Joy is not a door that we open or close at will. It isn't a burning in the bosom, a fire in the belly, or a pang in the chest. You don't unroll joy like a flag and pledge your allegiance, you can't manufacture it, and you can't trade it for anything.
If you've ever experienced it, you wouldn't want to trade it for anything. It's a fierceness that rends, a sublimity that transcends, and a fear mixed with wonder that eludes language. Joy is simply the true presence of God.
But it's not an emotion. Joy can induce emotion, to some extent joy must induce emotion, but it also induces and even results from rational thought. As God's presence, joy isn't definable in strict terms, as a chair is definable—it isn't one thing or another.
Why do we so often insist on limiting it to mere emotion? Emotions are changeable, they swing according to external influence, emotions well up in us or diminish. Paul wouldn't expect us to maintain constant joy if it was simply another emotion.
God's presence, however, he can command us to cultivate and maintain. We do this through external means, prayer, reading the Bible, singing hymns, fellowshipping with other believers, pursuing lives of holiness, eschewing sin. These are means of knowledge, primarily, not wells of emotion or feeling.
In the old days, happiness was simply a meetness of incident or coincidence. If two events coalesced to produce a positive outcome, it was a happy occasion. Now, however, happiness is anything that makes us feel good. So, people are always out to make themselves happy.
This new version of happiness is the opposite of joy. God isn't out to make us happy: He's out to make us humans willing to obey Him and glorify Him. He does this through our pursuit of joy, by which He guides us closer and nearer to Himself.
As J.I. Packer has noted, joy is possible even in the midst of spiritual struggle and doubt. This would be impossible were joy simply another emotion like anger or glee. But if joy is the presence of God, it is possible in the worst times and the best, in the midst of struggle and in the midst of ease.
Joy, then, is only attainable through knowledge of the One on whose presence it depends. How can we experience that which we do not know? The experience itself is knowledge, but the experience depends not on simple relationship, but on investigation. Why else would our source of knowledge about God be the Bible, a book of propositional statements, eternal truth, and knowledge?
Happiness isn't unique to Christians. Anyone can feel happy, because humans are feeling beings, and both Christians and non-Christians are humans. Only Christians, however, can experience true joy, the joy that comes from knowing God through the means he's given us. If we lose sight of this, we've lost our faith, and with it the saving knowledge only Christ can give.
Caleb,
ReplyDeleteSometimes you have to let the heart do things without the brains permission.
Where would you place Aristotle's definition of Happiness in all this? Eudaimonia is certainly more than a feeling.
But I like what you get at - the curious thing being that Christ is the truth and so knowing certain things about Him is to know him more personally than it is for me to know things about another human. As an analogy (and I already know your thoughts on what Aquinas did with this fellow!) I think what Aristotle did with happiness and its perspective within a complete life and the wholeness of virtue is a good natural way of thinking about what Christians experience supernaturally. It makes me think of a state of peace and at any given moment being ready for anything. Obviously, for historical reasons, he never came to Jesus Christ in a direct fashion. But its my opinion he did after death.
I think some Christians are hesitant to engage there minds to the joy sometimes because they don't want to lose the mystery of it, but I think if they understood Anselms's maxim "Faith seeking understanding" in the correct way which is more of a marriage analogy they'd find it rather only creates more mystery.
I would agree with everything you said in the penultimate and final paragraphs. (And yes, more of a mystery than ever, you prying fox.) I think the Classical understanding of happiness is pretty close to my understanding of joy, though of course not explicitly Christian (as you acknowledge). Largely, my idea of joy as the presence of God is taken from the pages of G.K. and from the Psalms, both of which trump Aristotle. Though I, too, agree with your assessment of Aristotle post mortem, and would add to the number Socrates. I'll write more anon; at work and on a short break right now.
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