Greenville, Journey Forth: 2008, 194 pgs.
Summary: A brief, eloquent meditation on God’s use of the emotions within the human heart for sanctification, maturation, and edification. The book is gentle, wise and balanced. It takes its place in Christian literature somewhere between Lewis’ A Grief Observed and Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy.
In his pursuit of balance Dr. Horton creates a unique theological framework which embraces an Augustinian view of human love as ordered loves or eudemonic love (70-74), while shying away from Augustine’s view of human freedom (44) by drawing the veil of mystery over it. At the same time, Horton's view of God’s love toward humanity is most similar to Arminius’ construction—God’s love toward humanity can be thwarted (77) while God remains sovereign.
He very carefully and biblically corrects reactionary responses among conservative Christians to Freud, the self-esteem movement, secular psychology, and psychiatric medicine. Further, he provides edifying guidance on how to cope with high and low emotions and experiences.
Exemplar Quotes:
On Paradoxes: Paradoxes, that is, can be mere verbal mechanisms, such as that of the two gates, or they can be of the actual substance of the idea, such as that grain of wheat. The latter further divide into the easily resolvable or the ultimately unresolvable. The unresolvable include some of the most important truths we have (26).
The Offered Life: And if the life we have to offer is a wretched confusion, shattered by blows from the world and reduced to a sin-stricken rubble? Then we make from the fragments of that life an altar on which to offer what is left of our poor selves. “An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me,” said the Lord to His people, adding “in all places where I record my name I will come unto thee, and I will bless thee” (Exod. 20:24). We ourselves, formed of the dust of the ground, can be that altar of earth as well as the sacrifice placed upon it (107).
On Depression: The virtues of patience and trust may need to be stressed to the ill or injured. Heeding medical instruction is an obedience issue. Keeping up the spiritual life and resting in the promises of God are always important reminders (150).
Reassurance: [God] has warm thoughts for the struggling, defeated Christian and is ready with assurance of His love and strength. To refuse to forgive ourselves for that for which we have been forgiven is understandable when the failure is from a human view egregious and irreversible, but to continue in self-rejection is ultimately an act of spiritual nullification: an unwillingness to receive with thanks the kindness of our Redeemer (169).
Benefits/Detriments: Worship is the practical outcome of the science of theology. Dr. Horton’s practical advice touching on how we love God and love each other is deep, warm, and edifying because he is teaching us to love God with all our being and our neighbor as ourselves.
The only weakness of the book from my perspective is that in attempting to balance the antinomy between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will Dr. Horton ends up describing God’s love as being ultimately thwarted by man’s action. Such a step appears to make God’s satisfaction contingent on human action either through God’s foreknowledge expressed in egalitarian love and the creation order or some other means.
As long as the reader makes no attempt to systematize Horton’s anthropological and theological views of love, Mood Tides will be of great benefit to all that read it.