this shared neglect has led to strongly negative consequences for research on love, psychological understanding of love, and preaching, counseling, and theology.

This was illustrated one Sunday at my church, in a teaching by a nationally known guest-speaker. I am sure it was repeated hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times from pulpits, in adult Sunday School classes, and at small groups and Bible studies across the world this past Sunday. I can say with some confidence it is in fact taught across the world, as I recently heard it at a Baptist Sunday School class in Lagos, Nigeria. This teaching is pervasive in conservative evangelical circles. And it is false. What is the teaching? Simply this: The love that Jesus told us to have for God and other people in the Great Commandments is not something we need to feel.

The burning question that has driven my biblical research for over 15 years is what did Jesus mean when he said, "The most important commandment is this: 'Listen, O Israel! The LORD our God is the one and only LORD. And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.' The second is equally important: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' No other commandment is greater than these" (Mark 12:29-31; all quotations from the New Living Translation). How we understand the meaning of these verses--or misunderstand it--can make all the difference in how we know God, understand spirituality, and live our daily lives. In addition, a correct interpretation of these words of Jesus can allow us to gain insight into our psychological understanding of what it means to love God and neighbor.

There is no question that love is at the foundation of living the Christian life and Christian ethics. The only questions are what is this love and what does the Bible mean by love?

The ideas that are most often expressed in theology textbooks and commentaries are that there is a special kind of agape love, that it is akin to how God loves, and that it is not emotional. Agape, one of the Greek words for love, is held to mean something very different from what is expressed by the emotional idea of falling in love, for example. In much church teaching, agape is defined in a way that is not akin to (or is even contrasted with) our common every-day use of the word love. This common use of the word is said to cheapen or misunderstand Jesus' meaning. Rather, agape is to be about our rational commitment, our actions, and our will.

Let me give a few examples of this special definition of agape. Many philosophers/theologians have followed Immanuel Kant (1967), who wrote:

 In this context, however, love is not
 to be taken as a feeling (aesthetic
 love), i.e. pleasure in the perfection
 of other men; it does not mean emotional
 love (for others cannot oblige
 us to have feelings) ... According to
 the ethical law of perfection "love
 your neighbour as yourself", every
 man has a duty to others of adopting
 the maxim of benevolence (practical
 love of man), whether or not he finds
 them lovable. (pp. 116-118)

New Testament theologian C. H. Dodd (1951) wrote, "It is not primarily an emotion or an affection; it is primarily an active determination of the will. That is why it can be commanded as feelings cannot" (p. 42). Addressing Jesus' Great Commandment in their three volume, 2,400 page commentary on Matthew, Davies and Allison (1997) wrote, "Love of God like love of neighbour, is not firstly an attitude or affection but--as the example of Jesus shows--a way of life.. This is why, unlike an emotion, it can be commanded" (vol. 3, p. 241; for other examples, see Elliott, 2005).

Many fellow New Testament scholars appear to have never thought through the implications of this teaching, but rather accepted it as common knowledge about New Testament vocabulary handed down from one generation of scholars to the next. However, the implications of separating the feeling of emotion from biblical commands of love are dramatic and far-reaching. I will talk about these more fully in my conclusion, but will briefly delineate some of those implications here to underscore their importance.

In a very practical sense, professionals who counsel those who have grown up in the evangelical church often see the negative effect of divorcing emotion from spirituality. On a long walk with me, a Christian counselor from my church related that a common struggle he sees among those raised in the church is their inability to express their deep feelings and emotions. Before he can even dig into a problem with them, he has to teach them that it is okay to feel.

In one week, I heard three testimonies like this one: "All my life, I was told I was too sensitive and, ultimately, I was made to feel my feelings didn't matter." Although a woman spoke those words, I am just as likely to hear something similar from a man who has been taught in church and American culture to hide and belittle his feelings. I was at a service project, painting for a local school. A fellow volunteer was talking about growing up in a church that taught that emotions were dangerous and should be controlled. That teaching, he reported, allowed him to fall away from God. "Most of the time when I pray about something," he told me, "it is like I am writing a letter. "But, when he heard about a tragedy of a church family and really felt it, he continued, "it was like I was on the phone as I prayed." My friend was learning to feel his faith again. The oft-repeated teaching--emotions are dangerous, volatile, and not to be trusted--often leaves people feeling disconnected from God and emotionally dry and cold.

Another result of an understanding of love that downplays its emotional quality is an unnecessary separation between theology and psychology. If those spending their lives studying Greek, Hebrew, and biblical history are convinced that biblical vocabulary that appears to refer to emotions is actually expressing theological concepts (intellectual ideas and constructs that have few if any emotional implications) and does not not address how believers in Jesus are to feel (Davies & Allison, 1997; Dodd, 1951; Kant, 1967), then theologians and psychologists are left with little common ground. If theologians routinely downplay emotional content in the Bible and psychologists and counselors are greatly concerned with people's emotional state and emotional health--as they should be--it is as if they are in parallel universes with little to talk about when it comes to emotion. We are less able to cross-pollinate our disciplines, since we are increasingly speaking different languages about the importance and place of human emotions.

