Note: This is Part Seven in a series, "God's Emotions: Why the Biblical God is so Very Human." Parts 1-6 are available at this website or at www.awaypoint.wordpress.com.
I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does -- The Smiths
In Ira Levin's satirical thriller, The Stepford Wives, a young mother named Joanna discovers that her small town friends have been replaced by sophisticated robots manufactured over time by the town's men. How does she figure it out? The women seem too unidimensional, too perfect, too content to be exactly what their husbands want them to be. Joanna visits the library and realizes that the cheerful, docile women around her had once been intelligent and complicated, with interests of their own. Now they serve beautifully as beautiful adjuncts to their husbands.
Levin's book is meant to be a commentary on the sexist narcissism that lets some men treat women simply as a means to meet their own desires. But in reality, we all have a little bit of the Stepford husband in us, in our personal lives and in our religious lives.
In marital therapy, couples often uncover a "be spontaneous paradox" that has them locked into a no-win situation: I want you to know how I'm feeling, but I don't want to have to tell you. Or I want you to bring me roses on our anniversary, but you should have realized that long ago. Now that I've told you, if you bring them next time I'll just get mad. We want our spouses to have intuitive access to our thoughts, wishes and preferences (though only sometimes, of course, and they should know when).
There are similarities between what we want from our spouses and what we want from God. In particular, we want the psychic fusion that is achieved mechanically in Levin's novel, when the replacement wife becomes simply an extension of her husband's dreams and desires. How many times have I sat through the wedding ritual in which one lit candle is handed to the bride and one to the groom so they can simultaneously light a third candle, then blow out their individual flames? How many times have you?
In a similar vein, Christians sing, "We are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord," evoking fusion of mind and purpose in the spiritual community. The quest of the mystic is to be one with God, to be consumed by his presence. The quest of the "servant-leader" is to be the hands and feet of God in the world. But because we are human, those individual candles never really go out. What people want, inevitably, is that God becomes a channel through which they can work their will in the world. That is the point of intercessory prayer.
What is at the very heart of human desires? To be loved. The Smiths said it. And isn't it interesting that according to Christian teachings, love for us is the emotional core of the risen Jesus, the one who dwells in human hearts and hears the prayers of little children? We move through the world with all of our imperfections and he loves us unconditionally. So, he intervenes for us when it comes time for taking math tests or finding parking spaces, and he forgives us everything short of voting Democratic.
I'm being ironic about how small-minded our self-god fusions can be; how small mine was when I was a believer. But in reality the feeling of being loved and consequently forgiven (and consequently deserving) is both powerful and tremendously empowering. It allows us to love and forgive ourselves and to ask so that we may receive. This benefit accrues to believers whether the Jesus who loves them is real or not.
Approximately sixty five percent of preschoolers, especially those who are firstborns or onlies, meet some of their social needs by creating imaginary friends. One of the appealing aspects of the imaginary friend is that she is at her creator's call -- perfectly available when needed, perfectly absent when not, ready to engage in whatever play activities, conversations or even spats that a child may prefer. Research suggests that these imaginary friendships have real world benefits. For example, they appear to help children hone their verbal skills or explore difficult feelings.
I might ask whether a loving Jesus-friend (again whether real or not) plays a similar role for adults. But before I could ask that, a preliminary question would have to be addressed, because I'm not sure that I know what "Jesus loves me" means. At a feelings level, love means having a sense of tender affection for another person, gaining pleasure from their proximity or even their mere existence. At a hormonal level, it means being flooded with oxytocin. At a functional level, it bonds parents to children and, secondarily spouses and friends to each other so that social interchange doesn't have to be based on rational calculus (which isn't nearly as compelling).
But God loves me, what does that mean? My Encarta dictionary says that within Christian belief God's love is the "mercy, grace, and charity shown by God to humanity." That sounds close. But the Bible says in many places that God is merciful, generous, and full of grace. It also says that he is loving, and I think the writers meant it -- in part because we humans don't know how to conceive of a person-god without emotions. How would we relate to a Spock-god? How would he respond to our emotions? Imagine baring your deepest feelings to an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent supercomputer in the sky -- who doesn't love you. Persons without emotions are the stuff of comedy or tragedy.
To reiterate, it makes sense that we expect Jesus to have emotions. That we say his defining emotion is his great love for us, that we imagine him to offer the unconditional affection that we couldn't get from our parents -- perhaps this should make us a little sheepish. It could be true, but it sounds indistinguishable from wish-thinking. The Jesus of the gospels is emotionally complex. He is not as complex as the God of the Hebrews, but he gets angry at times and he weeps. His emotions, usually, have a sort of proportionality that provides a foil against Yahweh's mood swings. But the Jesus of modern Christians -- especially liberal Christians -- has a bit of that same two dimensionality that caused Joanna in Stepford to become suspicious. Perhaps it should make us suspicious too.
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light, (Revised ed of The Dark Side) and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Her articles can be found at awaypoint.wordpress.com.
Dig Deeper:
Paul Watzlawick. The Situation is Hopeless but not Serious, New York: Norton, 1993.
