不只是感受： 情感和委身（中英文）

福音派信徒喜欢情感。他们通过教会是否有超自然的体验来评价教会的事奉。他们会批评牧师讲道太乏味太理性，因为他们希望牧师能发自心底地讲道。他们看重真诚，憎恶任何类似形式主义的东西。

但在历史上福音派如此重视情感已不是第一次了。

一则史例

著名学者格雷沙姆·梅钦（J. Gresham Machen）是二十世纪二十到三十年代动荡时期保守派长老会的代表，也是历史上新教的忠实捍卫者。二十世纪美国新教最讽刺事件之一就是梅钦在1936年建立正统长老会时，只招募了一小群保守派长老会的人加入。

为何梅钦只赢得了这么少的随从者呢 ？至少部分原是，许多福音派人士错误地把情感放在了比圣经更重要的位置，这使得他们没有积极响应梅钦对自由派的反对。

梅钦自己宗派（美国长老会，PCUSA）的许多教会成员，都不能信服于他的观点，因为教会里的其他成员并不认为自由派是一种威胁，对于这些福音派人士而言， 对基督的热忱就是真实信仰的表现。因为自由派人士经常会展示这种对耶稣和圣经的热忱。福音派人士认为这并未像梅钦所宣称的那样是一种威胁。

同样，这些福音派人士并未将教义或对基督真理的正式信仰告白视为忠信的可靠标志，毕竟，一个大庭广众之下宣信了尼西亚信经的人依然可以不是一个真正的基督徒。对于他们来讲，识别真假基督徒的更好办法不是看他是否有能力解释基督的神性和十字架的重要意义，而是看他对基督的爱和经历。只要牧师、宣教士或教会领袖展现了正确的情绪，就可以被视为是灵里健康的。评判他们的信仰则是一种诽谤行为。

然而这些福音派信徒却不相信梅钦的评判。梅钦称自由派弄错了教义和感觉之间的关系。自由派视信经与教义为基督徒经历的产物。因此，他们认为与其看教会的决定或讲道是否符合真理，不如看讲道者或做决定的人是否有正确的感受和最好的意图。梅钦，则正相反，他认为基督徒的经历应当遵从经文中的真理，以便于信仰的主观层面植根于客观的真理。正如梅钦所说，“如果宗教仅仅在于经历神的存在，那宗教就缺少了任何道德品质”[1] 。他补充道，如果基督徒的经历是教会真理的基础，那又如何判断基督徒的感觉是否正确呢？一种选择是，把教会的所有事情都归由大众投票来解决。但是因为每个人的体验都无限得不同，所以教会在任何信仰和实践上永远达不成一致意见。[2] 总之，自由派认为人类情感超越并可以对抗基督真理，这是他们持有的不正确态度。梅钦正确地看到这不仅破坏基督真理，而且还使基督徒们无法合一和相交。

持续的张力

一些保守派新教徒或许会同意梅钦关于自由派的观点，但是他们并不认为自由派对于感受的过度强调是他们面对的一种威胁。因为，总的来讲，福音派爱他们的主，并且寻求荣耀他、事奉他。但是，正如历史神学家卡尔 ·楚门（Carl Trueman）所指出的，对梅钦所说的这个问题的如此回应是目光短浅的。在当代的福音派新教徒中，楚门觉察到一种对感受和情感的施莱尔马赫式的强调——那就是，相对于圣经和教条而言，更高程度地重视经历，这是不应该的。尤其是在当代人们关于福音派敬拜的讨论中，楚门觉察到这种失衡现象。他写道，任何想使人的思想和经历成为敬拜根基的企图终将扭曲基督教真理，破坏敬虔的品格，甚至会破坏教会在不同文化背景下相互交流的能力。楚门驳斥道：“让我们把有关在基督里和好的简单、直白的真理作为我们敬拜的核心，而不是关注我们自己的关于教会或其他任何事情的经历。”

主观情感和客观的教义之间的冲突是屡见不鲜的。在宗教改革时期，一些新教徒反对敬拜和加入教会的那些正式标准，因为他们认为圣灵在他们中间的工作如此强烈，以至于这些标准成了真正基督教的障碍。尽管这次伟大的宗教改革运动保护了新教徒免于这种观点的危害，但是在第一次大复兴时期，情感高于教义的观点在英国和其在北美的殖民地又浮上了水面。信仰复兴运动轻率的支持者们把归信经历的重要性和功效强调到一定程度，并且预备相应的事工帮助人们拥有这样的经历，结果导致了许多新教教会内部支持复兴运动和反对复兴运动者之间的分裂。支持复兴运动的人强调对圣灵的直接体验；反对复兴运动的人认为对圣灵的体验与正确的教义和信仰的实践是分不开的。乔纳森· 爱德华兹试图将真假宗教情感区分开来，由于像他所提倡的那些中立观点的存在，福音派在第一次大复兴中诞生了，他们认为主观体验和客观真理一样重要。

