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At the heart of Christian spiritual life, of course, is love: God’s love for us, and our love for him and for one another. Jesus is repeatedly asked in the gospels what the greatest commandment in the Law is. His answer, again and again: “love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” The whole of the Law and the prophets, says Jesus, comes down to this.

Reflect with me briefly on the latter commandment — the commandment to neighbor love—and its connection to happiness, the theme of this issue of The Table.

The commandment comes from Leviticus 19, where it occurs at the end of a long list of commandments prescribing how the Israelites are to treat one another. They are to: leave extra on their fields for the poor and sojourner; not steal from or lie to one another; pay their laborers promptly; not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; do no injustice in juridical matters, showing no partiality to rich or poor; not slander the neighbor nor take his life; not hate the neighbor in one’s heart; and more. Then, at the end of the list, comes the commandment to neighbor love, apparently summarizing all that has come before: “in sum, love your neighbor as yourself.”

In Leviticus, then, loving the neighbor as oneself is about treating one another in the ways

From The Directors

prescribed by these commandments: assuring that one another’s sustenance needs are met, that all are secure against harms, that the vulnerable are treated with dignity, and that all have a place in a just and harmonious community. To love the neighbor is to seek her inclusion in such community.

Israel’s writers had a word for such community: shalom. Shalom, for them, is a communal state of well-being or wholeness in which neighbors treat one another in the above-described ways. Leviticus 19’s love commandment, therefore, is a commandment to treat the neighbor in ways that conduce to her shalom.

Now for the connection between love and happiness. For happiness, in the biblical tradition, is a deeply communal notion: It is a byproduct of immersion in shalom community. It’s what happens to one when one lives in community in which there is enough of life’s basic goods, in which there is justice and dignity for all, both weak and strong, in which all care for and delight in one another. And love, as we’ve seen, is about being an agent of shalom to those around you: it’s about nurturing, protecting, and spreading this sort of shalom community. Love, then, draws us into shalom, and shalom draws us into happiness. Love, shalom, and happiness: the three are deeply intertwined.

There is another interesting connection worth noting, this time between happiness and our focal theme this year at the CCT, “psychology and spiritual formation.” For modern psychology has accumulated considerable wisdom about the ways of shalom: about how to treat one another with dignity, how to find our way into harmonious relationship, how to forgive, how to show gratitude, how to recover from harms, how to help the burdened, and more. Modern psychology has much to teach us about how to help one another into shalom community. Therefore it has much to teach us about happiness.

In the issue to follow, you’ll find further reflections on happiness and its connection to themes in the biblical tradition, psychology, and other sources of wisdom too. Enjoy.

THOMAS M. CRISP Associate Professor of Philosophy, Biola University; Associate Director, Biola University Center for Christian Thought

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The Journal of the Biola University CENTER FOR CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

“HAPPINESS”

The Table, Issue 3, Spring 2014

The Table is a place to sit and think, to enjoy community and nourishment, and to encounter life’s biggest and most enduring questions. The Biola University Center for Christian Thought offers this publication as a source for carefully articulated ideas on culturally significant topics, all from a Christian perspective.

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Ellen Charry

Ellen Charry is Professor of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and is author of God and the Art of Happiness.

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they are designed to drag us down to the level of soft drinks in order to get our money. Personally, I don’t even like Coca-Cola. It’s too sweet.

Happiness for Augustine depends upon mastering one’s desires that guide an ordered life which is far more likely to eventuate in flourishing on all levels than is a disordered life. It is not a matter of chance or of seizing an opportunity. It is not a matter of being in the right place at the right time. It is not just a matter of knowing the right people in the right places. Nor is it something adventitious, external to us. Happiness is not something that one receives, or that accrues to one by virtue of successfully manipulating the environment so as to control it. For despite technology and medicine’s ability to control more than ever before, in truth there is much that we cannot control in this life: catastrophic illness, injury, social and economic downturns, the devastations of war and climate changes as well as accidents of birth belie our pretense of power to bend the world to our will. No, for Augustine, Christian happiness is more under our control than reliance on circumstance allows because we can prioritize wanting exalted things, and nothing can negate our enjoyment of living such an excellent life.

