Feeling God As a Way of Knowing God

One of these men is incapable of loving.

As a young Jesus-follower 41 years ago I was warned not to trust in my feelings, since feelings mislead. The emphasis, in one of the campus ministries I was involved in (not your's, BTW, J.P.) stressed rationality over emotion.

I loved this emphasis, since I was Finnish (Finns don't smile, don't cry, don't show anger, don't emote), and a philosophy major. Non-emoting Christianity was a perfect fit for my logic-wannabe brain.

Slowly, over time, I have rejected the myth of the superiority of reason over emotion. I still value logic. I teach it at our community college. This week, e.g., I gave an exam on elementary symbolic logic which, to me, is fun puzzle-solving. Tonight I'll introduce students to informal logical fallacies. And today I'll send in the chapters I have been contracted to review for a new logic text to be published by Oxford University Press. So, I still like logic. Speaking in "Star Trek" language, I still admire Spock. But I also admire the emotional Kirk. And, just as feelings can mislead and are not to always be relied on, so also logic deceives, in the sense that 99% of the world's peoples do not because they cannot think logically. That's why we teach logic and critical thinking in colleges. The over-whelming majority of my students are not logical creatures. What they think is good thinking is mostly not.

Following Pascal, Kirk has his reasons that Spock cannot logically understand. Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point. On le sent en mille choses. C'est le cœur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison. Voilà ce que c'est que la foi parfaite, Dieu sensible au cœur. "The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing. We find this in a thousand instances. It is the heart which feels God, and not the reasoning powers. And this is faith made perfect : — God realized by feeling in the heart." (Pascal, Pensees, #277)

There's factual knowledge, and then there's relational knowledge. For example, it is a fact that God loves you. We can reason this way:

1. God so loved the world.
2. I am part of the world.
3. Therefore, God loves me.

That's one way of knowing that God loves you. But it is, on its own, inferior to heart-knowledge. Hebrew thinking is more Kirkian than Spockian; more Pascalian than Cartesian. For example: "hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us." (Romans 5:5)

The word here "poured out" refers to a rainstorm of God's love that is deluged, not into our nous (mind), but into our kardia (heart). Here we expect an experience of being loved by God. A feeling. A very, very strong feeling. Because love, without feeling, is senseless. Spock, remember, is near-entirely incapable of love.

Something we know in the heart is more than a conclusion we logically infer in our mind.

This is how my own life in Christ began. One day a campus minister spoke these words into my little quasi-logical philosophical mind: "God loves you." Instantly, I "knew" this was true, I felt its truth like I had never felt or known anything before. The inner revolution had begun.