Practical Christianity: Rational Affection

One thing that struck me while reading William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes was how logical, almost scientific, his language and arguments were. He uses a lot of logical analogies to illustrate his points. He points to astronomy and the natural world, and even mentions Isaac Newton at one point. He also references historical, political, and international events to trace a pattern of human nature and behavior, thus laying a groundwork for his theses. 

He uses a phrase that I thought was interesting “rational affection.” We don’t often think of affection—an emotion—as “rational.” We don’t expect to be able to logically figure out who we’ll fall in love with, or to explain with a pros-con spreadsheet why you are friends with a specific person. Yet when it comes to our love of God, Wilberforce treats it as a rational act. Our loving God is not on our own initiative—we’re not doing Him any favors. Rather, our loving God is a natural, logical reaction of gratitude for Christ’s salvation, of appreciation of all the blessings He gives us, of acknowledging who God is, and of awe in how great and truly different He is from us. 

It is perfectly natural for humans to love, ingrained in the core of our being. Yet sin can find a way to corrupt even the best parts of us. The way sin corrupts love is by redirecting it on something unworthy of our love. And this is idolatry.

“It is not in bowing the knee to idols that idolatry consists, so much as in the internal homage of the heart; as in the feeling towards them of any of that supreme love, or reverence, or gratitude, which God reserves to himself as his own exclusive prerogative. On the same principle, whatever else draws off the heart from him, engrosses our prime regard, and holds the chief pace in our esteem and affections, that, in the estimation of reason, is no less an idol to us, than an image of wood or stone would be; before which we should fall down and worship.”

In Wilberforce’s day, he was not so concerned about physical stone idols as an idol of popularity. As social beings, it’s easy enough for sin to use that social-consciousness against us, and for us to prize the esteem of other people more than prizing a relationship with God:

“…the love of human applause must be manifestly injurious, o far as it tends to draw down our regards to earthly concerns, and to bound and circumscribe our desires within the narrow limits of this world.”

For some reason this makes me think of a grappling gun like in a superhero film. A grappling gun only serves its purpose if it’s aimed in the right direction. If it’s redirected, or aimed at the wrong thing, it will miss and you’ll never get where you need to be. Love is the same way. Its purpose is to bring us closer—not just to other humans, though that’s a blessing too, but to God—and if it is directed at anything else it will fall short and ultimately prove useless.