Alright, Pastor John, here's a question about emotions and affections. Are affections more than emotions? Are emotions part of affections? Are affections totally different than emotions, or are affections the source of emotions? How would you explain all this? Asking that question makes it sound like the question is, "What's the difference between the liver and the kidneys?" Now, what I mean is, there are two objects out there.

One is the liver, one is the kidneys. Everybody knows the liver if they see it. Everybody knows the kidney if they see it. And what the question means is, "Tell me the difference between them." Different function, whatever. That is not what's going on in this question. There aren't two...

There isn't a liver out there called affections and a kidney out there called emotions. And let's just talk about the differences. This questioner doesn't know what they are. The question really is, "What should I mean? What should I refer to when I use the word emotion? What should I refer to when I use the word affections?" At least that's the way I'm hearing it, because I don't know what they have in mind when they say emotion and what they have in mind when they say affections.

So I think the best way for me to answer it is to say, "How do I," and say, "Jonathan Edwards, use the terms?" And then they can decide if they want to use them that way, because that's what words are. Words are meant to be assigned to realities, and we assign them sometimes arbitrarily, and sometimes the community assigns them for us.

But in this case, I think there isn't any clear community that is in English agreement on precisely what the affections and the emotions refer to. So according to Edwards, the human soul has two faculties, reason and will. Not a third one, like feelings or emotions. Reason and will. What those two faculties do is they perceive and think, that's the first one, and they incline.

They want or don't want. They lean in or lean away. And if you asked them, "Well, where are the affections in this?" as Edward uses the term, and his answer is, "The affections are the lively inclinings of the will." In other words, if the will, like a magnet, really snaps to something, those are affections.

Or if it really recoils from something with hatred, those are the affections. So affections are not a third faculty of the human soul. They are the lively actings of the second faculty of the will. And he distinguishes it from what he calls bodily motions or animal spirits, like trembling, sweating, twitching, fainting, fluttering of the eyelids, short breath, you know, that sort of thing.

He says those are not affections. Those are bodily reactions to affections, but they have no spiritual nature to them at all. Now once you have set it up this way, Edwards almost never uses the word emotion. I did a word search looking for it. I could only find one, and that one was used almost synonymously with the bodily motions.

E-motion, the stirring, the shaking of the body. So the word emotion was not there for Edwards, which means I suspect that in our common modern language, there would be a large overlap between what he meant by affections and what we mean by emotions. Gratitude, love, hatred, desire, and so on.

But here's the key question. Are there natural affections, and are there spiritual affections? Edwards would say everybody has affections, but they're of no spiritual worth unless they are spiritual affections, and spiritual affections are the kind of inclinations toward God and his word and his ways and his works when we've been born again to love God, delight in God, and praise God.

So the affections of the world are strong, but they're not spiritual. They're not born of the Holy Spirit. They're not awakened by the new birth, and they're not affections for God as God, for God as beautiful and holy and satisfying. And so Edwards and I would say those are the affections we're after, and I love to quote Edwards.

This is one of my favorite quotes as a preacher. He says, "I think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided they are affected with nothing but truth and with the affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they're affected with." So I conclude, Tony, by saying, yes, let's pursue those affections with all our might, because God is most glorified in us when we're most affected or satisfied in him.

And desiring God exists online to spread that grand truth. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. At desiringgod.org you'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. you