We make choices and experience feelings, and our choices shape our feelings and our feelings shape our choices. This is how God made us, and this is how he is remaking us in the image of his Son. With our new hearts and transformed minds, we willingly offer our bodies (including our passions) to God as our spiritual act of worship (Romans 12:1). We put off the old man, with its desires and practices, and we put on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of our Creator (Colossians 3:10).

This is how God made us, and this is how he is remaking us in the image of his Son. With our new hearts and transformed minds, we willingly offer our bodies (including our passions) to God as our spiritual act of worship (Romans 12:1). We put off the old man, with its desires and practices, and we put on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of our Creator (Colossians 3:10).
Which is more revealing of the “real you”: your spontaneous and unguarded emotions, or your purposeful and intentional choices? Put another way, which is more fundamental to who you are: the feelings that spontaneously erupt from your heart, or the choices that you intentionally make?
At Bethlehem College & Seminary, I teach a class called “Foundations of Christian Hedonism.” Alongside the Bible, we read Piper, Edwards, Lewis, and more. We talk about the supremacy of God, the indispensable importance of the affections, the Christian life, and pastoral ministry. I love it.
One stimulating aspect of the class is identifying tensions and disagreements between our favorite Christian Hedonists and wrestling together with them. Last semester, we discovered a seeming dissonance between how Piper talks about feelings and how Lewis talks about the will.
Piper’s Grief
In chapter 3 of Desiring God, Piper explores “Worship: The Feast of Christian Hedonism.” In doing so, he accents the importance of feelings, emotions, and affections in worship.
Piper emphasizes that genuine feelings are spontaneous and not calculated. Feelings are not consciously willed and not performed as a means to anything else. He gives numerous examples of feelings — hope (that spontaneously arises in your heart when you are shipwrecked on a raft and catch sight of land), fear (that spontaneously arises when camping and you hear a bear outside your tent), awe (that overwhelms you as you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon), and gratitude (that spontaneously erupts from the heart of children when they get the present they most wanted on Christmas morning).
“Feelings are spontaneous, unsought, unplanned. They are our immediate and natural reactions to reality.”
The most poignant example of spontaneous feeling that Piper describes, however, is the grief that poured from his heart when he received the news that his mother was killed in a car wreck. In that moment, “The feeling [of grief] is there, bursting out of my heart” (91). No planning, no performance, no decision — just emotion and feeling. And here’s the crucial bit: “It comes from deep within, from a place beneath the conscious will” (91).
Lewis’s Prayers
At the same time, we were reading Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm. In Letter 21, Lewis discusses the frustrating irksomeness of prayer and the nature of duty. One day, when we are perfected, prayer and our other obligations will no longer be experienced as duties, but only as delights. Love will flow out from us “spontaneously as song from a lark or fragrance from a flower” (154). For now, we contend with various obstacles and impediments.
Even still, we have rich moments in the present — “refreshments ‘unimplored, unsought, Happy for man so coming’” (156, quoting John Milton). But then Lewis makes this statement:
I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling and contend with the greatest disinclination. For these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling. (157)
In other words, our best prayers may be the ones we pray even when we don’t want to pray, when our prayers are not riding on positive feelings toward God, but are actively, deliberately trying to overcome resistance within us. The will, Lewis might say, rises from deep within, from a place beneath even our feelings, proving who we really are at bottom.
Clarifying the Tension
We can see the tension, can’t we? Are feelings deeper than the will (as Piper says)? Or is the will deeper than feelings (as Lewis claims)?
Before evaluating, we need further clarity. We can begin by noting key areas of agreement. First, both Piper and Lewis agree that we ought to distinguish feelings from the will.
Second, they seem to agree about some of the key differences between feelings and the will. Feelings are spontaneous, unsought, unplanned. They are our immediate and natural reactions to reality (like birds singing and flowers blooming). The will, on the other hand, involves intention, planning, choice, and execution.
Third, both Lewis and Piper agree that the will and the feelings ought to be viewed in some sort of hierarchical arrangement, with one being “deeper” than the other.
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The authors contrast the social identities of two groups of Christians: progressive and conservative. Their method begins with discerning the values in each group’s “cultural toolkit,” then identifying goals that bring each group fulfillment. Descending from early 20th-century fundamentalists, they tell us, conservative Christians seek to preserve past church teachings. The authors describe this as expressing conservatives’ value of honoring “historical theology.” Progressive Christians descend from liberals of the same era. They judge by a “humanistic ethic of social justice.” And they are more consistently dug in on their politics than conservatives.

