Book Review – The Emotional Life Of Our Lord By B.B. Warfield

I’ve been liking this series from Crossway Short Classics. They provide a snippet of a longer book from an influential Christian and talk about who the person was, what setting they were writing in or against, and an overview of the longer book. This encourages someone who may want to have more than your average taste for a book before committing one’s self to the longer work.

The opening of the book covers B.B. Warfield as a person what the writing in the rest of the book shows about Warfield – that he is both a great scholar and great preacher of God’s Word. Having Sinclair Ferguson pen the Forward is a great choice to show that Warfield is not “just” a scholar. An interesting point that Ferguson points out is how much the fuller book is invested in citations and how well-read Warfield was. This was in a day and age when citations weren’t just plopping them in from Logos or Zotero. What’s interesting about that is that the passage from Warfield feels like a book that would exist in today’s world is the “make me feel good about being a Christian” books where citation is low and rhetoric is more valued. In this short work, Warfield’s command of both sets is on display and the purpose is to give a fuller understanding of who Jesus is and how He responded emotionally in His earthly ministry, and what we can learn from that, change our lives to conform to that, and be in awe of the Man-God Jesus Christ who is our Chief example.

Warfield covers a number of emotions such as love, compassion, anger, sadness, grief, indignation, and a few others. While love is where Warfield starts and rightly so, he makes some really interesting observations such as the Synoptic Gospels only attributing “love” to Jesus just one time but “compassion” often. Whereas John doesn’t use “compassion” of Jesus once but “love” many, many times. This is where knowing the history of the person writing and when they are writing is important and it’s something that I don’t think the introduction hits on as fully as it should. Warfield writing during the response to the liberal movement of Christianity in the early 20th century and the desire to respond to “God is love…and that’s all He is” causes this topic to be much needed. Warfield writes in response to “is love” is seen here but not from a theology standpoint from a viewpoint of what does the Man-God Jesus Christ love and how does He love is the topic at hand.

The answering of “and that’s all He is” is covered then with the other emotions, especially anger and grief. Warfield really drills down on the point of the writers of the Gospel observing and then writing down Jesus responding to certain people in anger. This is not just the Pharisees mind you. Warfield speaks of the compassion Jesus has for sinners but also the anger for those, for example, He knows will not follow His command to tell anyone and sends them away in anger. At the very least this provides a fuller picture of who Jesus is and not some Hallmark, always with a slight smile Jesus we can invent in our heads. That path clearly leads us down the same paths the liberals of the 20th century wanted to take but were foiled by people like Warfield. It’s the same path current day “God accepts everyone no matter what” liberal churches use when co-opting the Gospel message. Warfield’s discussion on the grief of Jesus is superb here; his discussion on Jesus’ grief for His mother’s wailing at the foot of the cross is a great showing of his juxtaposition of scholar and preacher.

This is a short book like the rest in the series but gives you a great glance at this brilliant man of God we owe so much to. It’s not a book that hand-holds you with self-help slogans but gives focus to an element of Scripture that is given so that you might continue in your sanctification process. Let us conform our hearts to the heart of Jesus Christ who feels and emotes and responds but without sin. That is our goal.