Isaac Watts on the Head and the Heart
“Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers,” Garth Brooks croons in the 1990 country mega-hit. The classic song taps into a powerful truth—God’s plans are better than our own, and often his refusal to give us what we want is evidence of mercy not displeasure. I experienced this dynamic in a minor way a few weeks ago at a theology conference when the speaker I planned to hear didn’t show up. As the dozen or so of us in the room looked around confusedly at one another and wondered how we would fill the unplanned break, a fellow attendee with a thick British accent piped up, “I can share some of my research if you all would like to hear it.” I’m so glad he did!
I didn’t know it at the time, but the man speaking was none other than Graham Beynon, a pastor and author who has written extensively on the life and theology of Isaac Watts. Beynon shared his research on Watts with the enraptured group, filling the entire forty-minute time allotment completely from memory. His topic was Isaac Watts’s understanding of human emotion and how Watts reflected that understanding in his hymns. I was vaguely familiar with Isaac Watts, but Beynon’s presentation inspired me to do some more digging. In fact, Beynon led me to conclude that Watts’s perspective on worship music and emotions is exactly the perspective we need right now in the church.
Isaac Watts (1674–1748) was an English Congregationalist minister who wrote several works of theology and penned over 750 hymns. If you’ve never heard of him, you’ve probably at least sang some of his songs. He wrote such hymns as “Joy to the World,” “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” and “Alas and Did My Savior Bleed” and adapted the Psalms for Christian worship by adding language from the New Testament to make them explicitly Christ-centered.
Watts lived during a time when human reason was exalted above “passions” or emotions. Enlightenment philosophers taught that reason was the most reliable source of knowledge and placed great confidence in the mind’s ability to arrive at truth. They often disparaged anything that might cloud the mind’s aptitude for thinking clearly and rationally. Thus, they frequently denigrated both trusting in divine revelation and allowing emotions to influence thought. Cold, detached reason became the ideal.
Watts, however, saw a wide range of human emotion employed in worship of God in the Bible. In 1729, he wrote Discourses of the Love of God and Its Influence on All the Passions and The Doctrine of the Passions Explained and Improved. In these two works he responded to what he described as a “growing deadness and degeneracy of our age in vital religion, though it grew bright in rational and polite learning.” To put it in today’s terms, religion had become all about the head while the heart was being ignored and devalued. For Watts, the Christian needs to “awaken the devout sensations of hope and fear, and love and joy” because God had “ordained [these passions] to be the most effectual allurements or spurs to duty.” Reason, though necessary, is not sufficient to motivate worshipful obedience.
Watts realized that the Bible teaches that all faithful Christian action flows from passionate love of God. In fact, he believed that love of God functions as the fountain that “awakens or suppresses all the other passions of the soul.” When Christ frees us to love God above all, everything else in life falls into its proper place. When Christ is esteemed as our greatest treasure and God is loved with “all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matt 22:37), the human heart becomes properly calibrated emotionally. We love what we should love and hate what we should hate, both in proper degree. We enjoy what is good for us and recoil in the face of that which would seek to harm us. Through love of Christ, we become attracted to righteousness and recoil at sin.
Watts’s practical guidance on how to cultivate greater love for God is one of his greatest gifts to the church. He understood the human tendency to run from one error into the opposite error. How tempting it is to respond to cold doctrinal Christianity by throwing out doctrine altogether. In some ways, we live in a much different world than the one of Watts’s time. In today’s cultural climate, freedom and authenticity are synonymous with unrestrained self-expression. To attract churchgoers, churches often mute doctrinal truth altogether. Popular worship anthems often focus on raising emotions by self-expression rather than inspiring awe in who God is and what he’s done for us in Christ.
Watts taught that affectionate love of God necessarily begins with knowledge of who God is and belief that he has acted for us in love through Christ. Emotion not rooted in truth is vain and useless. Once God is known and hoped in, the worshipper then employs the whole of his being towards loving him. First, we trust in him through Christ. Then, we turn all our affections toward him in desire and delight. Finally, we devote the entirety of our lives to obeying him.
The post Isaac Watts on the Head and the Heart appeared first on Remembrance of Former Days.