OUR BASIC CREATURELY GOODLacking basic creaturely well-being can be

spiritually corrosive. It can be degrading and anxiety producing, and can distract from tending to the quality of one’s actions and their impact on others. That is, creaturely disadvantage and deprivation may deter one from discerning what is truly worth wanting. Greed may lurk in all of our hearts, but serious deprivation can activate that greed in exceptional degree. Poverty forces people to focus their energies on fighting for financial and physical survival and may crowd out space for the examined life, which is necessary for moral-spiritual flourishing.

Unstable family life cannot easily train the young in the skills needed to benefit from education and to sustain constructive relationships. Further, creaturely deprivation can cultivate character weaknesses: greed, as noted, reflexive anger, contempt, xenophobia, anguish, despair, and self-righteousness that are socially isolating. In short, physical well-being provides a floor upon which psychological well-being is enhanced, and psychological well-being

enables one to strengthen one’s intellectual and spiritual strength for moving ever more deeply into life with God which in turn strengthens one’s ability to master untoward desires.

Creaturely security allows the mental and emotional space to attend to the quality of one’s life, or as Augustine puts it, attending to what it means to know, love, and enjoy God. Yet even if a comfortable material floor is needed to be able to tend to the quality of one’s spiritual desires, it does not guarantee that one will be interested in doing so. In order to want what is truly worth wanting we need to be able to discern what is truly worth wanting and what is not. That is why valuing moral-spiritual goods above material goods does have a point.

THEN WHAT IS TRULY WORTH WANTING?

Happiness from a Christian perspective entails having what we want and what is truly worth wanting. In a materialist and individualist culture like the U.S., how are we to learn to distinguish between what is truly worth wanting and what is not? American culture no longer enjoys the support of moral philosophical assumptions that enabled Augustine and Aquinas to rely on the desire for moral excellence as an alluring category that brings satisfaction and contentment to one’s life. Perhaps it was never so. By the same token, it is interesting to note that the value of spiritual self-cultivation has reemerged over the past forty years, although not necessarily in the Christian form that focuses on God or that addresses the Augustinian point that a serious Christian teaching on happiness must include learning to want what is truly worth wanting. My point here is that if we need training in how to cultivate the best life, we need guidance and practice.

What do we all want? In a world deeply fragmented by religion, class, ethnic and racial tensions, linguistic divides, disparities in wealth, access to education, and basic health and safety resources, what do we all share? We all want to be happy.

Christian HappinessWanting What is Truly Worth Wanting

All ancient paths to happiness assume that the good life—eudaimonia (flourishing) in Greek, felicitas (felicity) in Latin, nirvana/moksha (liberation from spiritual suffering) in ancient Sanskrit—advise an attentively moral way of life that yields personal satisfaction and contentment from a life well-lived even when outward circumstances are untoward. Happiness then is enjoying a well-ordered life. It is a psychological state of serenity that comes with exercising wisdom in all things. To put it sharply, a wise life is pleasurable and it enables flourishing in its various forms.

AUGUSTINE ON HAPPINESSThough people may say they want to be happy, if

they do not understand that true happiness depends on wisdom that comes from within rather than possessions that come from without, they carry around a counterfeit notion of what we all truly want. They are self-deceived, having turned away from what truly happifies to follow a dead-end

path that may temporarily please but will ultimately fail. Think of

smoking, drugs, gourmet cuisine, drinking, or sex, for we only want these over and over again. Satiety is beyond their reach. Even more pointedly, think of the American Airlines drink napkins that say “Coca-Cola is Happiness.” It’s not only a lie. It’s insulting. Such slogans are silly, if not pernicious, for

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In his 1863 “Thanksgiving Proclamation,” Honest Abe Lincoln entreated a war-tired nation to acknowledge and say thanks for “the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties,” Lincoln wrote,“which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.”

Throughout the address, Lincoln is attuned to our inclination to forget, our habits of ungratefulness, and the wounds of war. Interesting that gratitude was paramount to his approach to healing and restoring a broken nation.

Because it turns out that gratitude can do just that: the subject of a host of psychological studies over the past two decades, simply saying thanks can really heal, restore, and make you happier. UC Davis psychologist Robert Emmons has been at the forefront of this research, and we asked him about the science of gratitude. A hearty thanks to him for talking with us about thankfulness.

Thanks! The Science of GratitudeAn Interview with Robert Emmons, the Gratitude Guy

It’s common to think of gratitude as an obligation—something we owe to our benefactors—but you suggest that it’s more than just an obligation. Are you saying that gratitude works for our own self-interest and well-being?