Evan Kidd. (2009). "Imaginary Friends with Evan Kidd," La Trobe University, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2009/podcasts/imaginary-friends-with-evan-kidd/transcript
Follow Valerie Tarico on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ValerieTarico
Valerie Tarico: Psychology of God: Do Christians Believe God Has Emotions?
Jesus Loves Me - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An Exploration of God's Emotions in the Bible
God's Feelings About Emotions | VerticalThought [April - June 2007]
Valerie Tarico: God's Emotions: Why the Biblical God Is So Human ...
Many people say: "God will accept me just the way I am."
Under this plan, how could anyone get saved from sin? Believing is total commitment and the righteous have forsaken ALL sin and selfishness in order to qualify.
Fact: Without repentance there is only misery and suffering and emptiness and hopelessness and separation from all that is good & holy for all eternity.
God is love.
Saying such a thing is just as valid as saying "God is love," or "God is 172 gods," or "God is Allah / Zeus / the Flying Spaghetti Monster."
And calling something a "fact" doesn't make it so.
The love you feel Jesus has for you is an invention of your own mind. Any "postulating" is done by you. You have no evidence whatsoever that God loves you or anyone else, other than the 'good bits' he does, which are contrived to be effected by God by believers. It's the bad bits you have trouble with, but still excuse these with "God works in mysterious ways" platitudes.
"God is far more emotionally satisfying when you stop doubting his existence."
Again, a patronising assumption that without God, life has no meaning. I and many other non-believers doubt God's existence but still manage to lead full, moral and satisfying lives, with the love of friends and family, caring for others, and being decent, hardworking members of our communities.
The very fact Valerie has been drawn towards the topic may suggest that she is highlighting the fact that because you know nothing of God, you invent a character and human emotions for him. The God of the OT certainly needs a makeover.
You're angry with me because I am supposedly ignorant about the nature of a God ......that you don't truely believe in. You can't tell me that there's no reason to believe in God on the one hand, and that I'm distorting God on the other hand. If you do not even have the conviction that God exists then it doesn't make sense for you to have any other convictions about Him. And if you have no strong convitions about him then it's silly for you to be offended by any claims about him, let alone claims about his love and mercy.
But it's a REALLY great song, that can transport us back to a very simple time in our lives when we were more or less relieved of responsibility.
What it was originally meant to mean is one thing. What it means is another. What does "he sees you when your sleeping, he knows when your awake?" mean? What does "His eye is on the sparrow" mean? What does "step on a crack, break your mother's back" mean?
But, if you consider the idea that the "Jesus of the gospels" and the "God of the Hebrews" are supposed to be the same guy (to those who believe in a "trinity") ... it goes way beyond complex.
The "trinity" character is an imaginary friend with dissociative identity disorder.
The Christian decision arose out of conflict regarding Christ. Was he simply a human, thus not divine? God only appearing to be human, thus not ever really embodied? Or some combination thereof? The two major camps were Alexandria and Antioch. The decision was-- both God and human. The reason was that Christ was then the prototype of human spiritual evolution. You shall be as gods. Notice that the first was Mary, his mother. By her saying yes to the future form.
The other factor was the function of the Holy Spirit. In Greek, the word is neuter. In Aramaic, feminine. It is only Latin that gives the Holy Spirit a masculine cast. Which is why images of the Black Madonna arose in the west; they recover feminine divinity and reconnect to the sacred earth. Western Christianity pretty much ignored the Holy Spirit otherwise.
Eastern and Orthodox Christianity are different. The theology of the Holy Spirit was more developed. So was the idea of theosis; deification of human beings. But that also implied responsibility to help bring along the rest of creation. Plankton to planets. Maybe why the traditional color associated with the Holy Spirit is green.
Like Raphi explains below, whatever you think about the christian religion, the fact of the matter is that trinity results as an attempt to solve theological problems - real ones - not as a decoration to make excuses for more funny paintings.
Nor does it solve anything to point out that these theological problems may not have solutions. Because they are at the core of why religion exists in the first place. Of course it's possible that there are no answers. But it's not even rational to jump to that conclusion just because of some difficulties of interpretation. It's not rational because the monstrosity of life itself is no simpler. And THAT's what cannot be rationalized away.
Of course it all matters a lot how it's done. No doubt about it. But you can't make it go away by insisting on logic.
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. - 1st John 3:16
It seems to me that these statements (just two among many similar New Testament passages) show that Christ does love us in the traditional sense. Indeed, what we mean by love is in a sense defined by Christ's actions. While we were yet sinners, He died for us (To paraphrase another passage from John). It doesn't get much more "unconditional" than that. The very same authors who describe Christ in all his 'emotional complexity' describe him as the one with unconditional love for all.
To point out that Christ is complex in His emotional character, it would seem, is in no way opposed to saying that he has unconditional love for all humanity.
But, you can only be saved from an eternity of heII ... if you believe those unbelievable stories?
That sure sounds like a "condition" to me. --- A very cruel one!