“Your emotions are made in God’s image,” states author and Spectrum contributor Marc Alan Schelske at the beginning of his new book. For some Christians, this can be a difficult truth to wrestle with. It was for Schelske.
I have not yet read this book, but I recognize the Inspiration (capital ‘I…’) behind it, and have more hope for the Christian world knowing that it has been published.
Thankyou God, and Marc Alan Schelske !
I don’t have the exact wording of the quote, but Ellen once tried to describe the indescribable pain of rejection that Jesus felt when the Spirit (capital ‘S…’) behind the deeper, more emotional SDA ‘Message’ of the 1888 era was rejected by too many SDA leaders. She also spoke of the need for the people to see Jesus more clearly, and to bring such knowledge from the ‘outer court’ into the ‘soul temple’ of the heart. (Her motive for publishing The Desire of Ages.)
Jesus ‘died of a broken heart, caused by mental anguish’ (not of crucifixion).
Was that merely ‘reasonable’ ?
The science writers, Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee wrote in their 2007 publication of
The Body Has A Mind Of Its Own, pages 190-191:
". . . Dampen your interoceptive signals, and you dampen the fear.
". . . Scientists used to assume that reason and emotion were qualitatively different psychic spheres. Clearly these spheres could influence each other, but most believed that the thinking, knowing, reasoning part of the mind was in some fundamental way distinct from the mind’s feeling, sensing, emotional, and more primitive aspects. But James and Lange, and now Damazio, Craig, and others who follow the neuroscience, argue that it’s just not possible to separate them at a deep level.
"Emotion is never truly divorced from decision making, even when it is channeled aside by an effort of will. Even a mathematician pursuing the trail of a new proof is driven by a blend of personal ambition, curiosity, and the sometimes spine-tingling Platonic beauty of the math itself. Even a judge who renders a verdict that the law supports but he finds personally distasteful is being driven by a moral emotion about the principle of the rule of law. . . .
“Interoception, then , is the font of your complex emotionality. It breathes life into your cortex, which is otherwise rather machinelike in character. Interoception is the fire under the kettle of consciousness; remove the heat, and the system settles into tepid equilibrium.”
‘Interoception’ is that ‘inner man’ that David refers to in the Bathsheba Psalm, # 51 (where God wants ‘trust’ to be found), or Ellen’s ‘soul temple’. It is the function of the long hidden (right) ‘insula’ that is the first part of the brain to mature, even in the ‘fetal’ stage of human development, even in the womb.
(See:
Brain Struct Funct. 2007 Dec;212(3-4):335-46. Epub 2007 Oct 26.
Development of the human fetal insular cortex: study of the gyration from 13 to 28 gestational weeks.
Afif A, Bouvier R, Buenerd A, Trouillas J, Mertens P.)
So, the deadly effect of too many SDA leaders in the 1888 era rejecting the ‘Holy Spirit’ (aka ‘Holy Emotion’) is just the same ‘double-minded’ – emotion divorced from reason, heart from mind – SDA GC that we grieve over today.
Now, with the help of such timely books as The Wisdom of Your Heart, let’s not give any more cause for that effect to continue !
As long ago as 1844, we SDAs have been instructed to ‘study the sanctuary’, to ‘measure’ it, even while its ‘Jerusalem’ home is ‘tread under foot’ by the rest of the world:
“And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein.
But the court which is without the temple leave out, and measure it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months.” Revelation 11:1,2
To study just how the mind, emotions and body work together – NOT divorced apart – is to do just that.
How very unflattering for us it is, then, that merely rational ‘gentile’ ‘science’ is so far in advance of the SDA ‘religion’ in the study of the human ‘sanctuary’, which God also built !
The ‘insula’ – Island of Reil, where the Blakeslees write that mind, emotion and body ‘coemerge’ – was first described in a European scientific paper by Johann Christian Reil, just before William Miller, in America, abandoned Deism for a ‘personal Savior’, and began studying His Bible.