One of the defining characteristics of modern evangelicalism is a major emphasis on the idea of having a personal relationship with God. You will hear it preached from the pulpits, sing of it in the songs, and read of it in the devotional books: The Christian life is about having a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. You may be familiar with the slogan, “it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship!”
The main desire behind this emphasis on Christianity as a relationship with God is to avoid a sort of dead, ritualistic legalism where Christianity is conceived of as simply following certain external moral principles and participating in certain ceremonies without regard for what is actually going on in the mind and life of the person engaging in it. And that is legitimate. However, for all our emphasis on this personal relationship, there is often very little explanation of what exactly that means or how such a relationship even functions.
What does it mean to have an “encounter with Christ”? Are we supposed to hear an audible voice? Are we supposed to see a vision? Most of us don’t even claim to have experienced something like that, and we tend to view those who do with some degree of skepticism. And if you don’t hear an audible voice speaking to you, how do you know if you’re hearing from God or if you’re just thinking your own thoughts? Even if you do hear an audible voice, how do you know it’s God and not some hallucination, or even a demon? These sorts of questions are asked not only by skeptics who seek to paint Christian devotion as being nothing but delusion on the level of having an imaginary friend, but also by Christians who are sincerely trying to understand their own devotion.
The way the concept of “experiencing God” actually fleshes itself out is usually in terms of an internal emotion or sentimentalism. To be connected to God, or to feel close to God, is to be experiencing a certain emotional pull when in church, in prayer, and especially in private meditation.
If you grew up in any contemporary style church, and especially if you went to youth camps any time in the past few decades, you know what I mean. Think about if you’ve ever heard someone say “God moved so powerfully at summer camp” or “the presence of God was so evident during the service today.” “Lives were changed at this conference.” Almost invariably, what is meant by that is people had an intense emotional experience. There was a lot of crying, there was a renewed zeal, people rededicated their lives to the Lord, etc. We sometimes call this a “spiritual high” or even a “camp high.”
Even when we try to hedge against casting our relationship with God mainly in terms of emotions by saying things like “faith isn’t a feeling, it’s about knowing God is still with you even when you feel distant,” what that often translates to is little more than “I am not emotionally moved right now during worship and I haven’t been motivated in my personal devotional life, but I trust that God will renew that within me at some point in the future.”
The emotionalism of evangelicalism becomes frequent fodder for critics (especially exvangelicals) because they know the modern worship service is designed, even down to the very cadence of the speaker in delivering his message, specifically to create a certain emotional response. This is something many church goers do not even realize because it is often falsely assumed that the difference between traditional and contemporary worship services are mostly matters of stylistic preference especially with respect to music. On the contrary, there is an entire theology behind your church’s liturgy whether you are aware of it or not.
While the cynical perspective would see the design of the contemporary worship service as manipulative and exploitative (and that can be absolutely true in many cases), it’s also true that there are legitimately well-meaning, honest people who work in ministry for whom that is simply all they really know of what it means to be a Christian and worship God. My intent here is not to pass judgement on the motives or character of those who lead evangelical churches, however I do think it is necessary to point out where our entire concept of “experiencing God” is theologically unsound in light of historic Christianity and leaves us vulnerable to unwarranted anxieties and can even serve as a catalyst for people to fall away altogether.
When we function as though our Christian experience is primarily an emotional one (whether we would intentionally say it that way or not), we set ourselves up for failure. The first problem we run into is the spiritual high is very difficult to create on a weekly basis, especially if you don’t have a talented, charismatic speaker and a high production value. It is normally only going to happen during a special service or event like a retreat, conference, or camp.
Secondly, it is much easier to create hype and excitement in young people than it is in older adults. That is why revival movements almost always target people in their teens and early twenties. An easy example of this is the Passion Conference, one of if not the largest evangelical Christian events in the world every year, which is specifically for people aged 18-25. If you follow any Christian news sites and you read headlines about some revival going on in America, the chances are it’s an event happening at some high school or college. As we get older, especially if this was our normal Christian experience growing up, it becomes more and more difficult to overcome the familiarity of it and have our excitements renewed.
The difficulties in sustaining an emotions-based Christianity can and will eventually cause needless anxiety and perhaps even guilt for believers. If my main barometer for my closeness to God is how moved I am emotionally when I am in church or in private devotion, then what am I to think when I find my emotions to be fickle and fleeting? What am I to make of it when things that used to cause profound feelings within me no longer do? Surely that must mean something is off, right?
