Share this post on:

Had I some kind of veto power over Christian conversations and teaching, I’d call a moratorium on any Christian speaking about “emotions” until he or she had read Religious Affections by Jonathan Edwards. It’s that helpful.

It is not merely that the older concepts of affections and passions is more precise than the modern concept of emotions. It is that Edwards thought very carefully about the difference between affections produced by hype and hysteria, and those produced by the Spirit of God.

Circumstance compelled him. During the First Great Awakening, there were both true and false affections in generous quantities. There was wailing, weeping, and laughing aplenty in New England, but how was one to tell the genuine from the counterfeit by mere surface judgements? To bring it home to our day, how does one judge the emotion in a modern worship service to be phoney or authentic?

Edwards begins by claiming religious affections are essential to authentic Christianity. Since Scripture presents the greatest saints as being profoundly moved by divine truths, Edwards concludes that spiritual affections—when grounded in truth—are a necessary mark of a regenerate heart.

In the second part, Edwards warns against several external and internal signs that may seem like evidence of true faith but are ultimately unreliable. These include intense feelings, experiencing supernatural phenomena, having extreme zeal for spiritual things, and having a high intellectual interest in the things of God.

He goes on to suggest twelve “distinguishing marks of authentic affections”, which are wrought by the Holy Spirit, and cannot be counterfeited. I won’t include any spoilers here.

Once we understand the difference between spiritual desires and mere feelings, we are already on a better footing than those who give us platitudes and commonplaces about “emotionalism” or “dead orthodoxy”. To then begin evaluating affections for their source and their fruit will liberate us from dead-end arguments about how much emotion is permissible in religion. Indeed, Edwards answered that:

“I don’t think ministers are to be blamed for raising the affections of their hearers too high, if that which they are affected with be only that which is worthy of affection, and their affections are not raised beyond a proportion to their importance, or worthiness of affection. 

I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as possibly I can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with.”

Make it your goal to read Religious Affections at least once in your life. If you do, you’ll likely need little persuasion to read it again.

Share this post on:

Leave a Reply