Thunderstruck

It’s not happening. At least not the way I had hoped. I’ve had an article in my head since last month, and now that it’s come time to get it out it’s hung in the birth canal. I wanted to present a fully developed idea—my baby—but the best I have at the moment seems like nothing more than swirling amniotic fluid. Partly because I have, like Rebekah, multiple babies inside me competing for who’s coming first, and partly because I’m just, as Tolkien calls us, a sub-creator who’s hit the creative wall. Nevertheless, here comes what I have.

 

I got to wondering last month when reading through parts of B.B. Warfield’s, “The Emotional Life of our Lord”, why a scholar of Warfield’s stature would choose to research and write on such a subject. That treatise was no small effort, reflected in the paper’s one hundred twenty-eight footnotes. Writers write for reasons that move them, and there had to be some underlying motivation for such work. I got to digging into Warfield’s life and learned that he was opposed to some of the religious fervor of his day. Maybe “The Emotional Life of our Lord” was written as a response to what Warfield perceived to be the emotional excesses of some Christians.

 

Further conjecture leads me to suspect Warfield’s relationship with his wife. Benjamin married twenty-four year old Annie Kinkead in August of 1876. Not long afterward, the couple shipped off to Europe so that Benjamin could continue his studies. The record of what happened next is incomplete, but from the accounts we do have it appears the newlyweds went for a stroll in the Harz mountains of Germany and were caught in a very nasty thunderstorm. So much so that Annie appears to have been traumatized by what occurred. There is some dispute over the severity of Annie’s trauma, but there’s no question she came away from that experience deeply affected.

 

At the news of Annie’s death in 1915, one of Benjamin’s fellow professors at Princeton wrote, “I have faint recollections of her walking up and down in front of the house in the early years of my Princeton life, but even that diversion has long been denied her. I never spoke to her. Her trouble has been partly nervous, and she has seen hardly anyone except Dr. Warfield. But she remained, they say, until the end a very brilliant woman. Dr. Warfield used to read to her during certain definite hours every day. For many, many years he has never been away from her more than about two hours at a time.”

 

There’s additional documentation that shows Benjamin cancelling meetings and lectures due to “family illness” and that Annie suffered from an increasingly debilitating fatigue and anxiety. The record also shows that Annie was “pining for a baby” in 1881 yet the couple remained childless.

 

All of this makes me wonder what Benjamin was thinking and experiencing as he researched his paper on “The Emotional Life of our Lord.” As I noted in last month’s post, Warfield lists “Compassion” as “the emotion which is most frequently attributed to him.” To his credit, Benjamin appears to have embodied such mercy to his ailing wife throughout the duration of their nearly forty-year marriage. I wonder how often Benjamin reflected on God’s compassion toward him as the fuel that motivated and sustained him in having compassion on his broken wife.

 

It’s also interesting to me that the second emotion Warfield addresses in the life of Jesus is anger. Constrained by time and my capacity, it’s best if I give you a snapshot of some of what Warfield notes regarding Jesus’s anger. “The emotions of indignation and anger belong to the very self-expression of a moral being as such and cannot be lacking to him in the presence of wrong.” My interpretation: for justice to be satisfied, we must have an Authority who is capable of righteous anger.

 

Later in this section, “It is Mark who tells us explicitly [in 3:5] that the insensibility of the [religious authorities] to human suffering exhibited in a tendency to put ritual integrity above humanity filled Jesus with indignant anger.” Warfield goes on to write that anger is “the discomfort of heart produced in Jesus by the sight of man’s inhumanity to man.”

 

This is so affirming and confirming of my own moral sense and emotions when I’m listening to clients tell me their histories of mistreatment, abuse, and trauma at the hands of fellow human beings. It’s not unusual at all on any given day for me to interrupt a client to let them know that the story they’re sharing with me is ticking me off. Not ticked AT them, obviously, but ticked at the way someone or some organization has treated them. And the more I think about this sort of anger on behalf of the offended, the more I think of it as a form of compassion for the offended.

 

Annie Warfield never recovered from being thunderstruck. Why was she so affected and not Benjamin? Likely for the same reasons some police and military veterans have varying degrees of PTSD after shared traumatic experiences. So many complicated questions with simple answers hard to come by. Yet I think we can say with confidence, based on their lived testimony, that Benjamin and Annie were sustained to the end by riffing on God’s grace to them in Christ.

 

Because Jesus not only acts on our behalf, He feels on our behalf as well.