The Gospel Coalition highlighted in a recent tweet a quote from Sam Allberry.
"We don't live in a moralistic age where we need to prove people to be sinners. We live in an anxious age where we need to prove to people they're worth something."
Even if Allberry is right that we live in an anxious age, it does not necessarily follow that a crisis of self-confidence and valuation is the cause, or that words of affirmation are the chief cure for what ails us.
Iron sharpening iron is good, for instance. And so is one man to another. But some take this to mean something which I believe is untoward, and an overcorrection of what men like Allberry are claiming.
Do we see, for instance, Christians rebuking fellow Christians in the New Testament for their feelings? Or do we see God’s people in the Old Testament being rebuked for their feelings?
I do see 'Weep with those who weep,' and 'rejoice with those who rejoice.' And if 'Be anxious for nothing' and 'Fear not' are commands, then so also sympathy must be.
We should by all means preach and minister to the whole person – in ourselves and one another. But why do some prefer to rebuke the emotions themselves, or the people for feeling their emotions?
Some of us seem to me to be affirming the premise that our emotions are who we are and what we should be about rather than a consequence of what we believe is true and good. And I find that deeply concerning, no less if emotions are being rebuked than if they're being affirmed as sacrosanct.
Yet where the prevailing emotions and thoughts of a person are often called a disease or disorder in our day, even when there is no medical diagnosis to explain the depression, anxiety, or trouble paying attention, the Nouthetic counseling method perceives a danger calling sickness what is actually sin. What do they do with this?
To say someone is sick is not to say they are not a sinner. Neither is saying someone is a sinner to say they are not also sick.
Christ in Luke 5:31-32 uses both kinds of language – of illness and health, and of sin and repentance. So should we.
"And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”
The context of his saying this was Pharisees challenging Jesus for eating with tax collectors and sinners. And yet, again, there was nothing mutually exclusive about those who came to Jesus being either sick or sinners. They were both, with no excuses made. But healing and forgiveness from Christ corresponded with his compassion for the sheep without a shepherd.
What does Psalm 94:19 say?
“When the cares of my heart are many,
your consolations cheer my soul.”
The Lord's consolations cheering the soul of the careworn cannot to my mind be rightly substituted with rebukes to those who are overwhelmed with sadness and worry, even to the point of despair. Otherwise, what will we say? Is there a kind of mental and emotional prosperity theology inherent to our assumptions?
Really, now. I think some of us have never read the book of Job. Or if we have, we did not read it carefully to let it speak to us so much as read into it what Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar would have.
And Carl Trueman is right. "Protestantism, with its emphasis on the preached word grasped by faith, is perhaps peculiarly vulnerable to downplaying the importance of the physical. But to tear identity away from physical embodiment and to root it entirely in the psychological would be to operate along the same trajectory as transgenderism."