我们该如何正确看待情感呢？

那么如何恰当平衡主观感受和客观真理呢？基督徒该如何正确对待情感呢？

简言之，我们应该知道主观是基于客观的。正确的情感基于并源自于真理。

然而，福音派新教徒以将情感和圣经教导等同的方式理解经历和教义之间的关系。他们一直处在这样的危险中。原因相对简单。福音派新教徒总是想避免陷入形式主义和名义主义，即仅仅履行许多基督教的仪式条例。从逻辑上讲，对许多基督徒而言，读读圣经，背背信条，唱唱赞美诗或去做礼拜都是非常容易的，同样表现得忠于基督也很简单。福音派人士认为，是一颗对真理火热的心把基督徒的形式主义转变为对信仰的真实表达，对宗教的虔诚能显露出这颗热心。这种对经历和教义（或其他任何正式的表达如听道、领受圣餐）关系的理解会很容易变成对情感优先观点的肯定。只有当信徒清除了经历的障碍他才能接受正式的讲道并结果子。

当然这种对基督教信仰的主客观两方面关系的理解的危险性也正是梅钦所要告诫的。一直以来经历的含义变得如此片面，以至于基督教的客观标志——讲道、敬拜、有序的教会——在好的意图面前屈居次席。这些意图是源于对基督的健康的情感。经验主义基督教的支持者很难看到情感很容易会变成一种情绪。这样，信徒对事物的理解就更易于情绪化而不是更合乎基督的真理。

阐明这个问题的一种方式是拿婚姻中的爱打个比方。一个丈夫可能爱他的妻子也可能是爱上“爱的感觉”。通常对爱的感觉的渴望，会令男人们去寻找新的浪漫。由另外一个女子引发的感情会令他认为他对妻子的感情不再是真的了。当然福音派新教徒会说这种感受是不合理的，男人对妻子的爱会在婚姻中成熟起来。因此这种对妻子的爱仍然是真的，即便这份爱已不再因激情而火热了。一个丈夫对妻子的爱比起求爱或追求时的心潮澎湃，一定要有更多常规的形式。

基督徒的生命也有类似的驱动模式。随着个人信仰的成熟，个人敬拜、家庭敬拜、集体敬拜都变得熟悉而又习以为常时，信耶稣的第一股激情渐渐趋于平淡。一种维持基督教信仰的主客观平衡的方法，就是，像夫妻在婚姻中培养感情一样培养普通的常规的情感表达习惯。这就意味着一个敬拜者不用被推到狂喜的边缘而依旧能表达对基督的真挚的爱和忠诚。换句话说，强烈的情感并非一定是经历基督的最佳量标。

另外一个重要的平衡基督教信仰主客观方面的办法是识别出，源自真理的基督徒经历。情感应来自真理，而不是倒过来。这是梅钦想传达给他那个时代的教会的信息。他呼吁人们向使徒保罗学习，保罗说：“这有何妨呢？或是假意，或是真心，无论怎样，基督究竟被传开了。为此，我就欢喜，并且还要欢喜。”（腓1：18）。正如梅钦所说的，保罗对所传讲的道的重视程度要远远高于讲道时的感受。[4]

的确，对基督教信仰的客观方面的强调可能会忽视对基督的真挚的热心，就像只强调经历会滋生对基督信息本身的漠视。但是最终解决冲突的办法不是靠基督徒调整平衡，而是靠圣灵的工作。圣灵自己会预备清洁的心，这颗心会拥有圣洁的情感。并且神应许赐下圣灵与之同在的人，是那些正确地传扬耶稣基督的福音及他藉着死和复活做成的救恩的人。

因此，当教会认称救恩源于神又归于神时，基督徒生命中情感的的角色就找到了合适的位置。

1.梅钦，《基督教和新神学》  54页。

2.梅钦，《基督教和新神学》 78页

3.卡尔 ·楚门   The Wages of Spin   74页

4.梅钦，《基督教和新神学》 22 页.

