The Big Idea
Some Christians have always sought to minimize and spiritualize Jesus’s emotions. However, the Bible testifies to the intensity of Jesus’s full range of human emotions. Here are 10 emotional life principles drawn from Jesus’s emotional life.
Jesus’s Emotions and Our Emotions
I’ve been studying the Bible’s teaching on emotions, especially the emotions of fear and anxiety. As part of that study, I’ve been reading B. B. Warfield’s book, The Emotional Life of Christ.
In Warfield’s day, as in ours, some Christians were attempting to minimize the intensity of Jesus’s emotions by spiritualizing them, claiming that Jesus a fear of God, but no other normal, human emotions like sinless fear and sinless anxiety. Thus, the first words of Warfield’s book,
“It belongs to the truth of our Lord’s humanity, that he was subject to all sinless human emotions” (27).
Warfield quotes Calvin stating that to deny the full range of human emotions in Christ is to deny the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ.
“Certainly,” remarks Calvin (Commentarius in Harmoniam Evangelicarum, Mt. xxvi. 37), “those who imagine that the Son of God was exempt from human passions, do not truly and seriously acknowledge him to be a man.” (27)
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