These are two dramatic results of this kind of teaching about love and other emotions, the outcomes of our false understanding of the Great Commandment. We have believed the myth that God does not care about how we feel. The great tragedy in our teaching, our churches, and the way we live out our Christian lives is that because of our wrong view of the nature of agape love we have often pursued a belief system, a world view, and a list of dos and don'ts rather than pursuing a new heart. Psychological researchers address behavior, cognition, neurotransmitters, and social influences, but fail to address a Christian understanding of that new heart, or the psychological factors associated with heart transformation, especially emotions.

However, many Christians throughout church history have held a very different view. First among these is Jonathan Edwards (1746/1984), who wrote, "we should realize, to our shame before God, that we are not more affected with the great things of faith. It appears from what we have said that this arises from our having so little true religion" (p. 27). Edwards's treatise on religious affections argues strongly that how we feel as Christians is an essential part of authentic Christianity. Love to Edwards needs to be strongly felt. Others said much the same, including Aquinas (1967), John Wesley (Clapper, 1989), and, to some degree, even John Calvin (1989).

Perhaps there is a different way; perhaps the love Jesus was talking about in the Great Commandment is much easier to define than the elusive theological agape but much harder to live out. Was Jesus putting feelings front and center? Jesus knew something about the importance of the emotions: They can give us a real and true picture of who we are; they help show us what is actually in our hearts. Was there, in Jesus's thought, a special kind of agape love? Or is the greatest commandment at its core, about how God created us to feel toward him and other people? By "core," I mean that love without emotion is not love. All ice cream contains milk. It may be cold, it may be sweet, it may be any flavor; but without milk it is sorbet or perhaps Italian ice. There is strawberry ice cream and chocolate and butter pecan but what they all hold in common is the cream. We are asserting that emotion is the cream in love; it is at the core of what makes it love.

Could it be that we were meant to gauge our spiritual lives by how we feel? Could this help us connect our disciplines and research to produce a more adequate psychology of love?

Defining Love

From research in theology, the original texts of Scripture, psychology, neurology, and philosophy--arguments from both science and biblical studies, I am thoroughly convinced that feeling is exactly what Jesus had in mind when he spoke about loving God and neighbor. This is the conclusion to which considerable evidence points.

To continue with my ice cream analogies, I would like to propose that the love of chocolate-mint-fudge-ripple ice cream is much more like the love of the Great Commandment that we might expect. They have the same emotional core. To love like God desires is the 1 Corinthians 13 kind:

 Love is patient and kind. Love is not
 jealous or boastful or proud or rude.
 It does not demand its own way. It
 is not irritable, and it keeps no record
 of being wronged. It does not
 rejoice about injustice but rejoices
 whenever the truth wins out. Love
 never gives up, never loses faith, is
 always hopeful, and endures through
 every circumstance

That love is, to be sure, better and bigger and deeper and focused on different things than its ice-cream counterpart, but both are loves we should understand emotionally. They both refer to an attraction to something we consider good, worthy, valuable, or desirable; both are passionate; both share the core characteristics of that which produces the feeling of love in us (Carson, 1987). In contrast to a Greek idea of passionless virtue (Carson, 1987), 1 Corinthians 13 does not define love but describes it practically. The teaching of that passage also contrasts with the views of those who claim that love is behavior (Fee, 1987). Indeed, the passage specifically asserts that action in and of itself is not love.

Love is the emotion that we feel when we are drawn to an object we believe has value, worth, or goodness. We see the value of ice cream in its sweet taste, in its creamy texture, or its ability to cool us down on a 98-degree day. Likewise, we see the goodness and value of God as we recognize him as creator, as redeemer, as perfection--and our response is love. Unlike our love for ice cream, as our knowledge of God continues to grow and our understanding of him matures, our love grows and deepens. Both loves have the same emotional core, however. They differ in the object of the love, the characteristics of what is loved, not in the emotion of love itself. People love God and other people differently than they love ice cream, trees, or bacon and eggs because of the characteristics of the object being loved, not the characteristics of love itself (Lyons, 1980; Nussbaum, 2001).

Love, many contend, is the most basic of emotions and human motivations; all other emotions are based on it (see, e.g., discussions in Callahan, 1988; Oakley, 1992; Solomon, 1995; Tomkins, 1970). For example, fear is the feeling we experience when we believe something bad might happen in the future to something or someone we love. For this and other good reasons, it is appropriate that we find love at the center of Christian ethics and behavior.