作者 达里尔. G. 哈特

达里尔. G. 哈特是宗教与社会历史学家，并且是密歇根希尔斯代尔学院的历史学访问教授。

【英文原文】

More Than a Feeling: The Emotions and Christian Devotion

Evangelicals love emotions. They evaluate church services based on whether or not they provide a transcendent experience. They chastise preachers for being too dry or heady because they want someone who speaks from the heart. They value authenticity and sincerity and abhor anything resembling formalism.

But this isn’t the first time in history evangelicals have so valued the emotions.

A HISTORICAL PRECEDENT

One of the ironies of twentieth-century American Protestantism is that renowned scholar J. Gresham Machen, the leading voice of conservative Presbyterians during the tumultuous decades of the 1920s and 1930s and a staunch defender of historic Protestantism, mustered only a very small group of conservative Presbyterians to join him in founding the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936.

Why did Machen win so few followers? The answer lies, at least in part, in the fact that many evangelicals of his day wrongly valued emotions over doctrine, which left them at least partially insensitive to his charges against liberalism.

Many church members in Machen’s own communion, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., failed to be persuaded by his arguments because other evangelicals in the church did not regard liberalism as a threat. For these evangelicals, empathy and zeal for Christ were indications of genuine religion. Since liberals often exhibited this kind of emotional attachment to Christ and Scripture, the evangelicals assumed they could not be the threat that Machen alleged.

By the same token, these same evangelicals did not treat doctrine or formal expressions of Christian truth as reliable guides to Christian devotion. After all, a person could affirm the Nicene Creed, it was observed, and still not be a true Christian. A better way to discern whether someone was truly devoted to Christ was to consider his or her love and experience with Christ, not his or her ability to explain Christ’s deity or the significance of the crucifixion. As long as pastors, missionaries, or church officers displayed the right emotion, they could be regarded as sound. Critiquing their faith was a form of character assassination.

Yet these evangelicals failed to engage a fundamental point in Machen’s critique. Machen contended that liberalism misidentified the relationship between doctrine and feeling. Liberals regarded creeds and doctrines as the product of Christian experience. As such, they considered the truth or falsity of a sermon or church decision to be less important than whether the person giving the sermon or the committee responsible for the decision had the right feelings and the best intentions. Machen, on the other hand, believed that Christian experience should flow from the truth conveyed by doctrine, so that the subjective aspects of faith were rooted in the objective. As Machen argued, “if religion consists merely in feeling the presence of God, it is devoid of any moral quality whatever.”[1] He added that if Christian experience was the basis for truth in the church, “how shall the findings of the Christian consciousness be established?” One option was to put all matters before the church to a majority vote. But because the individual experience of Christians was “endlessly diverse” the church could never have unanimity on any point of faith and practice.[2] In short, liberals had an unhealthy regard for human emotion over and against Christian truths. Machen rightly saw that this not only destroyed Christian truth, but also made Christian unity and fellowship impossible.

THE ONGOING TENSION

Some conservative Protestants today may agree with Machen’s point regarding liberalism, but they do not regard the liberal overemphasis on emotions as a threat that they face, since, by and large, evangelicals love their Lord and seek to honor and serve him. But, as historical theologian Carl Trueman has pointed out, such a response to the problem Machen noted would be short sighted. Trueman detects a Schleiermacherian emphasis on feeling and emotions among contemporary evangelical Protestants—that is, an undeservedly high estimate of experience in relation to Scripture and doctrine. Trueman detects this imbalance particularly in current discussions about evangelical worship. Any attempt, he writes, to make “human psychology and human experience the basis of worship” will ultimately distort the truth of Christianity, the character of Christian devotion, and even the church’s ability to communicate across cultures. “Let’s focus on the simple, straightforward message of reconciliation in Christ,” Trueman exhorts, “not our own experiences of church or whatever, as the core of our church worship.”[3]

This tension between emotions (subjective) and doctrine (objective) is nothing new. At the time of the Reformation, some Protestants objected to formal standards for worship and fellowship because they believed the Holy Spirit’s work was so strong among them that such norms were actually barriers to authentic Christianity. Although the magisterial Reformation safeguarded Protestantism from the dangers of such a view, the priority of emotions over doctrine resurfaced again at the time of the First Great Awakening in both Great Britain and the English colonies in North America. Incautious proponents of revivalism stressed the importance and efficacy of the conversion experience—and geared services to produce these experiences—to such an extent that many Protestant communions split between those who emphasized the immediate experience of the Spirit (pro-revival) and those who insisted that experience could not be divorced from right doctrine and faithful practice (anti-revival). Thanks to moderate positions like those advanced by Jonathan Edwards, who attempted to distinguish genuine from spurious “religious affections,” evangelicals emerged from the First Great Awakening with a commitment to the importance of both the objective and subjective.

