Steve Chong is a pastor in Australia, and a student together with me in Portland Seminary’s Doctor of Ministry program in Semiotics. In our program, we read lots of deep and heady books, then comment on them to each other in a weekly forum. Just recently, we were reading and talking about F. Scott Spencer’s book, “Passion of the Christ: The Emotional Life of Jesus in the Gospels.” Steve—whose posts are always creative—decided to both illustrate and summarize his response. Then, he created the same illustrated summery for his wife, Naomi Chong, and I was utterly charmed when he created one for me as well.
Spencer includes both recent research on human emotions, the neurological reality that exists physically in our brains and hearts, and even our digestive system, as well as how we experience our feelings, and what our feelings “do.” Knowing Jesus is human prompted Spencer to interrogate the Gospels about Jesus’s emotional life. He must have one! But, being divine, does Jesus experience his humanity, his feelings, differently than you or I do?
I gave my own response last week. This week, I thought I’d share Steve’s illustrated summaries as a taste of how diverse and deep-thinking this graduate-level cohort really is. The following reflect our responses to the second half of Spencer’s book.
Steve Chong
Spencer wrote on the importance of feeling the full range of our emotions, and the harm caused by either suppressing or denying our genuine grief, anger, and fear.
Naomi Chong
Spencer also contrasted the pursuit of happiness with lasting joy. Happiness is brief, and is, according to Spencer, simply the desire to feel good in the moment and is only prompted by outside factors, whereas joy is an inner experience that does not change, regardless of outer circumstances.
Joanne Guarnieri Hagemeyer
(Yah, that’s me) Spencer discussed the problematic doctrine of impassibility, which holds that because God is divine, God therefore does not have emotions the way humans do. God is impassive: the absence of any external sign of emotion in action or facial expression. To say God is angry, or grieved, or even that God loves is to anthropomorphize the divine being who is separate from creation and feels none of those things.
I find I absolutely love these illustrations! What do you think?