Elites have long seen conservative Christians as intolerant and obsessed with politics. It’s a simple view that few have been able successfully to complicate into a more realistic picture. George Yancey and Ashlee Quosigk may have done so in their new book One Faith No Longer: The Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America. From sociological research data, they argue that progressive and conservative Christians are headed for a permanent split.
Two Different Social Identities
The authors contrast the social identities of two groups of Christians: progressive and conservative. Their method begins with discerning the values in each group’s “cultural toolkit,” then identifying goals that bring each group fulfillment.
Descending from early 20th-century fundamentalists, they tell us, conservative Christians seek to preserve past church teachings. The authors describe this as expressing conservatives’ value of honoring “historical theology.”
Progressive Christians descend from liberals of the same era. They judge by a “humanistic ethic of social justice.” And they are more consistently dug in on their politics than conservatives.
Islam Evokes Progressives’ Passions
The question the authors set out to answer was about the two groups’ opinions and feelings toward each other. They ran into a difficulty, though, in finding out. While conservatives aren’t shy about criticizing those in other religions, progressives wouldn’t say what they felt. They balk at labeling anyone, even themselves.
So, the authors found a creative way around that — they interviewed both groups about a third group, Muslims.
Their interviews showed that conservatives see Islam as a theology and reject it. Progressives see Islam as a culture and are open to learning from it. Conservative Christians blame Islamic terror attacks on the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran. Progressives blame anything but Islam.
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When Jesus speaks of salt losing its salty quality, He’s referring to the method of mining salt unique to that period and region. People would harvest salt from either the Dead Sea or from the salt pans, and in those salt pans the water evaporated. In that process, the pure salt would leech out, leaving a residue of other minerals and causing the salt to “lose” its saltiness. So, Jesus poses the question to His disciples, “What good will you be if you lose your saltiness—if you succumb to the things that leech the salt out of your lives?”

Many have described Christ’s words in Mark 9:49–50 as being among the New Testament’s most challenging passages. They read,
Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.
These verses reinforce a familiar biblical theme: following Jesus is a serious business. Anybody who views Christianity as some kind of esoteric philosophical journey—a sort of crutch for the inept—must reckon with Jesus’ own claims. The call to following Him involves self-denial and suffering (Mark 8:34).
Jesus further clarifies the seriousness of discipleship in the verses immediately preceding the text in view (Mark 9:42–48). Warning against sin’s dangers, He doesn’t suggest that we negotiate with sin, trying to reconcile our sinful propensities with discipleship’s demands. Rather, He calls for its total eradication. We don’t toy with sin; we put it to death (Col. 3:5).
It’s clear that Jesus deals here with weighty truths. And it’s against the backdrop of verse 48 (in which He describes hell as a place where the “worm does not die and the fire is not quenched”) that His puzzling teaching on salt appears. With the costliness of discipleship and the picture of fire fixed in His disciples’ minds, Jesus asserts, “Everyone will be salted with fire.” How should we understand this peculiar phrase?
The Old Testament Background
The sacrificial system in the Old Testament is a good place to begin. It would’ve been familiar territory for Jesus and His audience. Establishing the design for grain offerings in Israel, God had made the following provision: “You shall season all your grain offerings with salt. You shall not let the salt of the covenant with your God be missing from your grain offering; with all your offerings you shall offer salt” (Lev. 2:13).
Further, these seasoned offerings were burnt offerings; they were consumed on the altar. In this sense, these Old Testament sacrifices were complete and irrevocable. Jesus appears to be reaching back to this practice, collating the pictures of fire and salt, to remind His followers that discipleship will involve a process whereby they’re “salted.” When they offer themselves to Christ’s cause, they will undergo a refining process, their allegiance to Him being complete and irrevocable.
Other places in the New Testament affirm this idea. In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul describes a similar refining process:
No one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. (1 Cor. 3:11–13).
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