Certainly. Gratitude heals, energizes, and transforms lives in a myriad of ways consistent with the notion that virtue is both its own reward and produces other rewards. Gratitude takes us outside ourselves where we see ourselves as part of a larger, intricate network of sustaining relationships, relationships that are mutually reciprocal. In this sense, gratitude, like other social emotions, functions to help regulate relationships, solidifying and strengthening them.

What if the gratitude feels empty? What if you don’t really feel thankful? How can you work toward genuine gratitude that will lead to personal flourishing?

So what? Express it anyway when it is the right thing to do. I have written about the strategy of “going through the motions.” Most people assume that emotions precede behavior. After all, we rarely do anything unless we first feel like doing it. But research on attitudes in social psychology has shown that attitude change effectively follows behavior change. That is why the simple act of saying thank you, writing a gratitude letter, or even keeping a gratitude journal can activate the feelings of gratefulness even if they were not initially present, or present in a lessened form. People will sometimes initially poo-poo the idea of trying out one of these practices, because in the absence of the attendant feeling state, the behaviors don’t feel right or authentic. But by living the gratitude that we don’t feel, we can begin to feel that gratitude that we live.

What are some specific practices you recommend to develop a more grateful outlook?

This is a vital question because gratitude, at least initially, requires mental discipline. This is the paradox of gratitude: while the evidence is clear that cultivating gratitude, in our life and in our attitude to life, allows us to flourish, it is difficult. Developing and sustaining a grateful outlook on life is easier said than done. A number of evidence-based strategies,

Robert Emmons is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, and a leading figure in psychological research on gratitude. He is author of Thanks!: How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier.

It’s so common to think of personal happiness as pre-determined, or at least uncontrollable. That can really contribute to the feeling of being “stuck.” Can we take our personal happiness into our own hands? Is our inner state of well-being something we can control?

Absolutely you can control your own happiness, or none of us “positive psychologists” would be doing what we do. While there is a set range for long-term happiness, there are a number of intentional activities and attitudes we can choose that can sustainably affect our happiness. We have more control over it than we might first believe. But this does not mean that change will come easily or automatically or without effort.

How do you measure human flourishing? And how do you show that gratitude is a factor in securing a good life?

I rely on tried-and-true measure of flourishing—happiness, pleasant emotions, purpose in life, and low levels of unpleasant emotions. I also examine social indicators like friendship, generosity, and feelings of closeness and connection. On the one hand, gratitude is a strategy to increase one’s level of sustainable happiness. People are consumed by the pursuit of happiness, and gratitude is a reliable pathway to increasing one’s joy. Gratitude is also a spiritual practice. Even in their busy, distracted lives, people want to connect with their spiritual side, and gratitude offers a way to do that, incorporating it into daily life. Whether we use controlled clinical trials or survey methods, the evidence is clear: gratitude is good for us and for society.

What is gratitude anyway? Is it an emotion? A feeling? A mood? A virtue? An action? A prayer? What are we doing when we say “thanks”? What’s a good definition of “gratitude”?

It’s all of those and more. Gratitude is a morally complex disposition, and reducing this virtue to a technique or strategy to improve one’s mood is to do it an injustice. I like this definition: gratitude is an affirmation of the goodness in one’s life and the recognition that the sources of this goodness lie at least partially outside the self. READ THE FULL INTERVIEW

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Emmons

including self-guided journaling, reflective thinking, letter writing, and gratitude visits have shown to be effective in creating sustainable gratefulness. Here are five good practices:

1. Give away your gifts. How can I use my strengths and talents to help others? Paradoxically, we become more grateful when we become a giver rather than a receiver.2. Think about the bad. We associate gratitude with dwelling on the good, but recalling the worst times in our lives can be beneficial. To be grateful in your current state, it is helpful to remember the hard times that you once experienced. The realization that we made it through past tough times sets up a fertile contrast for present gratitude.3. Go through the motions. In your current life situation you may not feel grateful. But gratitude is an attitude, not a feeling that can be easily willed. If you go through grateful motions, the emotion of gratitude should be triggered. Grateful motions include smiling and saying thank you. By living the gratitude that we don’t feel, we can begin to feel that gratitude that we live.4. Traffic in the language of thankfulness. Grateful people have a particular linguistic style that uses the language of gifts, givers, blessings, blessed, fortune, fortunate, and abundance. Less grateful people are preoccupied with burdens, curses, deprivations, and complaints. Their words reflect this negative focus.5. Overcome mental obstacles. Busyness, forgetfulness, taking things for granted, and a sense of entitlement all diminish possibilities for gratitude. Take life “as granted” rather than “for granted.” Instead of saying, “I have to do this,” try saying, “I get to do this.” Sense that you are lucky or graced rather than deserving of good fortune. Take time to start a gratitude journal or develop other visual reminders of the benefits that surround you.