Let me differentiate this idea from the common cognitive and/or behavioral understanding of love in biblical studies in two major ways. First, I am not discounting the fact that many who hold the traditional view may allow for some idea of a feeling of love to be present in the word agape. Rather, I reject the regular downplaying of this emotional part of love as less important and not being in the mind of the New Testament writer. The direct downplaying or, in many cases, undermining of the emotional element is dominant in theology; this, I argue, is not a proper understanding. The vast majority of scholars who argue that emotion in love is less vital and important than reason or theological concepts are misguided. I argue, in contrast, that emotion is primary in these commands and cannot be made subservient to other dimensions of love. I make no attempt, nor do I think it is all that useful to attempt, to quantify what part of love is emotional versus what part is intellectual; however, "love" without emotion at its core is not genuine love (see my first ice cream example above).

Second, I aim to show that experiencing the emotion of love is important and vital for authentic Christian spirituality. Where many see emotion as a possible nice after-glow that sometimes follows from right loving action or commitment, I argue that this experience cannot be separated from true biblical love. The biblical standard is attaining the correct feelings. At the very least, we must reconsider any statement that downplays, minimizes, or specifically defines away emotional content in the text of the Bible.

Although love has, in many theological circles, been understood to be independent of how we feel, I argue that love is about how we feel. Jesus desires our goal to be cultivating a passionate love of God and neighbor; anything less is deficient. This Christian love has characteristics that naturally flow out of holding a Christian worldview. It is not just any kind of love that people choose, but the patient, kind, generous, giving 1 Corinthians 13 love that flows from realizing that their neighbor is made in the image of God, specifically loved by God, and offered forgiveness by God just like they are. This fact, however, does not downplay or minimize the emotional element. For example, in the command to love God, God is the most worthy, most valuable, most perfect being in all the universe. Remembering our definition of love, the emotion felt for him should be the strongest, deepest, and most passionate. As we learn more about God, believing these things to be true and accepting them as our truth, our love grows and deepens. In contrast, love for ice cream is for an object that is finite, can be harmful in great quantities, is subject to our personal tastes that may change over time, and has characteristics that can be easily understood. The characteristics of the love for these different kinds of objects, God and ice cream, are different because of the characteristics of the objects, not different because of differences in the definition of the love we experience for them.

This definition of love, as we shall see, has the power to unite our intellectual understanding with our emotional experience. It also allows us to study love in the biblical record and, I believe, in psychology, in a more helpful paradigm. If we can agree that love is a common human experience we all feel when we see an object as good, valuable, or desirable, our task is to understand why it is felt and how it motivates different behavior in different situations and individuals. Similarly, we can talk about what kinds of love are morally good and morally objectionable and how to tell the difference. We can also begin to understand what the differences are between loving God and ice cream, in our example, in a more helpful sense. This is a more useful approach in both understanding and research than defining our love for God as theological and not emotional where a love for ice cream is "worldly," "earthly," or "all-together different" than its spiritual counterpart. It is very difficult to define or quantify any of these terms.

The definition of love I have described establishes the context in which I discuss love. As I will express later in discussing the biblical vocabulary of heart and mind, I mean the totality of love. This is not an anti-intellectual stance, as I argue that emotion and reason are an integrated whole. Rather, love flows from beliefs, thoughts, and values that surround or are a part of the characteristics of the object we love. It is intimately interconnected to thinking, not independent of it. The love itself is inherently emotional, but emotion itself (as I conceptualize it) is by definition based on and actually part of thinking and reason. Certainly we can use the word "love" in connection to all these things--thoughts, reason, behavior--but we cannot rightly use love in a way that divorces it from emotion.

Thinking and emotion are, I (Elliott, 2005) contend, unified and interdependent. Similarly, Solomon (1977) set forth a theory, "the brunt of [which] is the total demolition of the age-old distinctions between emotion and reason, passion and logic" (p. 45). "What we shall find," he continues, "is that emotions turn out to be far more logical, far more complex, far more sophisticated, and far more a part and parcel of reason than most philosophers have ever imagined" (p. 49). A worldview that belittles or downplays emotion as a lower force than reason underlies much of our thinking about love (a non-cognitive view of emotion). Any flaws in our worldview are what we must deal with first and foremost if we are to come to the right conclusions about what love is. I will argue that the facts point to the total interconnectedness and interdependence of emotion and reason (Elliott, 2005)

This interconnectedness is clearly seen in how the New Testament handles emotion. For example, in 1 John, knowledge, love, and action are packaged together. True knowledge results in genuine love and right action flows out of genuine love. John does not see love as knowledge or as action; rather, the three--love, knowledge, action--are linked together in a unified and interdependent whole (Brown, 1982; Carson, 2000; Marshall, 1978). Interpreters have often mistakenly belittled or excluded emotional love from the triad, based on their world view when the biblical text points to emotion as absolutely essential.

Why Is the Predominant Teaching on the Nature of Agape Love Misguided?

