Religious affections

[Below is an email I wrote to a group of people involved in 'Work', or Fourth Way ideas, practices, and goals... (Ouspensky, Nicoll, etc.)]

This may seem like my 'inside baseball' involvement with seminary types on the internet, but it's interesting from a Work perspective.

There is a glimmer of a movement within Reformed Christianity to oust Jonathan Edwards from the canon (basically) because he is too 'embarrassing' (my word) in talking about emotions (affections) in religious experience and so on.

One professor has coined QIRE (quest for illegitimate religious experience) and thus puts anything and everything he can't understand or hasn't experienced under this dire acronym, and he apparently speaks for the 'mainstream' of Reformed, seminary-educated types.

This professor has rightfully been accused by some of his peers, though, as being a deist and engaging in 'dead orthodoxy', but he seems to be pretty hardened against such constructive hints and plows forward.

What caught my attention is this passage from Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections (to a person who knows the Work, he is talking about higher centers) -

http://heidelblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/heidelcast-21-feb-2010-ecstasy-is-not-christianity/#comment-16700

That's a comment in a thread, and the link should take you directly to it, I hope.

This is something that nags at me, and something I observe in others who are not at the most innocent - or crowd-influenced - level of the faith: not feeling the strong spiritual affections such as joy and sacrifice and zeal and love that Jonathan Edwards is talking about in that passage. Also, not feeling anything unusual for the Person of Jesus Christ. The latter just seems strange because we don't like to idolize humans (and Jesus was human, the God-man), and it's difficult to separate sexual things and context out from having a rapturous love for a human.

I think the rapturous love for Jesus Himself may be a bit of the fake kind of piety. Wriggling out of my fallen state I can work up an obvious total respect and gratitude for Jesus, and reliance on him, but He is God, so...it has to be sort of "duh" (and I don't say that in a flippant or disrespectful way, just, He is my King and Saviour and Lord and Mediator and God Himself; yet I'll say in times of peril or struggle or suffering the *connection* to Jesus via the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, will induce inner emotional and psychological phenomena stronger than what we experience in our everyday mundane existence)... As for the other affections in general I have to see those in the context of higher centers (Work language) which obviously some Christians have been given access to in unusual times and circumstances, and if we are to be able to experience them we need a development and change of being to have access to something we don't have access to now.

Read the passage linked and see what I mean. Edwards' book Religious Affections is considered one of the central, great classics of theology, by the way. Don't know why I've never looked into it. /ct