The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Can God feel pain?

God designs for His higher creatures the happiness of being voluntarily united to Him and each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. ~~ C.S. Lewis

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As a young man marries a young woman,
so will your Builder marry you;
as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride,
so will your God rejoice over you

Isaiah 62:5

The Apostle Paul was:

Uh oh! Looks like you’re going downhill, Geoffrey. Finding “feelings preposterous and nauseating in the extreme” sound a lot as if you’re feeling something!

YOU HAVE DISGUST? Another strong feeling!

It’s not feelings I was posting against. It was “the feelings zeitgeist”, the “contemporary world”. In other words, the latest version of the thing Christ says will always hate the Church (John 15:18-19).

I find it amazing that no matter the world’s current intellectual fashions or styles, the world always hates the Church. The only question seems to be, “Will the world in this particular time and place actually murder us for being Christians, or will it oppress us in less extreme ways?” I do not think that the world (at any time or any place) actually has any beliefs. It is motivated by hatred of the Church. It merely selects different sticks at different times and places with which to beat the Church.

This makes sense. George MacDonald wrote somewhere (in one of his realistic novels, perhaps?) that a man cannot believe a false thing. He can believe only a true thing. He compared it to the fact that a man cannot eat a stone, but can eat only food. Sure, a man can put a stone in his mouth and go through the motions of eating it. He may even swallow it. But he is certainly not eating it in the same, full sense that he eats bread. Same with falsehoods. The mind can go through the motions of believing them, but it is never actual belief. I wish I had the actual quotation. How I love that man!

Goecffrey said:

wow :question:

Thanks for the clarification, Geoffrey.

I, also am a George MacDonald fan. I have nearly every book he has written.

I have a book of 3000 quotations from the writings of George MacDonald. I looked under the heading “Belief/Unbelief,” but could not find it.

The closest that I found was under the heading “Faith.”

Having a heart is feeling. As the bible says: " You honor me with your lips, yet your hearts are far from Me."
If a mother felt anything for the fetus inside her womb, abortion would not be so easy. We don’t help someone because we think we should. Loving your neighbor as yourself requires putting yourself in another’s shoes. Having a relationship is more than just going through the motions-bringing flowers, buying jewelry, saying “I love you”. You’d better feel something or the relationship won’t last very long.

Nicely put LLC! :smiley:

Emotions may or may not accompany love (Greek agape). Dorothy Sayers, who was an Anglo-Catholic, mentioned in a letter to C. S. Lewis that she never once in her life felt a religious emotion. She did not doubt that some other people sometimes had religious emotions because she had read about them.

“He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me.” (John 14:21)

We probably need to define “religious emotions”. The article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, talks of many different contexts:

Emotions in the Christian Tradition

For example, the article:

Asks the question: Does religion have a single emotional center?
How do religious emotions differ from “ordinary” emotions?
The article talks about Gratitude, Contrition and Compassion. Do folks on this tread, consider them “religious emotions”?
Are religious emotions “cognitive”?

Good questions and sub-topics to consider.

Let me quote from the introduction:

Now suppose we were discussing “stink bomb” - without defining it. The common conception is probably something that blows up and stinks. But if we study the Wiki article:

Stink bomb

Things can get a whole lot deeper.

Let’s take a look at agape:

As we can see,to say love doesn’t include emotions is ridiculous. Moreover,

Do we WANT God to suffer pain?

Not a stupid question by the way - I’ve heard it stated on this forum that unless God suffers as we do, there is no point in honoring Him for anything.
Which seems to me to be…what’s that word?..ah, yes - Stupid.

I’m going to bite on this though Dave, you may have to bail me out or laugh at me. :smiley:

I would say suffering is a state of mind. I deal with many folks every day that make STUPID choices in their life and they ‘suffer’ the consequences. Gods laws and statutes are there for us to see, read and correct our lives by. Jesus in His sermon on the mount, gave us some new, very important advise on how to live.

In the USA, there are degrees of suffering. In Africa, there IS suffering.

Check out the link here ted.com/talks/gary_haugen_the_hidden_reason_for_poverty_the_world_needs_to_address_now?language=en

I’ll stand with ya, Chad.

Perhaps we’re not using the word “emotions” in the same way? I do not see emotions mentioned in either of those passages.

For example, when my daughter was a young infant, she (as is typical for infants) cried at any hour of the day or night whenever she was hungry. When I was awakened from sleep (night after night, week after week, month after month), and had to get out of bed at 3:30 a.m. (after already being out of bed at 11:15 p.m. and 12:09 a.m.), change her diaper, warm-up some formula, and hold and feed my daughter, I felt only one single thing: EXHAUSTION. I felt no emotions. I simply obeyed Christ’s command to feed the hungry. In obeying Christ I was loving both Him and my daughter. Emotions do not enter into it.

If, while doing all of this, I was awash in warm feelings/emotions, would that have made my love more? Certainly not. Love is in doing, not in feeling. (If it were in feeling, then we’d have to say that the moronic and hormonal teenagers “in love” with each other are the most loving people on earth, which would be preposterous.)

Reading George MacDonald was one of the most liberating things in my life. Before reading him (and C. S. Lewis), I struggled with the thought that I didn’t “love” God. I felt strong emotions for my beagle at a young age, and I felt strong emotions for my high school girlfriend, but I never felt strong emotions for God. How freeing to know from MacDonald and Lewis (who both, of course, learned it from Christ) that love consists in obeying God, regardless of emotion. We are not to screw-up our faces and try to manufacture feelings towards God (or towards anyone or anything). We are simply to obey Him, regardless of what emotions come or don’t come.

My wife had the exact same difficulty until I explained it to her. She, too, found great liberation in knowing that loving God, neighbor, and enemy consists in doing your immediate duty by them, not in trying to feel emotions about them. Lewis somewhere wrote that attempting to do that with one’s emotions inflicts harm on oneself.