First, there is not strong evidence from any specific text in Scripture that the word agape denotes a fundamentally different kind of love than what we know as emotional love. The Bible uses the word agape for all manner of loves, much like we use love in English. There is not strong textual or historical evidence that there is a special agape love in the Bible. The Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, uses agape in reference to the love involved in idol worship and immorality (Jer. 2:33, Hos. 4:18). Further, other Greek words for love are used in contexts we would expect to find agape--if the writers of the New Testament believed there was a special kind of agape love. New Testament scholars who argue for a special meaning for agape love freely admit exceptions to their special definition of the Greek word (Butler, 1977; Silva, 1983).

Lexicography is pointing to the same conclusion. In studies of biblical languages, lexicographers contend that there has been a tendency to over-define words, building theological concepts into the definition of the word itself that are not actually there (Barr, 1961; Silva, 1983; see also Ullmann, 1957, on defining emotional vocabulary specifically). In addition, the history of the meaning of the word has often been given significant meaning when it may actually mean very little about how the word is defined in the New Testament. So if a word was used in a certain way during the time of Plato and a different way in the time of Jesus, knowing how the word was used at the time of Plato may be interesting but may mean nothing for the meaning to the average hearer at the time of Jesus. Defining the word agape in New Testament studies is a prime example of these kinds of mistakes. A whole theology of love has been built into a definition of agape that would not have been understood by a listener at the time of Jesus and the early church (Nida & Louw, 1992; Silva, 1983). (1) From the study of the text, I argue, a more accurate understanding of agape is much closer to our everyday use of love as an emotion we all feel. This most basic use and understanding crosses cultures and history, as it is a universal emotion felt by all people (Keltner & Ekman, 1994; Levy, 1984).

The idea that there is a special agape love in the New Testament fails the test of logic as well. It necessitates that there is one definition of love in some passages of the Bible and a very different definition of love in other parts of the Bible. If it is of fundamental significance that agape love is very different than a "worldly" emotional love, there is no indication in the Bible itself that this is true. Wouldn't Jesus, Paul, Moses (Deut. 6), or somebody have made it clear if God meant something very different by love in the greatest of the commandments than what we understand "love" to mean in everyday life? However, we do not see a strong indication of a special kind of agape love in how biblical writers use the word. Instead, the actual usage points to it being used in passages like the Great Commandment just as it was in everyday language. (Butler, 1977; Elliott, 2005; Louw & Nida, 1988).

The claim there is a special New Testament agape love also fails logically when we think about the meaning of love in the context of the emotional vocabulary found in Scripture. The Bible contains a wide range of emotions. Emotion theorists in philosophy and psychology have argued, and provided evidence, for the existence of seven basic emotions (Izard, 1972; Keltner & Ekman, 1994); all are found in the Bible. Six of the seven most basic emotions (love, joy, hope, hatred/anger, sorrow, and fear, but not jealousy/envy) can be split into pairs (note, some theorists include surprise, but this is not a significant feeling for biblical theology and spiritual formation). Hope is the opposite of fear--whereas hope is the expectation that something good is going to happen in the future to something a person loves, fear is the expectation that something bad is going to happen in the future to something a person loves. Likewise, love is the opposite of hatred/anger. Joy is the opposite of sorrow. Theologians usually argue that, in the text of the Bible, hatred, anger, sorrow, and fear refer to emotions. (2) The Bible often tells us it is not good to feel these negative emotions--or at least not to live long-term in these emotional places. The command "Fear not" (including its variant, "Don't be afraid") is, for example, the most frequently repeated command in the Bible. However, when it comes to the love, joy, and hope that the Christian is repeatedly commanded to have in Scripture, many theologians contend that these are not emotions we are to feel, but refer instead to theological concepts, truths, or actions.

Could it be that the writers of the Bible write about feeling emotions we do not particularly want to live in--anger, sorrow, fear--but when it comes time to write about the emotions we want to live in--love, joy, hope--these same biblical authors believe them to be purely cognitive or theological concepts? Is it logical for us to understand anger, sorrow, and fear as emotions but understand their logical opposites--love, joy, and hope--theologically rather than emotionally? There are strong indicators that a major reason for making such claims is that many of these theologians have a worldview that assumes human feelings are dangerous or a lower function than reason. Negative emotions should thus be minimized, with positive emotions redefined as theological terminology (Elliott, 2005).

Aside from the fact that this teaching leaves us with a very disappointing and unhealthy emotional life, the meaning of the text points us in a different direction. If we take the command of Scripture at face value, God wants us to live feeling love, joy and hope (Rom. 5:5, Gal. 5:22, 1 Pet. 1:22, Rom. 14:17, 1 Pet. 5:2, 1 Thess. 1:3, Heb. 6:19). Those emotions characterize lives transformed by Christ. That is the kind of good God we serve, the God who has planned for us to feel good things; a God who is able and wants to bring us to a place where our emotional lives are dominated by godly feelings.