Beyond anxiety in the minds of believers, there is an even more pressing concern to consider. If Christianity is all about a personal relationship with God, and if you think about and understand that relationship primarily in emotional terms, then it is easy to begin functioning as though Christianity is really about associating God with positive feelings. But then what happens when something you associate with God begins causing negative feelings?
If you read your bible enough, eventually you’re going to be faced with portions of it that don’t exactly make great inspirational quotes. If you live in the world long enough—a world we affirm God is sovereign over—you’re eventually going to witness and experience profound sufferings that don’t have an immediately obvious reason behind them. If you hang around the church enough, eventually you’re probably going to see and hear about conflict that can get quite nasty. If your closest relationships are with Christians, then eventually it is going to be Christians with whom you experience relational hurt. If the point of your Christian life is to have positive feelings about God and you start having all these experiences that cause negative feelings, it is an easy step from there to doubting whether Christianity is all it’s cracked up to be. I would argue that this is the exact scenario underlying much of, if not the entirety of, the exvangelical movement.
None of this is to say that the emotions have no part to play at all. Emotions are part of who we are as humans, and so to love God with all we are means to love Him with and through our emotions as well. This also isn’t an argument that the “spiritual high” experience is necessarily bad. The point is simply that while we are emotional beings, our emotions are not the most fundamental aspect of us, and they are constantly fluctuating by design. They are not a good litmus test for one’s closeness to an unchanging God, and the proper aim of Christian worship and devotion is not to create a certain emotional outpouring.
The emotionalism that is so common in churches today is of course not universal within evangelicalism. There are prominent voices who are openly critical of it, preferring instead to emphasize the intellect over the emotions. And I agree generally with this impulse provided that it is not to the exclusion of emotion altogether. After all, it is of little benefit to be full of passionate zeal for a God you know very little about. The scriptures are full of exhortations to engage your mind in your love for God and to seek understanding. But while these sorts of points are worth making and acknowledging, I think there is actually a more important idea that is often lost even in more conservative contexts, and that is the role of communion.
For many evangelicals today, even those who claim to be reformed, the prevailing view of communion is that of a merely symbolic remembrance of Christ. While it is certainly a remembrance (“do this in remembrance of me”), the notion that the bread and the cup are mere symbols of the body and blood is not the view of the scriptures, it is not the view of the church fathers, and it is not the view of historic Protestantism. Zwingli famously promoted a strict symbolic memorialist view, but it was rejected by both the Lutheran and Calvinist branches of the reformation and as such cannot even truly be called protestant.
The clearest scripture on this point is found in 1 Corinthians 10:16-17: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”
The reformed view as expressed by the Westminster Confession affirms that the supper is to be observed not only as a remembrance of the sacrifice, but also for “the sealing all benefits thereof unto true believers, their spiritual nourishment and growth in him…” Clearly then Christ is present in communion at least in some unique sense and confers in it a grace to the recipient. The benefit of communion is not confined to a subjective, internal result of contemplating the sacrifice of Christ. Rather, God is actively doing something in and through the sacrament.
It is true that each major theological tradition has different understandings of the nature or mode of Christ’s presence in communion. For example, Rome teaches that the elements change substance into the physical body and blood. The Lutherans are content to say, “Christ said this is His body, and is means is.” The rest is a mystery, and any further comment is speculation. The reformed maintain that the proper body and blood are truly present in the supper, but the nature of the presence is spiritual rather than carnal. While the question of how we receive Christ’s body and blood in the supper is important, it is secondary to the question of whether we truly receive it, and that is my primary point here.
For the vast majority of Christians throughout history, communion has been the focal point of Christian worship. This is not an exclusively Roman Catholic idea, although Rome certainly does have its distinctives with respect to their understanding of it. Naturally, this raises questions about the proper frequency of observance. While my personal opinion is that it seems best to do it every Lord’s day, my main concern is with its prominence in our understanding of worship however often it is administered. It is just as important as the sermon, for we recognize Christ in the opening of the scriptures and the breaking of the bread.
Recovering the high Sacramentology of our own protestant heritage is the true key to mitigating the pitfalls of evangelical emotionalism. It is correct to say Christianity is a relationship with God. It is correct to seek to encounter or experience Christ. But the believer’s relationship with God is a matter of objective reality and there is a sacrament given to convey that reality. The normative means by which believers experience Christ is not through powerful music or meditating on top of a mountain with beautiful scenery. You experience Jesus by faithfully partaking of His body and blood with the rest of His people. If you are receiving the sign He has ordained and you believe the thing it signifies, you can be assured that you are in relationship with God.
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