I Know – I Feel

I know what the Bible says, but I feel like. . . .

I know what the Bible says about how to worship God, but feel like….

I know what the Bible says about my responsibility to be salt and light to a lost world, but I feel like….

I know what the Bible says about my responsibility to witness the truth of gospel, but I feel like….

I know what the Bible says about restoring broken relationships, but I feel like….

“I feel” is the great enemy of rational thinking and rational thinking is God’s great gift to the human race.  How does this conflict between “therapeutic feelings” and “rational knowing”  express the cultural milieu? Primarily through the agents who control the culture; therefore, these agents are expressions of cultural morality.

In his book, After Virtue, the 20^th century moral philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, referred to these agents as Characters. “They are, so to speak, the moral representatives of their culture and they are so because of the way in which moral and metaphysical ideas and theories assume through them an embodied existence in the social world (After Virtue, p. 28). The Characters are, “the Manager, the Rich Aesthete, and the Therapist.” The “manager’s function as that of controlling behavior and suppressing conflict…” The Rich Aesthete “whose interest  is to fend off the kind of boredom that is so characteristic of modern leisure by contriving behavior in others that will be responsive to their wishes, that will feed their sated appetites.” The Therapist is the father of “I feel.”  MacIntyre’s Therapist represents, “the sphere of personal life.” “The idioms of therapy have invaded all too successfully such spheres as those of education and of religion.”  The worldview that supports the therapeutic revolution is pragmatism. “In The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1996) and also in To My Fellow Teachers (1975) Philip Rieff has documented with devastating insight a number of the ways in which truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.”  Read this paragraph every day, so your feelings will not overrule rational thinking.

Avoid: I know the truth, but I feel the power of postmodernity  (no truth, no reality).

The contradiction of all ages: I Know ‒ I Feel!