In addition, the text of the Bible has no negative blanket statements about emotion. There are no verses that propose that the Christ-follower is to have some kind of overarching generic control of their emotions, that we are to consider emotions dangerous, or that following our feelings will get us into trouble. We do find statements of that sort in Stoic, Epicurean, Platonic, and Jewish writings (Elliott, 2005). (3) A few verses like Proverbs 14:29, "People with understanding control their anger," refer to controlling a specific emotion in a specific situation, but there are only a handful of these. The fruit of the spirit listed in Galatians include "self control" but this does not apply any more or less to emotion than to any other part of life. In fact, the Bible commands that we have more love and more joy and live in hope (Eph. 4:15; Jude 1:2; 1 John 4:17; Heb. 1:9). (4) The regularity in Scripture of the idea that Christians are to live in these emotions reinforces the idea that they are to be grown and cultivated deliberately.

Another reason that a proper understanding of Biblical love (and an adequate psychology of love) involves emotions stems from an understanding of what it means to "love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength" (Mark 12:30). The vocabulary of heart (kardia) and mind (nous) in the New Testament present a holistic view of the human person, holding thought and emotion together. In the use of these terms emotion is considered vital and important in what we do, how we think, and how we understand spirituality (Bauer, 1981; Dunn, 1998; Ladd, 1974; Sorg, 1976). Although there are different emphases of meaning for the same word in different passages, and heart and mind have distinct meanings, the biblical language does not contain the same philosophical difference between reason and emotion that we find in western thought. Both terms are used in contexts that include emotional meaning. My point is that we should not work too hard to differentiate reason and emotion in reading "heart" or "mind," as is common in our academic tradition; and, when a passage of Scripture does emphasize one over the other, recognize that the other is present also.

This has specific application for our discussion of love. When Jesus talks about loving God with all the heart, mind, and soul in Mark 12 and Matthew 22, what is in view is a totality of us. Emotion--in my view--is flowing naturally out of the depths of who we are. So Jesus is not differentiating parts of love, as if mind/reason loves, and soul loves, and heart loves, and understanding each separately can define what love is. Rather, love flows out of our beliefs, thinking, and values out of the totality of who we are becoming in Christ.

We need to acknowledge that emotion is involved in the biblical idea of heart and mind. If we are following God well, we will live in and with the right emotions (Rom. 12). One of the characteristics of evil people in the Scriptures is that they love evil and hate good. The righteous are evil haters and good lovers (Elliott, 2005). By taking emotion out of our definition of loving God and neighbor, we are much more prone to sin because we are natural sin-lovers. To break the power sin has over us, we need to learn to love and desire the good, while also learning to hate the evil both in the world and in our own hearts.

One objection to there being an emotional core to love is that it is impossible (or wrong) to command emotion (Davies & Allison, 1997; see Elliott, 2005, for a catalog of numerous assertions of this idea). If we look at the plain reading of New Testament commands concerning emotion, however, the writers clearly expect us to feel particular emotions in particular situations--the Great Commandment is just one example of many. When we look at the standards of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, for example,

You have heard that our ancestors were told, "You must not murder. If you commit murder, you are subject to judgment." But I say, if you are even angry with someone, you are subject to judgment! If you call someone an idiot, you are in danger of being brought before the court. And if you curse someone, you are in danger of the fires of hell.. You have heard the commandment that says, "You must not commit adultery." But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matt. 5:21-28),

we find commands that we are not able to keep perfectly (Piper, 2006; see also Evans, 2006). Nevertheless, this is a standard that Jesus commands of us. Commands of emotion are neither more nor less difficult. The attainability of a command is not what we look at in order to ascertain if it is actually a command.

The idea that emotion cannot be commanded, which is argued for by many theologians, is not informed by textual indicators but rather by the philosophical presuppositions about what emotions are and how they function. From the time of the Early Church Fathers, the idea that emotions are dangerous forces that must be controlled has been prevalent (Armstrong, 1980; Origen, trans. 1885). This idea is informed by the predominant idea in the academy of a non-cognitive view of emotions. In this view, emotions are separate from our thinking, like a reflex in our body or nervous system. If true, it becomes impossible logically, to command emotion.

If, however, emotions are, in part, inextricably cognitive--based on and integrated with what we think and value--emotions can be formed and transformed by the mind in a variety of ways (Elliott, 2005). As early as Aristotle, some thinkers have insisted that the ethical and moral life has particular emotional characteristics because emotions are inseparable from reason and thinking (Aristotle, trans. 2003; Fortenbaugh, 1975). In this context, the biblical writers had good reason to "command" particular emotions and teach us to pursue certain emotional characteristics. Expectations that the Christian is to grow toward a certain kind of emotional life are reasonable and right, as emotional responses and tendencies are based on a set of unique Christian beliefs that, as they work their way into our hearts, will--over time--naturally produce these emotional responses and tendencies (Elliott, 2008; Roberts, 2007).

