This is the fourth article in my series titled, Identifying and Responding to Theological Bombs that Threaten the Integrity of our Movement.

In this article we look at two potential land mines: emotionalism and eudaemonism.

(4) Emotionalism

While it is true that most cessationists live in some measure of fear when it comes to their emotions, charismatics are inclined to identify the absence of emotion with spiritual morbidity. We must admit that there is a very fine line separating legitimate, Spirit-awakened emotions, from unhealthy emotionalism often evoked by some manipulative leader.

We can see how the issue of emotion, affection, and passion affects the way a person worships. Packer’s words are spot on:

“In the interests of decency and order and perhaps of social respectability, too, dead-pan physical restraint has long been the conventional way to express reverence in worship, at least in the English-speaking world, and any breach of this norm becomes at once suspect. What makes charismatics more demonstrative, however, is not lack of reverence for God, but fullness of happy love for Jesus Christ and Christian people; anyone who has shared in the holy hugging of charismatic congregations or seen charismatic bishops dancing in church, as I have, knows that. Granted, charismatic forms of emotional expression can easily become an exhibitionist routine, but then cool bodily stillness, with solemn fixity of face, can equally easily be the expression of a frigid, heartless formalism. Between these two you may make your choice, but by scriptural standards there is no doubt that a disorderly liveliness, the overflow of love and joy in God, is preferable to a tidy deadness that lacks both. A living dog, after all, really is better than a dead lion (see Ecclesiastes 9:4”, 186).

 Or, as I like to say, I’d rather have to calm down a fanatic than resurrect a corpse!

 (5) Eudaemonism

 This word points to the conviction among many charismatics that God wills for us to pursue life in this broken and fallen world feeling well and in some altered state of euphoria. One expression of eudaemonism is the belief among far too many charismatics that “physical disorder and discomfort are not ordinarily God’s beneficent will for his children” (Packer, 194). This goes hand in hand with the refusal of many to acknowledge any redemptive or sanctifying value in suffering (be the latter emotional, physical, or psychological).

Many have been taught that Christian growth and sanctification entails graduating from one spiritual high to yet another, and on and on until the believer attains a constant level of emotional blessedness that insulates them from pain, suffering, doubt, and disappointment (or, if it doesn’t insulate them from these maladies, they are led to believe that such struggles are the fruit of their own faithlessness). This perspective is seen in the words from a popular Christian hymn: “every day with Jesus, is sweeter than the day before.” Once we arrive in the new creation, with glorified bodies, this will undoubtedly be true. But until then, honesty demands that we acknowledge the many frustrations, doubts, and spiritual setbacks that come from living in a fallen body in a fallen world.

Eudaemonism is also the reason why many feel condemned, as if a spiritual outcast, when doubts about God and the Christian faith in general arise. The notion that a believer is expected to live in an ever-increasing assurance of the goodness of God leaves those who struggle with unanswered questions and persistent pain feeling like failures who have put themselves beyond God’s forgiving grace.

To be continued . . .