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Does Worship Make You Happier?

Alexis D. Abernethy is Professor of Psychology at Fuller School of Psychology. She is editor of Worship that Changes Lives: Multidisciplinary and Congregational Perspectives on Spiritual Transformation. Her Spiritual Experience in Worship (SEW) Pilot Study was sponsored by the Templeton Foundation.

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Are questions of happiness or well-being relevant to corporate worship? Some would argue no: the focus of worship is to glorify God, not make humans happy. While it’s true that glorifying God should be our focus, I wonder whether our degree of well-being influences how we engage in corporate worship, our experience of worship, and our degree of transformation in worship.

In 2008, I led a scientific study of worship, where seventy-four participants from diverse ethnic backgrounds and Pentecostal and Presbyterian churches described key transformational experiences in worship.1 We hypothesized that congregants would report positive emotion in response to selected worship experiences. This would include expressions of joy and happiness. And our research findings provided support for our hypothesis that congregants would report more positive emotion in response to worship.

These findings suggest that understanding the interplay between negative and positive emotion may help to illuminate how corporate worship experiences contribute to spiritual transformation. Our participants’ descriptions suggest that this process is not simply an infusion of positive emotion, but a process where concerns and burdens are brought to worship. A process of reorientation occurs,

1 Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226.

Isn’t it ironic that the supposedly “Happiest Place on Earth” is filled with so many unhappy people? Why is it that so many people struggle to be happy even in a place where the sun always shines and service always comes with a smile? It is because Disneyland, like every other good thing in this world, requires patience to be enjoyed.

Christian theologians and ethicists have long upheld the importance of patience as a core component of virtuous character. For instance, Tertullian maintained that patience was the supreme Christian virtue and that impatience was the root of all sin.1 Scriptures present patience as a defining attribute of God’s character, which Christ’s followers should emulate as they live in community and await Christ’s Second Coming.2 Patience is listed as a fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5; it’s considered evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work in the life of a believer.

More recently, psychological scientists have begun to accrue evidence demonstrating the necessity of patience for life, happiness, and satisfaction. Patience is defined by psychologists as the ability to wait calmly in the face of frustration, adversity, or suffering. Higher levels of patience (as

The Happiest Place on Earth?

Sarah A. Schnitker is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary and the Thrive Center for Human Development.

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a character trait) predict higher life satisfaction, hope, goal achievement, and self-esteem, along with less depression and loneliness.

NO PATIENCE FOR THIS!Despite the theological and scientific

evidence supporting the importance of patience for spiritual and psychological well-being, many Christians do not actually aspire to become more patient. I study a variety of character strengths in my research lab. When I talk about my research, people will regularly exclaim that they have no patience at all. In contrast, I’ve never had someone say that they are completely lacking in gratitude or kindness. Why is it socially acceptable to be lacking in the virtue of patience, but unacceptable to lack gratitude or kindness?

As we have become more and more able to control our natural environment, we no longer see waiting as a necessary part of life. Instead, we want everything to be instantaneous and believe that we should be able to eliminate all waiting and frustration through technological advancements. Thus, waiting, suffering, and frustration are seen as the result of

1 See David Baily Harned’s Patience: How We Wait Upon the World (COWLEY

PUBLICATIONS, 1997).

2 For reference, Nehemiah 9:29–31; 2 Peter 3:9–15, Ephesians 4:2; James 5:8.

technological malfunctions, and patience is viewed as a childlike and “unimaginative failure of nerve.”

This is a problem. Although our expectations have changed, life is still full of waiting (just take a look at the line for Space Mountain). To think that we can eliminate all waiting and adversity through our technological advances is hubris—a modern-day tower of Babel. In contrast, waiting and bearing frustration with patience teaches us humility as we acknowledge that we are not in control of our own lives.

where these concerns are placed in a broadened biblical perspective. The person experiences a shift, so that they are not solely influenced by negative emotions, but also have a sense of God meeting them in their struggle. They leave with a broadened perspective and a more positive outlook that may include attitudinal and behavioral change. These findings underscore the importance of providing space for not only positive expressions of joy and adoration in worship, but also spiritual struggle. Both of these experiences contribute to our spiritual formation and well-being.