The final type of evidence that it is reasonable and correct to consider the Great Commandment as a command of emotion comes from the contemporary academy, which addresses what emotion is and how it operates. Modern science (including psychology) and philosophy provide additional reasons for the importance and value of emotions in constructing a psychology of love.

Unlike the non-cognitive view that came out of rationalism and was prevalent for many of the founders of modern psychology--William James, for example (Izard, Kagan, & Zajonc, 1984; Koteskey, 1980; Proudfoot, 1985; Strongman, 1987; Young, 1973), some major recent philosophical works on emotion emphasize its utility, logic, and importance in ethics and morality. Emotions are based on, and crucial in, cognition. However we define emotions--whether in terms of Solomon's (1976) idea of emotion as judgments, Robert's (1988, 2007) idea of emotions as construals, or Nussbaum's (2001) intricate theory of emotion--there is a clear pattern of thought among many philosophers working in this area. This is their conclusion: emotions need to play a major role in our philosophical and ethical systems because they are an integrated and important part of reason (Arnold, 1960; Lazarus, 1994; Lyons, 1980; Nussbaum, 2001; Roberts, 1988, 2007; Solomon, 1976). This is consistent with the idea that emotional vocabulary in the biblical text does, in fact, emphasize how we are to feel--Jesus was commanding an emotional state in the Great Commandment. When emotion is thought to be a lower evolutionary force that must be controlled and mastered, how could Jesus have put emotion front and center in our life and ethics? However, if emotion is understood properly--as both intelligent and informed--it is both natural and imperative that we grow the right emotions and that those right feelings guide us.

Beyond philosophical arguments, evidence from psychology and neuroscience fortifies the idea that emotion is a higher brain function that is interrelated with reason and logic. As emotional function diminishes, reason declines as well (Cytowic, 1993; Damasio, 1994; Schwartz & Sharon, 2002). Consistent with biblical usage of heart and mind, reason and emotion should not be falsely separated; we cannot make logical love-choices without the interplay of emotional motivation. A non-emotional agape love does not actually exist in any of us. Good and moral choices are informed both by sound reason and by sound emotion--both are necessary components of being logical and reasonable.

The idea that emotions are a lower part of us than reason, that they are unpredictable and dangerous, has for too long informed our understanding of the Great Commandment of Jesus. This view has been informed by false philosophical ideas and theories about human function that have been sharply challenged. They should no longer be used to argue that there is a special kind of agape love.

In conclusion, the evidence and arguments that agape love is a special kind of exercise of the will, commitment, or action is weak and unpersuasive. Love in the Bible has at its core the emotion we know and feel in daily life. Although many people have been taught by the church and by our culture that it is ideal to control our emotions, Jesus taught that our love for God and neighbor should control us.

Why Is It a Travesty to Assert That Agape Love Is Not Emotional at Its Core?

Some contend that it is more spiritual to love another person "no matter how we feel" than it is to love someone for whom we feel love. The love God desires from us, they claim, is much more bedrock, solid, and dependable than feelings. In reality, the opposite is true. It is much better to love emotionally. I have a pastor friend who belongs to the Hell's Angels motorcycle club because he is passionate about motorcycles. He loves the guys with whom he shares that passion. He wrote this to me:

 I gotta tell you this one story. I have
 a friend in the club--a total pagan literally.
 He has become a very good
 friend over the past two years. He
 even stops by my office every now
 and then, just to hang out with me.
 The other day he sat down in my
 office and asked me what I was
 working on. I told him I was writing
 a sermon. He said: "Hey, I've got a
 great sermon idea for you. Why
 Christians shouldn't be such
 **#$^$%^&^%$^ hypocrites!!!"

That man clearly doesn't think much of church or Christians. This Hell's Angel would therefore not hang out at a pastor's office if he did not really feel loved, if they were not real friends. What draws the man to my friend, I think, is his genuine heart-felt affection for the man.

People know if they are really loved as opposed to being nothing more than a ministry project or evangelism target. Emotional love makes all the difference in our relationships and our witness to a hurting world.

The "agape love" that is driven by duty and defined as action is shallow and has an end point. It only demands so much of us and, when we have reached that end point, we are done. Genuine love, in contrast, requires much more of us and cannot be counterfeited. If we feel it, we have it, we know it, and it motivates us to sacrifice and go the extra mile. Genuine love cannot be turned off when the duty is done. Rather than being able to check a duty-driven-love off our spiritual checklist with the completion of a particular action, emotional love makes it natural for us to keep at it, keep going, keep trying, keep loving.

