Today's question comes from a podcast listener who raise a criticism that Pentecostals, I will say,

we hear it frequently, and that is that we rely on emotions too much in our worship and in our

spiritual life. Now, I will say this person brought it up that this is not

really just a theoretical debate, but he had referenced a couple of people that he knew,

or more than one person that he knew who had actually ended up leaving Pentecostalism because

they felt like that their faith was too much based on emotion. And cessationists and other non-Pentecostals would throw this same charge at us,

that, you know, Pentecostals, all the speaking in tongues and the expressive worship,

and the shouting and the dancing elevates emotion above scripture and sound doctrine.

I'm sure you've heard this accusation before.

So the question I'd like to ask you is, what role should emotion play? Does emotion have any role to play in our faith and spiritual life? And if so,

what is that role? Emotion absolutely does have an important role to play. And that's true,

both when you study anthropology or study humans and study theology,

study the Bible. I will hasten to add, since we are, at least in our Western culture,

and at least among historic Christianity such as Catholics and Protestants, we do emphasize

emotion more than they do. It can seem a little extreme to people raising those traditions, but that's just

because they have a deficient view of what it means to be human, apparently, and also a deficient

view of scripture. This also means that since we do emphasize emotion more, if we are going to

go to excess, we would be more likely to go in that direction. So certainly you can give stories of Pentecostal people

who went way off track into bizarre emotionalism

or unscriptural emotionism

or used emotions to justify false doctrine or false teachings

or, you know, unethical behavior or anything like that.

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