福音派信徒喜歡情感。他們通過教會是否有超自然的體驗來評價教會的事奉。他們會批評牧師講道太乏味太理性，因為他們希望牧師能發自心底地講道。他們看重真誠，憎惡任何類似形式主義的東西。
但在歷史上福音派如此重視情感已不是第一次了。
著名學者格雷沙姆·梅欽（J. Gresham Machen）是二十世紀二十到三十年代動蕩時期保守派長老會的代表，也是歷史上新教的忠實捍衛者。二十世紀美國新教最諷刺事件之一就是梅欽在1936年建立正統長老會時，只招募了一小群保守派長老會的人加入。
為何梅欽只贏得了這麼少的隨從者呢 ？至少部分原是，許多福音派人士錯誤地把情感放在了比聖經更重要的位置，這使得他們沒有積極響應梅欽對自由派的反對。
梅欽自己宗派（美國長老會，PCUSA）的許多教會成員，都不能信服於他的觀點，因為教會裡的其他成員並不認為自由派是一種威脅，對於這些福音派人士而言， 對基督的熱忱就是真實信仰的表現。因為自由派人士經常會展示這種對耶穌和聖經的熱忱。福音派人士認為這並未像梅欽所宣稱的那樣是一種威脅。
同樣，這些福音派人士並未將教義或對基督真理的正式信仰告白視為忠信的可靠標誌，畢竟，一個大庭廣眾之下宣信了尼西亞信經的人依然可以不是一個真正的基督徒。對於他們來講，識別真假基督徒的更好辦法不是看他是否有能力解釋基督的神性和十字架的重要意義，而是看他對基督的愛和經歷。只要牧師、宣教士或教會領袖展現了正確的情緒，就可以被視為是靈裡健康的。評判他們的信仰則是一種誹謗行為。
然而這些福音派信徒卻不相信梅欽的評判。梅欽稱自由派弄錯了教義和感覺之間的關係。自由派視信經與教義為基督徒經歷的產物。因此，他們認為與其看教會的決定或講道是否符合真理，不如看講道者或做決定的人是否有正確的感受和最好的意圖。梅欽，則正相反，他認為基督徒的經歷應當遵從經文中的真理，以便於信仰的主觀層面植根於客觀的真理。正如梅欽所說，「如果宗教僅僅在於經歷神的存在，那宗教就缺少了任何道德品質」[1] 。他補充道，如果基督徒的經歷是教會真理的基礎，那又如何判斷基督徒的感覺是否正確呢？一種選擇是，把教會的所有事情都歸由大眾投票來解決。但是因為每個人的體驗都無限得不同，所以教會在任何信仰和實踐上永遠達不成一致意見。[2] 總之，自由派認為人類情感超越並可以對抗基督真理，這是他們持有的不正確態度。梅欽正確地看到這不僅破壞基督真理，而且還使基督徒們無法合一和相交。
一些保守派新教徒或許會同意梅欽關於自由派的觀點，但是他們並不認為自由派對於感受的過度強調是他們面對的一種威脅。因為，總的來講，福音派愛他們的主，並且尋求榮耀他、事奉他。但是，正如歷史神學家卡爾 ·楚門（Carl Trueman）所指出的，對梅欽所說的這個問題的如此回應是目光短淺的。在當代的福音派新教徒中，楚門覺察到一種對感受和情感的施萊爾馬赫式的強調——那就是，相對於聖經和教條而言，更高程度地重視經歷，這是不應該的。尤其是在當代人們關於福音派敬拜的討論中，楚門覺察到這種失衡現象。他寫道，任何想使人的思想和經歷成為敬拜根基的企圖終將扭曲基督教真理，破壞敬虔的品格，甚至會破壞教會在不同文化背景下相互交流的能力。楚門駁斥道：「讓我們把有關在基督裡和好的簡單、直白的真理作為我們敬拜的核心，而不是關注我們自己的關於教會或其他任何事情的經歷。」
主觀情感和客觀的教義之間的衝突是屢見不鮮的。在宗教改革時期，一些新教徒反對敬拜和加入教會的那些正式標準，因為他們認為聖靈在他們中間的工作如此強烈，以至於這些標準成了真正基督教的障礙。儘管這次偉大的宗教改革運動保護了新教徒免於這種觀點的危害，但是在第一次大復興時期，情感高於教義的觀點在英國和其在北美的殖民地又浮上了水面。信仰復興運動輕率的支持者們把歸信經歷的重要性和功效強調到一定程度，並且預備相應的事工幫助人們擁有這樣的經歷，結果導致了許多新教教會內部支持復興運動和反對復興運動者之間的分裂。支持復興運動的人強調對聖靈的直接體驗；反對復興運動的人認為對聖靈的體驗與正確的教義和信仰的實踐是分不開的。喬納森· 愛德華茲試圖將真假宗教情感區分開來，由於像他所提倡的那些中立觀點的存在，福音派在第一次大復興中誕生了，他們認為主觀體驗和客觀真理一樣重要。