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Happiness vs. Blessedness

— James Houston November 2013

“Happiness” is a rather shallow term for what should be, for the Christian, “blessedness.” Happiness has to do with the social world of humanity—the kind of thing that enables the Tibetans to measure the flourishing of their citizens not by the GNP but the GNH: Gross National Happiness, or Bhutan Happiness Index. Happiness, in our culture, is a sense of well-being, a sense of being at peace with each other. It’s the efficacy of socialization.

But blessedness is far richer and deeper, because blessedness means that I am blessed as I’m being transformed by the way of life that the Beatitudes define. And when we read the Beatitudes, we have much more a series of indicators of what is truly a blessed life.

We, all of us, can have unhappiness and suffering, living in a sinful world, but blessedness is transcendent. It speaks of another kingdom. It speaks of another realm. It speaks of the heavenly life.

— Bob Dylan Rolling Stone interview, 1991

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Aaron Kheriaty

Aaron Kheriaty is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine, and author of The Catholic Guide to Depression.

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medical or psychological help. When they fail to find relief from their suffering from spiritual direction or prayer or Bible reading, they can be tempted to despair, or may feel as though God has abandoned them.

Although a sense of loss is common to both depression and the dark nights, the sense of loss is manifested differently. Depression involves the loss of ordinary abilities to function mentally and physically, and it can also be triggered by interpersonal loss, loss of a job, etc. The interior dryness of the dark night of the senses involves a loss of pleasure in the things of God and in some created things. However, it does not involve disturbed mood, loss of energy (with cognitive or motor slowing), or diminished sexual appetite—all of which are seen commonly in depression. Persons in the dark night of the senses have trouble applying their mental faculties to the practice of prayer and meditation, but do not typically have difficulty concentrating or making decisions in other areas of life. Think of Mother Theresa, who was extraordinarily effective exteriorly even while enduring dark nights interiorly.

HOPEThe psychiatrist Aaron Beck, famous for

developing cognitive therapy for depression, did a long-term prospective study of 1,400 suicidal patients to determine which risk factors were most closely linked to suicide. Beck managed to follow these patients for the next ten years to see who survived and who eventually completed suicide. In trying to find the key differences between the

survivors and those who died by suicide, Beck examined the patients’ diagnosis, the number and type of mental and medical symptoms, the degree of physical pain a person was in, social and economic factors, and so on.

The results of his study surprised some behavioral scientists. The one factor most predictive of suicide was not how sick the person was, nor how many symptoms he exhibited, nor how much pain he was in. The most dangerous factor was a person’s sense of hopelessness. The patients who believed their situation was utterly without hope were the most likely candidates for completing suicide.

There is no prescription or medical procedure for instilling hope. Hope is ultimately found in the revelation of God’s love and his promises. We can have a natural sort of hope when things in our life clearly appear hopeful. But when our situation appears or feels hopeless, the only hope that can sustain us is supernatural—the theological virtue of hope, which can only be infused by God’s grace.

Depression is often misunderstood. Many people mistakenly think it nothing more than intense or prolonged sadness, when in fact it’s a complex illness that can profoundly impair a person’s mental and physical functioning.

Those who are afflicted with this disorder often suffer in silence, unrecognized by others. If someone is diagnosed with cancer, this person is typically flooded with sympathy from family and friends, with an outpouring of support from their local church community. Rightly so. But if someone suffers from depression, this person probably receives, at best, a few well-meaning but ineffective attempts at sympathy from family or close friends, but often without real understanding. There’s rarely public mention of the problem due to the broader cultural stigma against mental illness.

In the DarkDepression, Dark Nights, and the Virtue of Hope

DEPRESSION, SOUL, AND BODYDepression is a complex condition that affects

more than just a person’s emotions; it impairs one’s cognition, one’s perceptions of the world, one’s physical health and bodily functioning.

The medical model that characterizes depression as simply a “chemical imbalance in the brain” is true but also incomplete. Neurobiological and genetic factors do play a causative role; but psychological, interpersonal, behavioral, cultural, social, moral, and indeed, spiritual factors also play a role.