This reminds me of the great love that my grandfather, Ed, showed to Ruth, his beloved lifelong-partner, when she began to lose her mind to Alzheimer's disease. Grandpa sat with her every day holding her hand, just thankful to have shared his life with her--long after she could no longer remember his name. What but a deeply felt and abiding love would propel a man in his 90s to spend his days with a woman who could no longer feed herself or remember his name? Day after day after day after day--and he never minded, it was joy to him. Real love is emotional and it need not fade or lessen. The right kind of love, based on the right things, can be nourished and grown over the years. We should be falling more in love with our spouse, our kids, our God year after year. My grandfather lived that out until grandma died. Isn't that the kind of love everyone needs in life, the kind of love every person wants others to feel for them?

So, we are not aiming at doing more of the right things to grow in Christ, but at building a new kind of heart within us that naturally wants to do the right thing out of love. We must redefine what we pursue. We are not looking for an agape that is only defined by theological knowledge and right action, but rather are to pursue a passionate emotion we feel about God and others. This is better and holier and, I believe, what Jesus has in mind.

Psychologically speaking, we must realize that the study of love must include emotion. The distinction that love motivates behavior, but is not the behavior itself, is an important one. Because emotions are complex cognitive functions, it is a worthy task to increase our understanding of what new thought patterns, therapies, and behaviors can help to grow a loving relationship between flawed people. Researchers need to address emotions if they are to truly understand love. Psychologists who fail to include emotions in their thinking when claiming to understand love may end up with a seriously deficient understanding of it. Emotion is part of the Christian understanding of love, it is a psychological topic, and the emotional core of love has been greatly neglected. It is my hope to see this righted as we understand the fundamental importance of the feeling of love in our motivations, relationships, and psychological health.

The view I hold contrasts with the majority view, which Hare (1993), in his commentary on Matthew, articulated this way:

 In an age when the word "love" is
 greatly abused it is important to
 remember that the primary component
 of biblical love is not affection
 but commitment.... but it is not
 warm feelings that Deuteronomy 6:5
 demands of us but rather stubborn,
 unwavering, commitment. (p. 260)

Rather, I assert, it is not the definition of love that is the problem for the church but the object of the affection. It is not that we have cheapened love by defining it incorrectly, but rather we have set our hearts' affections on the wrong objects, things that do not deserve our love. By redefining love as action or commitment in the Great Commandment, we have allowed ourselves to set our greatest affections on things that do not deserve them when in fact Jesus demands to have our greatest love. If love is an emotion that is based on what we value and believe to be good and worthy, then we will feel the most love toward God only when we actually know him to be the most worthy, valuable, and good.

This kind of love--based on the fact that other people are made in the image of God, are unique, and have great value--motivates the greatest sacrifice and service. The direction, reasons, or object of Christian love for neighbor is totally different from a selfish love.

I believe that God wants us to do great things, the kind of things that can only be driven by passion. In my 2008 book, I tell the story of my wife taking piano lessons, going to the best teachers, and practicing up to four hours a day. But it was for her a duty done, a responsibility fulfilled, the dream of somebody else. She could play well, but was never great. When the duty ended, she was done. She has not wanted to touch a piano until very recently, and playing still sometimes makes her feel stressed--her shoulders and back become tense and rigid. Laura never learned to love playing piano, so the hours and discipline were largely wasted. No one plays piano in front of a packed concert hall if their discipline and practice is not driven by love--they will never be good enough. In the same way, we will never be effective Christians, never impact our world like Jesus wants us to, if we are not driven by love. In a sweet irony, we can never be righteous by doing more, but only by loving more (1 Cor. 13). For many of us, it would be better to do less and love much more.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that in denying the emotional nature of a unique kind of agape love we deny the power of God. It can seem easy to love if we buy into the idea that love is duty, action, and commitment. We can do what is required and we can keep a commitment if we have enough discipline. This love requires nothing (or very little) of the power of God in our lives. Jesus' command, "But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!", requires God's power and work within us to actually feel (Matt. 5:44). Do we believe that God is big enough, strong enough to put him to the test? In not believing that we need to feel a real love toward those hard to love, we deny that God is able to help us feel it.

How we can develop a better understanding of emotional love for an enemy by realizing that emotions are intelligent and cognitive is an example of a worthy area of research that is brought to the forefront with this understanding of love. Biblical ideas such as human beings made in the image of God, the universality of sin, the grace of God, and the uniqueness of each individual can help us form a foundation for genuine emotional love of enemy. Understanding the process of building these values into our feelings, even loving feelings for those most antagonistic toward us, is a research topic of great importance.

When people believe in a non-emotional agape love, they are allowed to remain content in complacency. A love that is not deeply and relentlessly passionate does not motivate us to step out in faith to do hard things. We were made by God to have a passionate love for something and if we do not have it for the right things or persons, we are going to have it for those that are wrong. If it is not spent on God and things he loves, we will spend it pursuing money, or status, or self-fulfillment.

