Emotions

Emotions, called affections in the confession’s own vocabulary, are the felt movements of the soul, love, joy, grief, fear, anger, and the like, that Scripture treats as a real part of human nature rather than as something beneath the spiritual life. Because sanctification touches “the whole man,” the believer’s emotions, like the mind and the will, are meant to be renewed rather than either indulged without restraint or suppressed as if holiness required feeling nothing at all.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states that those united to Christ “are also farther sanctified, really and personally… the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and the several lusts thereof are more and more weakened and mortified, and they more and more quickened and strengthened in all saving graces.”¹ It adds directly that “this sanctification is throughout the whole man,” though “imperfect in this life,” so that “the flesh” and “the Spirit” remain in conflict “in every part” of the believer until the war is finally won.² The confession does not treat the emotions as a separate faculty exempt from this renewal; they are included in “the whole man” along with the mind and the will.

Biblical Basis

Scripture commands love for God with the whole of the person, “heart,” “soul,” and “might” together (Deut. 6:5; Matt. 22:37), naming what a modern reader would call emotion as the object of a direct command rather than something merely to be tolerated. Paul tells the Romans to “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15), commanding an emotional response fitted to another person’s circumstances as an ordinary part of Christian love. Repentance itself has an affective content Scripture calls “godly grief” or “godly sorrow,” which “produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret,” in contrast to a “worldly grief” that “produces death” (2 Cor. 7:10). Calvin draws out what distinguishes the two: godly sorrow means “we not only tremble at the punishment, but hate and abhor the sin, because we know it is displeasing to God.”³ A repentance that stops at fear of consequences, without this hatred of sin itself, falls short of what the text describes.

Doctrinal Significance

Boyce ties the emotions directly to what sanctification requires: it “includes the whole spiritual part of man” and “is not to be confined to mere outward actions,” since “God’s spiritual nature demands not only spiritual worship, but holy spiritual emotions and affections; and these belong to the heart.”⁴ On this reasoning, a Christian life that conforms outwardly to God’s commands while the heart remains cold or indifferent has not yet reached what sanctification actually asks for. Boyce also draws the connection the other direction: the “outward fruit” of a Christian’s actions and “the inward condition” of the heart are joined so that the latter is “the actual producing power of the former,” not merely a private feeling running alongside right conduct.⁴

Historical Development

The word “emotions” is itself a modern term. Carter, following Kevin Vanhoozer’s and Thomas Dixon’s work on the vocabulary’s history, notes that patristic, medieval, and Reformation writers did not use it; they spoke instead of “affections,” voluntary movements of the rational soul, as against “passions,” involuntary movements that bypass reason and will.⁵ “Affections” is the word the confession itself uses; “emotions” only came into use in this sense in the nineteenth century, once these feelings began to be understood as arising from the body rather than the soul.⁵

The place of strong emotion in conversion became a live controversy during the eighteenth-century revivals associated with George Whitefield and John Wesley. Bavinck describes how the desire to move hearers from spiritual indifference to an “acute crisis” of conviction sometimes produced “convulsions and hysteria, loud screams and cries, wailing exclamations and unintelligible sounds, a flood of tears alternating with dancing and a leaping with joy.”⁶ Jonathan Edwards, a defender of the revivals against critics who dismissed them wholesale, nonetheless “carefully distinguished affects that proceeded from spiritual workings on the heart and those that arose as a result of impressions made on the imagination” in his 1746 Treatise Concerning Religious Affections.⁶ American revivalism shifted further after Edwards: Charles Finney (1792-1875) moved away from Edwards’s emphasis on dread and fear of judgment and toward urging sinners “to make a decision to give their heart to God now, in this very moment,” a more will-centered approach that later evangelists such as Moody continued in their own way.⁶

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t strong emotion in worship or conversion prove that a person’s faith is genuine? Bavinck cautions against this inference in either direction: “We may not infer the authenticity or inauthenticity of conversion from a variety of intense feelings and odd incidents or from their absence.”⁶ Edwards’s own project in distinguishing affections that come from the Spirit’s work on the heart from those that come merely from an excited imagination assumes exactly this: intensity of feeling by itself settles nothing about a feeling’s source.⁶

Doesn’t a confession that emphasizes restraint and order in worship make Reformed Christianity cold or merely intellectual? Boyce answers that the confession’s own doctrine of sanctification requires the opposite: holiness that stops at “mere outward actions” without “holy spiritual emotions and affections” in the heart is not the holiness Scripture describes.⁴ Restraint in the expression of emotion is not the same claim as indifference to whether the emotion itself is present.

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 13, “Of Sanctification,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 13, para. 2. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), book 3, chap. 3, sec. 7. ↩
James Petigru Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Company, 1887), chap. 37, “Sanctification,” 412. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Craig A. Carter, “What Is Trinitarian Classical Theism?” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 2. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 19, “Faith and Conversion.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