In the Apostles’ Creed, Christians profess faith in the “resurrection of the body.” We are neither disembodied souls nor simply material bodies. Rather, in each human person there is a substantial unity between soul and body, between spirit and matter. This Christian perspective is consistent with experimental findings from modern science. Modern medicine has shown that there is a profound connection between the mind and the body: what affects the one has profound effects on the other.

DEPRESSION VS. THE DARK NIGHTWe need to understand depression in relation

to the spiritual life. It is important to distinguish depression from moral or spiritual disorders like sloth, or what the early Church Fathers called the deadly sin of acedia.

We should also distinguish it from the dark nights of the senses and spirit that John of the Cross and other Christian mystics have written about. I think most Christian therapists have had the experience of patients who prematurely “spiritualized” what were actually more psychologically or biologically rooted problems.

Speaking somewhat loosely and without awareness of the more technical meanings of the term, Christians will sometimes refer to any spiritual trial—dryness in prayer, doubts or difficulties with faith, or strong temptations—as “dark nights of the soul.” I have evaluated some devout Christian patients who interpret their depressive symptoms as a “dark night.” An exclusively spiritual interpretation of their problem may lead them away from seeking

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Robert C. Roberts

Robert C. Roberts is Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University, and is author of many books, including Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues.

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all of these good traits will be fruit of the Holy Spirit. It is in this sense, then, that the emotion virtues are “spiritual.” They are spiritual because of their connection to the Holy Spirit and thus to the preaching of Christ.

More specifically, the word about Christ with which the Holy Spirit works in believers’ hearts is embedded in the emotions characteristic of the Christian emotion virtues. One aspect of the Christian psychology that I promote is a conception of emotion that is compatible with and helps to explain what the biblical writers say about joy, gratitude, peace, and the other emotion virtues. It is also a view of emotions that is quite compatible with the “cognitive” understanding of emotions that is widespread in contemporary psychology of the emotions. My idea is that emotions are “concern-based construals.” That is, they are ways of “seeing” situations about some aspect of which we are concerned.

Consider, for example, the joy that the apostles are said to feel about being arrested, imprisoned, and beaten for telling the good news about Jesus (Acts 5:41). Most people don’t like being arrested, imprisoned, and beaten up. It doesn’t cause them much joy. But the apostles are said to have rejoiced about being “counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name” of Jesus. They construe this situation, which most others would consider a personal disaster, as a blessing and a reason for rejoicing. Why? According to the account of emotions that I offer, it is because they 1) love Jesus and care about being like him and associated with him in his ministry, and 2) “see” themselves as having just done something wonderful and obedient for Jesus. And they feel gratitude to God for giving them the opportunity to do this. That is to say, they 1)

care deeply about having this opportunity and 2) see God as their gracious benefactor in bestowing this opportunity on them.1

The emotions of joy and gratitude the apostles felt depended quite directly on their Christian beliefs. We might say that the very identity of their emotions—what those emotions are—was shaped and determined by what the apostles believed about God and Jesus and thus about themselves and the world they live in. This is what makes these emotions “spiritual.” It’s not exactly that they are a different kind of mental event from other emotions (as though spiritual emotions are a different kind of psychological phenomenon from such non-spiritual emotions as joy about getting a raise and gratitude to one’s boss for the raise she gave you), but rather, they are just plain emotions with a spiritual content—they are about God and Jesus thanks to the convicting work of the Holy Spirit.

I gave Spiritual Emotions the subtitle A Psychology of Christian Virtues. Why? Because I want to stress that Christians can have their own psychological beliefs, distinct beliefs about human nature and destiny, about what is virtuous and what is vicious, about what is healthy and what is unhealthy. Christians do not need to import, and should not import from the psychological philosophies of the present age, the broad norms that guide our living. The Christian virtues are not the same as the ones promoted under the banner of positive psychology or any of the mainstream personality theories and psychotherapies of our time. We have a different moral identity because we have a different God.

Spiritual Emotions and Psychology

How can emotions be spiritual? What distinguishes a spiritual emotion from a non-spiritual one?

The word “spiritual” is much in vogue these days. People speak of being spiritual but not religious, or spiritual but not Christian. The word is pretty vague, but it seems to denote connection with something deep and perhaps mysterious, something of value, something beyond our superficial delights in consumer goods. The object of spiritual experiences might be wild nature or profound art, and the idea is that the spiritual person sees rather deeply “into” these things, and somehow senses the meaning of her life in them.

