DR. JAMES FOWLER
God created all humans with the ability to experience emotion.
The English word "emotion" is derived from the Latin, exmovere, which means, "to move out." Emotions allow us to be moved, aroused, invigorated, and enlivened. To be fully human, as God intended, we need to experience sensation, affection, fervor, enthusiasm, and passion. Without emotions life would lose its luster - there would be no thrill of excitement, no flush of embarrassment, no frustration of failure, no wonder and amazement of that which is around us and beyond us. We should embrace our emotions, and allow them to provide passion in our lives.
Emotions sometimes seem to be so spontaneous and overpowering, overwhelming us suddenly and even violently. They are not demons, however, but are integrally connected to the rest of our being (psychologically and physiologically). In particular, emotions connect with our thoughts and attitudes. People usually feel what they think. For example, if a person feels inferior, it is based on established attitudes about their identity. Some seek to blame the events of life for arousing their emotions, but events do not produce emotion. We cannot say, "That situation or that person made me angry." We have to own our own anger. The situation simply allows established attitudes comprised of expectations, assumptions and perceptions, to bring forth emotional reaction. In his Meditations,13 Marcus Aurelius (2nd century AD) wrote, "If you are pained by an external thing, it is not the thing that disturbs you, but your judgment about it."
Modern psychology is preoccupied with emotions, advocating that people "get in touch with their feelings," and "be true to their feelings." With the prevailing philosophical outlook moving towards "postmodernism," there is an extremely subjective orientation that evaluates everything by the emotional effect that it has on people, and often denies objective reference. This is not unlike the older "romanticism" that was the antithetical extreme of "rationalism." As Christians, we want to avoid both the rationalism of the mind and the romanticism of the emotions, in order to allow for the expression of the Christ-life through our thoughts and feelings.
So, how do people deal with their emotions? There seem to be three main options: (1) To believe that emotions can have power over us and control us, passively crying that we are "victims" of our emotions. (2) To believe that we have the power in ourselves to actively control our emotions by mind over feeling, denial, or the suppression, or "stuffing," of our emotions. (3) To believe that God gave us the ability to experience emotions, and that the indwelling Christ can control our emotions, using them as appropriate expressive agents of His character. The third option is the only one that allows us to have soul-rest in our emotions.
The range of emotional experience is so vast and diverse that it is impossible to identify all human feelings. In the 17th century, in a thesis on the Passions of the Soul,14 Descartes noted that emotional passions were a mystery that science could never understand. Despite the proliferation of the social sciences in the past couple of centuries, his observation seems to stand. We will, however, attempt to consider a few of the more common emotions.
In His Indwelling, Jim | 
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