Emotionalism

Among many Christians one can find a mindset amazingly immune to any reality.
I think this problem with reality resides primarily in an inordinate love of an idea. What the particular idea is isn't as important as understanding that the idea competes for place with God, because in order to serve God, we have to set it down. But such is the attachment to the idea that no result, except scandal can serve to end its influence.

So what happens among Christians like this? Well, if they acheive success, they thank God for having the idea. If they suffer, they still hold on to the idea and insist that they are being persecuted for the Lord. So, in order to get any thing done, the Lord has to allow an incident. This incident has to be either tragic enough or scandalous enough to materially end the influence of the idea. And it's a toss up whether or not tragedy will work.

For instance, when God himself proved various end-of-times Christians wrong by NOT ending the world at such-and-such particular time, those congregations were certainly hurt, but many of them actually did not die out. They continued and persisted in many of their failed doctrines, only admitting that their calculations were wrong.

Scandal tends to work because it can taint the motivated. But this is never fun for a believer of any kind, especially since those who hate God will use scandal to encourage disbelief. It would be much better if we could find objective ways to determine whether it is God's will to do something.

The Monatists are a good example of the dangers we have to watch out for, especially among the Charismatic Community. We believe in prophecy and have the Holy Spirit, and yet everyone knows there are excesses out there. Often, when I read or hear an account of the Church making an inquiry or insisting on a change among Charismatics, I hear the language of persecution. Certianly, some may use the offices of the Church to attack Charismatics, but there's also the very real possibility that the charismatic group actually needed correction. When most decisions made within the group are assumed to be made within the Spirit, it is very hard to correct groupthink internally.

Emotionalism is also the source of Gnosticism. On televison, I've heard people refer to Gnostics as the intellectuals, or as the people who believed you had to be smart to get into heaven. They did not, they simply beleived in "secret knowledge" that would get a person out of this world and into heaven. It's easy to see by their writings that their "knowledge" was generated by attaching vast significance to emotion. Indeed, they tended to go to extremes, either fasting or feasting, anything to generate more feeling which they could then develop into an incoherent story. They wouldn't make sure their ideas where consistent with Church doctrine, nor would they particularly care if they were consistent with themselves!

We have to judge ideas, as anything else, by their fruit. That means being able to discern between persecution and correction. As we know from Job, circumstances alone do not indicate sinfulness, but when there are problems we have to be willing to ask ourselves if there was a flaw in our thinking. We must commit ourselves to thinking critically, especially when the call for action is based on nothing but an emotional argument.