The Christian tradition, by contrast, speaks of the Holy Spirit who is manifest in the Church in connection with the preaching of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. In Galatians 5 the apostle Paul speaks of several virtues as the “fruit” of the Holy Spirit, among which are joy and peace. The other fruit he mentions is the virtues of love, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We find similar lists of virtues elsewhere in Paul’s letters, for example, in Colossians 3:12–15 and Ephesians 4:2 and 4:32. I take it that in Christians

“The emotions of joy and gratitude the apostles felt depended quite directly on their Christian beliefs. We might say that the very identity of their emotions—what those emotions are—was shaped and determined by what the apostles believed about God and Jesus and thus about themselves and the world they live in.”

1 See my Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (GRAND RAPIDS: EERDMANS, 2007), 15.XIV XV

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Enough Is Not Enough

Christopher Kaczor is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Calif. He is author of A Defense of Dignity, The Ethics of Abortion, and an upcoming volume on positive psychology and happiness.

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No matter what arena of competition we enter (money, power, fame, social status), the egoist will never be lastingly satisfied with winning, no matter how great the victory. If you were a musician, you might think, “If I could just have my own album that would be such an amazing achievement that I would certainly be happy.” And after your first album appears, you’re delighted! But over time the glow of seeing it for sale fades. You might then think, “If I could have the best-selling album of the year, then I’d achieve lasting happiness.” If you achieve your goal, you would probably be quite happy for a while, but before long, some other artist would take your place, and you’d find yourself dissatisfied. Finally, you might say, “Well, if I had the best-selling album of all time, then I would achieve lasting happiness.”

Michael Jackson was in this very position. His 1983 album Thriller is the best-selling album of all time, more than doubling the sales of the second-best-selling album. But, even demolishing the competition, was the King of Pop satisfied?

It certainly doesn’t seem so. No, in a July 2010 Vanity Fair article, Jackson said that, following Thriller, he spent the rest of his life trying to make an album that would outsell it.1 Being number one wasn’t good enough, even for the person who was number one! As Bertrand Russell put it, “Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed. You cannot, therefore, get away from envy by means of success alone, for there will always be in history or legend some person even more successful than you are.”2

1 “The ‘Thriller’ Diaries,” Nancy Griffin, Vanity Fair, July 2010. http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2010/07/michael-jackson-thriller-201007 (accessed January 9, 2012)

2 Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (ABINGDON: ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS,

2006), 58.

The Pursuit of Happiness, Your Highest Good

David A. Horner is Professor of Philosophy and Biblical Studies at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. He is the author of Mind Your Faith: A Student’s Guide to Thinking and Living Well.

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A right to the “pursuit of happiness” is enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence. But is happiness really something we should be pursuing—especially as followers of Jesus? Isn’t our problem, morally speaking, that we pursue happiness at the expense of doing what’s right?

Today we tend to think of “happiness” as a subjective feeling of contentment or experience of pleasure, but classical thinkers had a very different understanding. Although it is commonly translated “happiness,” the Greek eudaimonia carries none of the English term’s modern connotations. The ancients saw eudaimonia, not as a subjective feeling but an objective state of flourishing or well-being. A eudaimon life is one that expresses the highest good, the summum bonum, for human beings, and most classical thinkers understood this in terms of moral excellence and virtue. The pursuit of happiness, they thought, is a quest for that kind of life, a life of true flourishing. “It seems to me,” says Augustine, “that it is characteristic of all men to seek the happy life, to want the happy life, to desire, long for, and pursue the happy life. … The man who asks how he can enjoy the happy life is indeed asking just this: ‘Where is the highest good?’”

So what goes wrong when the pursuit of happiness conflicts with doing the right thing? The problem is not that we pursue happiness, according to our ancestors; that’s a given. Our desire to flourish as human beings is as natural and essential to us as breathing. The problem is that we are seeking happiness in the wrong place. The desire is God-given, but we often settle for too little, for lesser goods. As C.S. Lewis put it most memorably:

“[I]t would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants

to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

XVI XVII

Bruce Hindmarsh is the James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver. For more information, visit brucehindmarsh.com.

