Whoever gets sense loves his own soul; he who keeps understanding will discover good.
In an age of anti-intellectual emotionalism and anti-emotional intellectualism, Scripture provides the sanity which both sides recoil from (Ps. 10:4). The balance is difficult and not merely quantitative. Sinful man abhors it, in part because it resists making excuses and resists avoiding application. We, being sinners, have a natural aversion to it, a natural desire to descend into unhinged emotion on one side or unapplied knowledge on the other. God’s wisdom, however, is the only eternal path.
On the one hand, we have the prioritization of emotion. This strain of thought is deep into our culture, an anti-rational justification of action by feeling. ‘If it feels good, do it’ and ‘Love is love’ are two slogans born of this mindset. In many ways, it has succeeded more than mere intellectualism, largely because emotion-without-truth prompts action, while mere intellect doesn’t. Emotion is the hook of the mind on the world, in practicality, and emotionalism’s over-focus on that hook has potent effects, however chaotic and eventually self-destructive.
Emotionalism consists in justification by feeling and by the self, rather than by God and His objective standard. The appeal to emotion has a reigning power in our culture; too many prefer the emotional appeal of ‘My body, my choice,’ to the factual truth of a baby’s murder. Even those who argue against said murder often reduce the case to shame and making the other side feel bad, forgetting that the true problem is the violation of God’s law and the destruction of His image (Gen. 9:5-6).
A significant force in this is the profound selfishness inherent to emotionalism. Emotionalism does not and cannot consider the feelings of others; it is subjective. The only portal it has to others is an unhinged empathy, typically deranged by (due to a lack of logic) an innate assumption that everybody else is like the self. As a result, the self becomes the true center of reality; the emotions of the self, whether natively experienced or projected onto the mother, justify any amount of harm to the child, with whom the self has no wish to empathize and thus for whom the self cares not a whit. A similar function underlies the ressentiment and envy which bolsters Communism, liberal democracy, and other wealth-redistributing, totalitarian politics.
Emotionalism, note, need not be blatantly anti-rational, though at its base it remains so. Emotionalism can attach vast superstructures of philosophy and politics and data to itself. Nietzsche boils down to emotionalism (as I’ve defined it); he just sounds very smart (or exceptionally dumb). Marxism, fascism (to a lesser extent), mere reactionism, and all the rest can assemble massive intellectual justifications- around lies.
Intellectualism is less dominant, in nearly all cases a disguised servant of the emotion, being the lesser power in man’s soul. I see it semi-prominently in the church, however. Some parts of the church, of course, are openly emotionalist (and not just the charismatics). The too common result is a hodge-podge of bad doctrine, scams, abuse, and some blasphemy for flavor. But over in Presbyterian-land, where the Reformed flag flies, we’re prone to retreat into ivory towers of logic, devoid of relationship, driven by what seems remarkably like fear and acceptance of the secularist paradigm to merely know doctrine, without applying it.
Scripture points to the righteous way. We must, on the one hand, know the truth (right doctrine). Proverbs is clear on this, simply by being written down. God has given us an unchanging truth, a truth which we are to learn and internalize (Jer. 31:33). We must know His law (Ps. 119) or we are lost (Is. 24:5). Yet mere knowledge merely damns (James 2:19).
We must not only know but act- which means emotion, the force within will. The desire to honor Him must join with knowledge of how to honor Him. Job was not righteous merely because he knew the truth about God but because he acted righteously, in doing right and in teaching rightly (Job 31, 42:7). Faith without works is not dead because ‘works are the life of faith’; faith without works is dead because faith which does not produce works never existed in the first place, was only a simulacrum (Jam. 2:15-17) and a quick-fading one at that (Mark 4:5-6,16-17).
This proverb implies all this truth in its relation of wisdom to spiritual (and physical, if we are honest) health. Wisdom and understanding are the foundation and progenitors of caring properly for the self and for the world, of prosperity and happiness. Yet without love, without the carrying-out, wisdom and understanding cannot mean anything, for they would never find good (nor, in Scriptural terms, would they be ‘wisdom’ or ‘understanding’). To love is to fulfill the law; to fulfill the law is to love. Love carries out, but it can only carry out what the law sets forth for it. The law prescribes and proscribes, but it can only bless if carried out. Thanks be to God that Christ, who sinned not and bore our sins (Is. 53:12), gives us the blessing which is to eternity, of His righteousness (Is. 61:10).
God bless.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
Colson Potter writes copious fiction and nonfiction, including a weekly Proverbs post and his blog at Creational Story.
