Emotional Life of Our Lord

Biography

B.B. Warfield was a Presbyterian theologian born in the mid-1800s to a prestigious family in Lexington, Kentucky. He was a very distinguished theologian, often considered to be one of the greatest American theologians.

But despite this, what I found striking about his writing style is that it’s not merely scholasticism but it is thorough theology that leads to action and exultation.

In his academic career he defended the inerrancy of Scripture and much of the orthodox faith against the ideas of the Enlightenment and the rise of liberal scholarship, while also finding time to take care of his invalid wife and speak out against racism in the United States.

Emotional Life of Our Lord

One of his better-known works, The Emotional Life of Our Lord is written as an apology of the orthodox truth of the hypostatic union during a time when such a mystery was heavily under fire. This book has three chapters, each tackling an emotion, and an unlabeled but very natural introduction and conclusion.

Introduction: Our Lord’s Humanity

The book opens by tackling Christ’s humanity, of which Warfield says there are two tendencies to overemphasize.

One is to assume that in order to be the perfect man, Christ had no emotion. The other is to assume that in order to truly deliver man, Jesus had to be emotional to the same extent that we are.

In order to balance these tendencies, Warfield says that Christ “is meek and lowly in heart and yet at the same time the Lord of men by their relations to whom their destinies are determined.”

Chapter I: Our Lord’s Compassion

What Warfield calls the most frequently attributed emotion to Christ is his compassion.

Warfield asserts that the compassion of Christ is comprised of both internal pity and external beneficence. In fact, Warfield attributes most, if not all, of Christ’s emotions as a movement from internal to external, emphasizing the true humanity of it that we ourselves know.

The Gospel of John uses love more than it uses compassion, but by example John means the same thing. This love is love of benevolence or love of sheer delight in the object. Only once is Jesus referred to as having love for the Father; but it is in that mention of love that it says that His love for the Father is the driving force of Jesus’ whole mission. Alongside this is also Jesus’ love of sinful men.

Jesus’ love for the Father is the delight in the object itself, while Jesus’ love for sinful men is a love of benevolence. However, there is also the love of simple human fondness in the bonds of friendship that Jesus is said to have for people such as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and Lazarus.

An interesting side note that is relevant to the class is what Warfield says about Christian living. He describes self-sacrificing love as “the essence of the Christian life, and is referred for its incentive to the self-sacrificing love of Christ himself.” If we take spirituality to primarily be a living in accordance to what we believe, then biblical spirituality according to Warfield is primarily having a self-sacrificing love for others that is modeled after the self-sacrificing love of Christ on the cross.

Chapter 2: Our Lord’s Anger

Warfield moves from Christ’s compassion to one that may be less palatable; His anger. Warfield begins this chapter by saying that “It would be impossible…for a moral being to stand in the presence of perceived wrong indifferent and unmoved.” And Warfield believes Christ to be a perfectly moral being.

The anger of Christ encompasses indignation and vindictive justice, annoyance, holy resentment, and rage.

The indignation or vindictive justice is an anger towards moral imperfection and hardness of heart.

The annoyance of Christ is a lesser anger and one that might be amusing, but it is an accurate way of describing a situation such as Jesus’ reaction to the disciples turning the children away from Him.

The holy resentment is another indignant anger and rage against unrighteousness which is manifested most in the cleansing of the temple but also in events such as the speaking of woes against the Pharisees.

What I personally want to spend just a little more time on is Jesus’ rage as described by Warfield. The best example of it is Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus in John 11. Here it is said that Jesus “groaned,” but Warfield thinks it means something much deeper. He argues that “What John tells us, in point of fact, is that Jesus approached the grave of Lazarus in a state not of uncontrollable grief but of irrepressible anger.”

This rage is said to be in Jesus’ spirit and not the fullest extent of His rage that could have been expressed. This rage bubbles out into tears that make up the verse, “Jesus wept.”

This rage is against death, and the devil who is behind it. Jesus is enraged that we fallen creatures have death as a reality because of sin, and without His atonement live under its tyranny. Jesus then approaches the tomb of Lazarus as a microcosm of Jesus’ conquest of sin on the cross.

Chapter 3: Our Lord’s Joy

Taking the Lord’s pity in one hand and the Lord’s anger in the other, Warfield climaxes his book with the Lord’s joy. But the thing is, which you may have noticed, each of these emotions in his argument is not isolated but rather builds off of the others.

His anger came from His compassionate pity of us. So too does His joy come from His anger and His compassionate pity.

He finds joy in His atoning work.

There is one mistake to say that the joy of Jesus was simply a shallow joy of enjoying life and removing people’s cares. But Warfield says it is an equal and opposite mistake to say that Jesus’ life was full of hopelessness and depression.

Jesus endures suffering like no other, Warfield going as far as to say that Christ died of a broken heart on the cross, but “nowhere is he the victim of circumstances or the helpless sufferer.”

Conclusion: Our Lord

The brilliance of Warfield’s apology is that by the end you are given a complete picture of our Lord. He does not win you over to the hypostatic union with excellent philosophy or witty arguments, but he shows you the testimony of the Evangelists.

By the end of The Emotional Life of Our Lord, you simply see the two natures in one person. You see that before us we have not a God who does not understand us, but a human being who suffers pain with us and for us. And yet somehow still not a human being who is plagued by the same suffering we are but a God who is in complete control and calls us to imitate Him.

Or as Warfield says it, “Strong as they are—not mere joy but exultation, not mere irritated annoyance but raging indignation, not mere passing pity but the deepest movements of compassion and love, not mere surface distress but an exceeding sorrow even unto death—they never overmaster him. He remains ever in control.”

(If there is even more time than enough to read Warfield’s thoughts then also do this first:)

Warfield finishes by not just being content to have shown us theological truth, but by giving us a “So what?”

Why does it matter that we rightly understand the emotions of Christ and His true humanity against His true divinity? Because if we understand this, then we know that He can truly understand us.

Our Lord, our eldest brother, is with us in our suffering. When we are left in the pits of despair, we know that Christ is there. But we also know that He can drag us out.

On the other side, we also have a model for how we are to approach our emotional lives. That is not to avoid our emotions, but rather to put to death the sin in them. A sanctified Christian feels quite deeply, but is not controlled by emotion.

Further, in Christ’s emotions we actually see HIs atoning work in action.

(If you end up having time, conclude by reading Warfield’s concluding thoughts)