Great harm comes to us when we teach and believe that if we engage in loving behaviors and believe the correct propositions we have done what is required by the Great Commandment. If we teach that God does not actually require that we are to feel the love for him, our faith is stunted. That is the very antithesis of what the Great Commandment of Jesus is all about. In redefining the words of Jesus as action, duty, and commitment of the will only, we absolve ourselves from the need to measure ourselves by the more accurate gauge of how we are growing in Christ. This is why teaching that duty and commitment take us to a better place than the true feeling of love is scandalous.

The very reason Jesus said loving God and our neighbor was the greatest of commandments was to cut into our hearts, to totally eliminate self-deception, to require us to get a new heart in order to get it right. He had a transformation of our emotional lives in view because he knew that nothing but an emotional transformation would mean that we got what his new kingdom was all about (1 John). He used feelings as a measure because feelings get at the truth of what is actually inside us. Duty-driven love is counterfeit.

I fear that the work of theologians who define emotion in the Bible in non-emotional terms also leaves our brothers and sisters working in psychology, research, and counseling without access to biblical truth and insight that could better equip them. The Bible is greatly concerned with our emotional lives and our emotional health. We are created in the image of an emotional God. In this, perhaps we can better integrate spiritual truth into psychology's research and practice. Both our disciplines could benefit from a fuller understanding of how God created emotion and reason to work together in harmony. How should we understand the emotional elements and emotional truth in biblical commands and Christian theology? How should an informed view of what emotions are and how they operate affect our worldview and how we teach Christian formation?

This definition of love leads us to some important questions that must be researched further. What fundamental characteristics differentiate love for objects and love for people? What clues are there to help us find the differences between selfish love and the giving other-centered love we find in 1 Corinthians 13? Is there evidence that shows that those with genuine affection toward their spouse, for example, have healthier marriages? Can we say that those who feel genuine love for neighbor exhibit more loving behavior? Do those who work less on doing the right thing and more on feeling the right thing, exhibit a higher level of emotional or even spiritual maturity? Much work remains to be done on even basic questions in this area.

If we find common ground in defining love, it may pave the way for biblical scholars, theologians, and psychological researchers to come together and significantly increase our understanding of love and the role it plays in Christian growth, evangelism, and building a faith community. We can be more effective in equipping pastors and Christian counselors. As they teach about how much God values emotions and cares about emotional growth and maturity, people in their care will grow. Could esteeming and encouraging emotional expression and emotional maturity--rather than just emotional control--change the way people love (feel about) their fellow Christians, their neighbors, and even their enemies? I believe it can and will, and that is part of what Jesus had in mind when he talked about love being the Great Commandment.

God wants us to live emotionally full, emotionally driven lives. When Jesus said in Matthew 22: "The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments," he could do so because the love of God and love of neighbor can only be achieved with a total heart transformation, a heart transformation that is the result of a life-long pursuit of a genuine and true knowledge of God, who is to be the chief object of our affection.

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Matthew Elliott

Oasis International

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Matthew Elliott, Ph.D., c/o Oasis International, 209 E. Liberty Drive, Wheaton, IL 60187. E-mail: info@faithfulfeelings.com

Notes

(1) Nygren's (1953) study, Agape and Eros, has been very influential in claiming two opposite idea of love are encapsulated in the words Agape and Eros (his definitions of the words are, by design, not synonymous with their meanings in the New Testament). He writes, "When we seek to analyze the structure of the idea of Agape, what first attracts our attention is its spontaneous and unmotivated character.... Agape has nothing to do with the kind of love that depends on the recognition of a valuable quality in its object; Agape does not recognize value, but creates it.... The man who is loved by God has no value in himself; what gives him value is precisely the fact that God loves him" (p. 78). New Testament scholars' ideas of agape most often see the word in light of Nygren's statement, which contradicts, I contend, a proper understanding of love--an emotion that requires an object.

(2) Notable exceptions are biblical scholars who argue for a non-emotional meaning of "the fear of the Lord," hatred as rejection, and God's anger as justice. Thinking of each of these as non-emotional is shaky at best and totally misguided at worst (Elliott, 2005). This is further evidence of the anti-emotion bias of biblical scholars.

(3) Note that the word translated as "passion" in the New Testament appears only in contexts of immorality and has a different meaning than its use in Greek philosophy, where it can denote simple emotion.

(4) For some of the complexities of when we are to feel or not feel hatred/anger, fear, sorrow, and jealousy, see Elliott (2005).

Matthew A. Elliott (Ph.D. in New Testament, University of Aberdeen) focuses his research on emotion in philosophy, psychology, and neurology, in relation to theology, biblical texts, and Christian formation. He is author of Faithful Feelings (IVP, 2005) and Feel (Tyndale, 2008). He is President of Oasis International which serves Africa's poor majority with affordable books and Bibles; his latest project is the ground-breaking Africa Study Bible.