HOW ARE WE TO RIGHTLY REGARD THE EMOTIONS?

What then is the proper balance between the objective and the subjective? How are Christians to rightly regard the emotions? In brief, we should understand that the subjective depends on the objective. Right emotions depend on, and derive from, sound doctrine.

Yet, evangelical Protestants have been in continuing danger of construing the relationship between experience and doctrine in a way that puts emotions on the same level as biblical instruction. It is relatively easy to see why. Evangelical Protestants always want to avoid the error of formalism or nominalism, that is, the danger of simply going through the motions of Christianity. For too many Christians, the logic goes, reading the Bible, reciting a creed, singing a hymn, or going to church is too easy and so is an unreliable indication of the posture of a person’s heart toward Christ. What turns Christian formalities into genuine expressions of faith, evangelicals argue, is a heart that is “on fire” for the truths conveyed in the religious forms of devotion. This understanding of the relationship between experience and doctrine (or other formal expressions such as listening to a sermon or partaking of the Lord’s Supper) can easily turn into an affirmation of the priority of emotions. Only after a believer clears the hurdle of experience can the believer move on to formal teachings or practices that bear fruit.

Of course, the danger of this way of understanding the objective and subjective sides of Christian faith is exactly what Machen warned against. Over time, the import of experience becomes so one-sided that the objective marks of Christianity—teaching, worship, and rightly ordered churches—take a back seat to good intentions that spring from a right emotional regard for Christ. Proponents of experiential Christianity rarely see that emotions can easily turn into sentiment. When this happens, the believer’s feelings for Christianity are disproportionate to the person’s understanding of the object to which he or she is emotionally tied.

One way to illustrate this problem is to consider love in marriage. A man may love his wife or he may be in love with the feeling of being in love. Too often the desire for the feeling of being in love leads men to look for new romances. The emotions generated by another woman convince him that the old attachment to his wife is no longer true. Of course, evangelical Protestants would say that such feelings are illegitimate and that love for one’s wife actually matures over the course of a marriage, so that the love is still “true” even if it does not run red hot with emotion. A husband’s love for his wife must take more ordinary or routine forms than the rush of emotion that accompanies wooing and courtship.

A similar dynamic is at work in the lives of Christians. The first flush of trusting in Christ becomes ordinary and routine over time as one matures in the faith and as the practices of personal devotion, family worship, and corporate worship become familiar and habitual. One way to maintain a proper balance between the objective and subjective aspects of Christian faith is to cultivate ordinary, routine expressions of emotion in the same way that husbands and wives do throughout their marriages. This means that a Christian worshiper on any given Sunday may not be moved to the brink of ecstasy, yet he or she can still express genuine love and devotion to Christ. In other words, intense emotions are not always the best measure of Christian experience.

Another important factor in balancing the objective and subjective aspects of Christian faith is to recognize that Christian experience arises from truth. Emotions proceeds from doctrine, not the other way around. This is a lesson Machen tried to teach the church of his day. He appealed to the example of the apostle Paul, who told Christians in Philippi that no matter what the motives of the preacher, as long as the gospel was proclaimed he “rejoiced” (Phil 1:18). As Machen argued, Paul was far more concerned about the doctrine that was preached than the experience or emotions that went into the preaching.[4]

To be sure, an emphasis on the objective aspects of Christianity can lead to the neglect of genuine zeal for Christ, just as an emphasis on experience can breed indifference to the content of the Christian message. But the ultimate solution to this tension does not depend upon Christians striking the balance just right, but upon the Holy Spirit’s work. He alone can create a clean heart characterized by godly emotions. And the particular means which God has promised to bless with the presence of his Spirit are those that rightly declare the good news of Christ and the salvation he has made possible through his death and resurrection.

Thus, the role of emotions in the Christian life find their proper place when the church acknowledges that salvation begins and ends with God.

1. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 54.

2. Ibid., 78.

3. Carl R. Trueman, The Wages of Spin (Geanies House, Scotland: Christian Focus Publications), 74.

4. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 22.

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