那麼如何恰當平衡主觀感受和客觀真理呢？基督徒該如何正確對待情感呢？
簡言之，我們應該知道主觀是基於客觀的。正確的情感基於並源自於真理。
然而，福音派新教徒以將情感和聖經教導等同的方式理解經歷和教義之間的關係。他們一直處在這樣的危險中。原因相對簡單。福音派新教徒總是想避免陷入形式主義和名義主義，即僅僅履行許多基督教的儀式條例。從邏輯上講，對許多基督徒而言，讀讀聖經，背背信條，唱唱讚美詩或去做禮拜都是非常容易的，同樣表現得忠於基督也很簡單。福音派人士認為，是一顆對真理火熱的心把基督徒的形式主義轉變為對信仰的真實表達，對宗教的虔誠能顯露出這顆熱心。這種對經歷和教義（或其他任何正式的表達如聽道、領受聖餐）關係的理解會很容易變成對情感優先觀點的肯定。只有當信徒清除了經歷的障礙他才能接受正式的講道並結果子。
當然這種對基督教信仰的主客觀兩方面關係的理解的危險性也正是梅欽所要告誡的。一直以來經歷的含義變得如此片面，以至於基督教的客觀標誌——講道、敬拜、有序的教會——在好的意圖面前屈居次席。這些意圖是源於對基督的健康的情感。經驗主義基督教的支持者很難看到情感很容易會變成一種情緒。這樣，信徒對事物的理解就更易於情緒化而不是更合乎基督的真理。
闡明這個問題的一種方式是拿婚姻中的愛打個比方。一個丈夫可能愛他的妻子也可能是愛上「愛的感覺」。通常對愛的感覺的渴望，會令男人們去尋找新的浪漫。由另外一個女子引發的感情會令他認為他對妻子的感情不再是真的了。當然福音派新教徒會說這種感受是不合理的，男人對妻子的愛會在婚姻中成熟起來。因此這種對妻子的愛仍然是真的，即便這份愛已不再因激情而火熱了。一個丈夫對妻子的愛比起求愛或追求時的心潮澎湃，一定要有更多常規的形式。
基督徒的生命也有類似的驅動模式。隨著個人信仰的成熟，個人敬拜、家庭敬拜、集體敬拜都變得熟悉而又習以為常時，信耶穌的第一股激情漸漸趨於平淡。一種維持基督教信仰的主客觀平衡的方法，就是，像夫妻在婚姻中培養感情一樣培養普通的常規的情感表達習慣。這就意味著一個敬拜者不用被推到狂喜的邊緣而依舊能表達對基督的真摯的愛和忠誠。換句話說，強烈的情感並非一定是經歷基督的最佳量標。
另外一個重要的平衡基督教信仰主客觀方面的辦法是識別出，源自真理的基督徒經歷。情感應來自真理，而不是倒過來。這是梅欽想傳達給他那個時代的教會的信息。他呼籲人們向使徒保羅學習，保羅說：「這有何妨呢？或是假意，或是真心，無論怎樣，基督究竟被傳開了。為此，我就歡喜，並且還要歡喜。」（腓1：18）。正如梅欽所說的，保羅對所傳講的道的重視程度要遠遠高於講道時的感受。[4]
的確，對基督教信仰的客觀方面的強調可能會忽視對基督的真摯的熱心，就像只強調經歷會滋生對基督信息本身的漠視。但是最終解決衝突的辦法不是靠基督徒調整平衡，而是靠聖靈的工作。聖靈自己會預備清潔的心，這顆心會擁有聖潔的情感。並且神應許賜下聖靈與之同在的人，是那些正確地傳揚耶穌基督的福音及他藉著死和復活做成的救恩的人。
因此，當教會認稱救恩源於神又歸於神時，基督徒生命中情感的的角色就找到了合適的位置。
1.梅欽，《基督教和新神學》 54頁。
2.梅欽，《基督教和新神學》 78頁
3.卡爾 ·楚門 The Wages of Spin 74頁
4.梅欽，《基督教和新神學》 22 頁.
作者 達裡爾. G. 哈特
達裡爾. G. 哈特是宗教與社會歷史學家，並且是密西根希爾斯代爾學院的歷史學訪問教授。
【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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