Head and Heart Brought Together: Romans 5:5 in Real Life

The two main purposes of this blog are to reflect on A. The unique, God-given strengths of the charismatic movement and how these can contribute to the mission of the church at large, and B. How we might shore up some of the key weaknesses of the charismatic movement so that it can be healthy and more effective. In my first three blog posts over the last month and a half I have focused on purpose B. I want to change gear for this blog post and focus on purpose A.

Not all Christians experience a defining, turning point conversion moment in their lives. But when I reflect on my life I think of it in two halves - before I encountered God’s love and after I encountered it (note that the comments in this post apply fully to believers who have steadily walked with Christ their whole lives!). Those who have met me within the last 4-5 years of my life know me as an academically inclined Christian who loves to think and teach. But what is not entirely clear from my current life situation is that I was not always this way. As a teenager prior to turning 18, I had absolutely zero interest in academic theology, the scholarly study of the Bible or paying close attention to the Christian tradition. I wanted to study computer science, and saw myself as more of a people/leadership orientated person rather than a studious, academic person. In this blog I am attempting to, as a charismatic biblical-scholar-in-training, point out the anti-intellectualism of the charismatic movement and how problematic this is. But had I not had a profound encounter with God’s love through the immediate presence of the Holy Spirit in my heart when I was 18, I would never have had even the slightest bit of interest in academic theology. And this is where one of the key strengths of the charismatic movement comes into play.

Romans 5:1-5, especially verse 5, is one of those texts that I find myself coming back to time and again, both in my personal walk with the Lord and my preaching/teaching. When I was 18 years old attending a discipleship program in Toronto, I experience Romans 5:5 in real life, in action. I had an immediate, up-close-and-personal experience of the presence of the Holy Spirit in my heart within which I knew that God delighted in me as a joyful and perfect father does his beloved son. The result of this experience was that the pain and trauma that I had been carrying inside myself for many years was healed, melting away in the immediate, visceral, emotional experience of God’s love. I went from knowing that God loved me as an intellectual fact, to being confronted and embraced by the reality of his love for me; truly knowing it. This is the kind of thing Paul is describing in Romans 5:5. Douglas J. Moo comments on this verse, saying “And it is this internal, subjective - yes, even emotional - sensation within the believer that God does indeed love us - that gives us the assurance that ‘hope will not disappoint us’” (first edition, page 305). Notice that Moo seems to anticipate in his readers a reluctance to embrace the idea that a biblical text could be commending an “emotional” experience of God’s love - why else would he need to include the words “yes, even...”? I hear his main audience declare ‘We are good, bible-believing evangelicals, and we don’t base our Christian life on experience or emotions, we base it on the firm foundation of the Scriptures!’ I wholeheartedly agree that Scripture is the highest authority (aside from Christ himself) and foundation of our life and teaching in the church, but the complete suspicion and resulting exclusion of the category of emotion/experience is, as it turns out, unbiblical (see Galatians 3 for another place where Paul appeals to experience as well as the Scriptures to discern God’s will and good theology!).

This is part of why I love what God has done and continues to do through the charismatic movement: You could have preached/taught powerful, deep, intellectually and doctrinally sound theology to 17-year-old David until you were blue in the face. But without the actual experience of God’s love healing the pain and trauma in my heart, I would have remained unmoved and trapped in sin. I arrived at where I am now, someone deeply engaged with and invested in intellectual, academic theology through the route of an emotional encounter with God’s love by the Spirit in the context of the charismatic movement. One of the professors in my undergraduate theology degree once reflected that Christian denominations sometimes have a lot to do with personality types rather than only fundamental disagreements. I think there is some merit to this suggestion. Pentecostal/Charismatic churches tend to attract people who are more expressive and heart-orientated, whilst other denominations tend to attract more cerebral people. Evangelicalism as a whole has a long history of struggling with the false dichotomy of ‘head vs heart’. I am now convinced that this really is a false dichotomy. If we are asking ‘Which is more important, knowing God in your heart or having deep and sound theology?’ we are asking a faulty question, the correct answer is ‘No’. We need both, and therefore we need each other. As Paul so memorably taught in 1 Corinthians 12:21 “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” (NRSV).

References:

Moo, Douglas J. The Letter to the Romans. 1st ed. The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.