It always amazes me how much emotion can be attached to theology, or really any attempt at an intellectual conception of spiritual matters. For me, it bridges two concepts rarely related to each other: knowledge and emotion. The first seems to be housed in concepts, models, objects. They are devoid of life, housed in books, and simply exist in some timeless realm of words and phrases. Emotions on the other hand aren't bound by words and situational. Religion for me has become the combination of these two concepts.

I lead a bible study that embodies this combination. Well, to be more accurate, I co-lead a bible study with the pastor of the Wesley Foundation, the methodist campus organization that I belong to. In that relationship I constantly see this contrast, I try to understand systematically what it is we are reading each week, he asks what it means to me emotionally, what it makes me feel, what it makes me think about. We both see things a little different, but there is a feeling of acceptance that we are looking at the same thing, working toward the same goals. In leadership, both become necessary and we as a team work well together.

Last week we were reading a passage in Joshua, where the Hebrews were in the process of capturing the land of Israelites from the Canaanites and other inhabitants already present. Part of God's command as stated in the texts is that each town they conquer, they completely eliminate those present killing men, women, and children. Having these immoral, harsh, and otherwise cruel orders ascribed to a God otherwise related to such emotions as love, compassion, and mercy was difficult for many. Those who could justify these actions did so on a largely intellectual level, clearly God must have some higher understanding, some higher reason that we can't understand. God is just, so by ordering the deaths of the Canaanites they must have done evil. On the opposite end of the spectrum, those who could not justify it were more focused on the emotional aspects. They saw the continuing possibility of redemption in those people, couldn't they have been given another chance before they were killed? God is a concept, an idea, and it becomes an emotional being assigned human attributes. The difficulty is once an attribute is assigned, anything in contradiction seems hard to justify. It is a classification of someone, something, some idea held in common and yet not. The difference in these approaches and the response both emotionally and intellectually is interesting.