Being “passionate” about Christ or the Gospel or Christian worship is frequently cast as an uncontested virtue, a principal indicator of authenticity in a milieu infatuated with that concept. This presentation pushes back against this notion, following the lead of dissertations by Thomas Dixon (Cambridge, 2003) and Ryan Martin (T & T Clark, 2019) in suggesting that the cultivation of the affections and the restraint of the passions are inverse operations in the pursuit of Christian sanctification.
Arguing from the impassibility of God as an ideal legitimately classified as “communicable” (to the degree that any divine attribute is truly communicable), I argue that human passions, while neither evil nor escapable, are properly the purview of Christian mortification. They are not properly the stuff of simple cultivation, much less a mere transference of object (one is passionate about, say, football and transfers that passion to Christ). Instead, the biblical terms governing the passions express as self-control (the ἐγκράτ-/σωφρ- word groups), sobriety (νήφω), discipline/training (παιδεία/[ὑπω]πιάζω), and order (τάξις). This does not mean that believers must suppress religious feeling; indeed, such feeling may be had and expressed deeply and fervently, even as God does. But such feeling should never be undisciplined or uncontrolled.
In short, by informing, containing, and deliberately/suitably directing our passions, our passions transform in their essence into something ever more closely aligned with the religious affections.