Happiness is that thing which all desire for its own sake and not for the sake of something else. Everyone wants to be happy. This is the end toward which all human action is finally directed. However, for all the vagaries of circumstance, the main determinant of our happiness still lay, for Aristotle, in one’s own nature, and he therefore described the sort of virtuous character that would be most likely to lead to happiness.

For Augustine, a deep moral transformation by grace was the path to true happiness. This understanding was reflected also in the liturgical tradition of the Western church. Take, for example, the very Augustinian collect still prayed today on the fourth Sunday after Easter in many churches:

O ALMIGHTY God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This whole prayer aims at happiness (“true joys”) and it is full of human longing, but it recognizes the profound need for a deep interior transformation by grace. That is why it prays, “Grant unto thy people ...” Transformation only comes of God’s grace. The

THE TABLEXVIII XIX

Bruce Hindmarsh

Holy and Happy?

In recent years positive psychology has directed our attention away from a preoccupation with the pathologies of the human mind—all that which plagues us—to the empirical understanding of human flourishing. This is to join in on long conversation with philosophers and theologians. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle closely identified the purpose of all human striving with happiness.

transformation required is serious, though, and it is both moral and psychological, addressing “the unruly wills and affections.”

The chief difference between ancient and modern discussions of happiness, however, is that the ancients recognized the need for a perspective that encompassed the whole of life, and for Christians, life beyond the grave. Even Aristotle recognized that one could not become happy in a day and made clear that his discussion of happiness had to do with an entire, complete life. For Augustine this of course meant a complete human life which began in the mysterious depths of divine love and whose end was the eternal enjoyment of God forever.

In the pre-modern world where life was so precarious, one was disposed to think of happiness in more than this-worldly terms. When Augustine was writing, life expectancy was less than twenty-five years. How different today. Charles Taylor has reminded us of how, as modern people, we tend to view immanent, this-worldly goods as self evident, especially what he calls the goods of “production and reproduction”: we seek to realize our own happiness through material prosperity and achieving intimacy. For Augustine, these goods could only be good when subordinated to the transcendental good of loving God above all else. When we seek our happiness in these lesser goods, they become idols, and idols always enslave and lead to the addictive, disordering of our loves. We are left restless.

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On the cusp of the modern period, John Wesley again linked moral goodness and human flourishing, believing that holiness and happiness were two sides of the same coin. Of the original state of the human person in Paradise, he wrote, “By the free, unmerited love of God, he was holy and happy: He knew, loved, enjoyed God, which is, in substance, life everlasting.” This was likewise to be the condition of redeemed women and men in the new creation: “an unmixed state of holiness and happiness far superior to that which Adam enjoyed in Paradise.” When Wesley was sixty-eight years of age, he preached a sermon in Dublin in which he instructed parents that they should remind their children several times a day, “He made you, and he made you to be happy in him, and nothing else can make you happy.”

And Wesley described the whole process of present salvation in terms of the recovery of this undivided happiness and holiness. As soon as the Holy Spirit reveals God’s Son in the heart, and the Son reveals the Father, “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts; then, and not till then, we are happy.” We are happy in the consciousness of being loved by God, in our constant communion with God, in the new virtues the Spirit works in us, and in the witness of the Spirit that our actions please God. Our happiness increases, says Wesley, quoting the apostle Paul, as we “grow up into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”

Perhaps the greatest challenge of a truly Christian psychology today is to recover and sustain this transcendent framework, and with it, a deep sense for the porous human psyche being fundamentally capax Dei—capable of God, made for a divine end, happy finally and only by sharing in God’s holiness. Holiness is happiness. What God has joined together let no man put asunder.

cct.biola.edu/journalXVIII

The TableThe Journal of the Biola UniversityCENTER FOR CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

ARTICLES

Ellen Charry on What We Want — IV

Aaron Kheriaty on Depression — XII

Robert C. Roberts on Spiritual Emotions — XIV

Bruce Hindmarsh on Holiness — XVIII

INTERVIEW

Robert Emmons on Gratitude — VI

QUOTE

Bob Dylan — X

BLURBS

Sarah Schnitker on Patience — VIII

Alexis Abernethy on Worship — IX

James M. Houston on Happiness vs. Blessedness — XI

Christopher Kaczor on Having Enough — XVI

David Horner on Eudaimonia — XVII

ILLUSTRATION

Jon Ashcroft

© 2014 BIOLA UNIVERSITY

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