The Pendulum of Praise: Emotionalism vs. Intellectualism
When generations that exist after we have long passed away recount our current age, what shall they conclude concerning our worship? Will it be considered a doxological dark age or an age of doxological enlightenment?
As I study the ministry of praise throughout the church age, it appears the pendulum has swung back and forth rarely finding equilibrium. And if it has managed to settle somewhere between the two extremes of the trajectory this doxological pendulum swings upon, it has settled only for a moment. For in short time, some outward force has grabbed hold of the theology of worship and, being unsatisfied with a balanced position, aggressively given the pendulum a swing in one directional extreme or another.
In speaking of the back-and-forth nature of the church’s doxology, it is necessary to identify the apex of both ends. What is the outer limit which man’s understanding of corporate praise can swing before it exhausts it’s energy and must swing in the opposite direction?
The answer? It’s complicated.
This pendulum does not simply swing back and forth along a simple plane. But rather, it exists in three dimensions swinging not only backwards and forwards but also side to side and also up and down and also any direction you may imagine.
Despite the spatial challenges of the analogy, perhaps we can do our best by identifying contrasting apex points on the axes we can ascertain.
The first axis that catches our attention is that of emotionalism and intellectualism. Some may call this the contrast between Spirit and truth. While I personally disagree that Spirit equates to the emotional side of worship and truth to the intellectual, it is nonetheless how many find it helpful to understand this plane of pendulous motion.
What are these extremes?
Without preference for one or the other, let’s examine emotionalism. In traditional pendulum-extremed fashion, to swing completely in one direction is to forsake the other direction. Therefore, emotionalism focuses solely on emotion and forsakes truth altogether!
In this type of worship, the faithful use any means necessary to incite an emotional response to some deific being. Which deity you ask? Well, these fanatics aren’t quite sure. Come to think of it, they have never taken the time to define their object of worship at all! They simply know that when they feel a certain emotion, that means that they are worshiping this sacred object. In the end, the thing they worship becomes the very emotion itself!
At the other end of the miles-long trajectory sits the proud, boasting of intellectualism. It scoffs across the chasm at it’s infantile sibling.
“They don’t even know the God they worship!” It mocks. “We know the complexities of the Trinitarian God. The inner workings of His very tri-personal nature. Give us a pop quiz on how we come to God in worship and with amazing haste we will scribble down the answer: we come to God the Father, through Jesus Christ the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit!”
They sing hymns of rich theology:
O God our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
They sing praise with a well-curated hymnal in one hand and a Septuagint in the other (they can fluently read Greek, you know!)
Their worship is filled with creeds and confessions, lofty language and lyrics, and theological concepts most seminarians have long forgotten. And the amazing part is after learning about the vast riches of mercy and grace God pours out on them - it being dictated to them in clinical terms the laity could never hope to understand?…
…
They feel none of it! It is simply a mental exercise for these faithful gatherers of knowledge.
For the devotees of that proud god Intellect, to know God is to know God but not to love Him. For they are incapable of feeling any emotions at all because they have long ago saddled anything that even remotely resembles emotion upon a mighty catapult and flung it over the divide they sneer across.
Or perhaps it could be said they have tumbled it down the mighty summit of their great Mount Intellect from which they look down upon the rest of the infantile believers who are still drinking from bottles of spiritual milk at the bottom of the mountain. “We have filet mignon up here! Real spiritual meat!” They jeer. “Perhaps someday when you gain the strength you can come up and join us.”
Just as the extreme of emotionalism makes emotion a god, the extreme of intellectualists makes knowledge theirs.
And therein lies the truth. While both emotion and knowledge are false gods, they are both necessary in the pursuit of the one true God. He stands at the bottom of the pendulous gulf an equidistance from both extremes.
And how do we know this? Jesus tells us that the Father is seeking those who will worship Him in Spirit AND Truth. To forsake one is not just to forsake the other but is to forsake the very God Himself whom you seek!
So, where is the God of Christian worship? He is in the chasm, the exact middle point between emotion and intellect. Both being an equally necessary coordinate on the map that leads to true praise.
To forsake the latitude of intellect and only follow the longitude of emotion, leads us to a false god. One we have either created in our own image or one that we refuse to define (in doing so, most likely casting him in our own image as well!) We feel an intense devotion to a deity that we don’t really know at all. And a false one at that!
In the other direction, to only plug in the latitudinal coordinates of intellect into our doxological GPS, we arrive at an equally displeasurable state! Sure, we may hear the polite, mechanical voice of our navigation system proclaim, “You have arrived at your destination. The one, true, living God will be on your right!” But once we’ve arrived, we will not have the ability to enjoy the destination now that we are there. We may get out of our car, take a few pictures, write down the dimensions of what we’ve arrived at, record any observations we find interesting and catalogue them later for further study. But we will not be able to worship because worship must by necessity be an emotional experience.
Hebrews 13:15 tells us that worship is the fruit of lips that acknowledge God’s name. True worship seeks to see the true and living God - not to record facts about Him - but to allow the experiential knowledge of His holiness, grace, love, mercy, justice, and wrath to fill our hearts to overflowing where we cannot help but burst forth in jubilant praise!
The words that pour forth are not mere lip-service to some theological concept we read about from a long-dead theologian. The words that leave our lips in TRUE worship are the overflow of a heart that is inculcated with a holy fear and affection for the God that welcomes us into His presence through the propitiatory sacrifice of His Son Jesus.
This is ONE of the center-points on that great pendulum of praise that has swung back and forth throughout ecclesiastical history.