a word before we begin

Somewhere in the last half-century or so the world discovered a set of things, gave them names, wrote books about them, built seminars and industries and whole careers on them, and then sold them back to us at a premium. It called them emotional intelligence, and conflict resolution, and emotional regulation, and self-awareness, and active listening, and a dozen other tidy phrases, and there is money in every one of them. And the strange thing, the thing that started me writing this, is that when you actually open those books and sit in those seminars, you keep bumping into things you have read before, only older, and truer, and free.

Because the church did one of two things with all of this, and both of them were a mistake. Some of us shunned it, waved it off as worldly, psychology, not for us, and in doing so threw away things that were ours to begin with. And others of us ran to the world’s experts to learn it, as though we had nothing of our own to say about how a person governs his temper and hears his brother and mends a torn relationship, as though the Book that made us had gone quiet on the whole subject of being a person among persons. Both were wrong, because the truth is that we were handed the fullest and truest manual on all of it two thousand years ago, and we have mostly left it closed.

It would be easy to mistake what I am doing here, so let me head that off. I am not going to baptize pop psychology. I am not going to take the world’s ideas and sprinkle a few verses on top and hand them back to you as though that made them holy. I am going to argue the reverse of that, and I want you to feel the difference, because it matters enormously. I am not saying the world found something good and we should borrow it. I am saying the world found a shadow, a faint outline, of something the Scripture has been holding in full color the whole time, and that we ought to stop admiring the shadow and go back to the thing that casts it.

And the title tells you the diagnosis before we start. Corrupt code. A message can get garbled on its way from one person to another, and it does, constantly, and that is half our trouble. But underneath that, the deeper thing, is that we ourselves are running on corrupt code, every one of us, a fault written into us at the Fall, and no seminar on the planet will debug that. And yet, code can be rewritten. That is the gospel of it. There is a fix, and it is not a technique.

chapter one

the world’s word for something older

Let us start with the flagship phrase, the one everybody knows by now. Emotional intelligence. The idea, roughly, is that there is a kind of smarts that has nothing at all to do with book-learning, a competence in reading yourself and reading the room, in governing your own reactions and answering the people around you wisely, and that this competence has a name and can be measured and taught. And it is a real thing. I am not here to sneer at it. People who have it do move through life more gracefully than people who do not, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

But open the Book of Proverbs, which was old when Rome was young, and tell me what you find there. An entire library on precisely this. You find wisdom, which is not raw brainpower but the skill of living well. You find prudence, which is the foresight to see where a road ends before you set foot on it. You find discretion, which is knowing what to say and, harder, what to leave unsaid. You find the man slow to anger and the man who rules his own spirit set above the soldier who takes a walled city. Every single piece of what the modern world has repackaged and priced as emotional intelligence is lying there in plain sight, named and praised and commanded, in a book so old its authors would find our excitement over the discovery a little quaint.1

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.Proverbs 4:7

And here is what ought to sober us. It is not merely that the Bible got there first. It is that the Bible dug deeper than the seminar ever thought to dig. Strip the world’s emotional intelligence down to the frame and you find a set of skills in the service of the self. It will make you more effective, better liked, more persuasive, the sharpest operator in the room. Its aim, in the end, is you. Your advancement. Your outcomes. But the wisdom of Scripture leans toward an entirely different sun. It aims at the love of God and the love of your neighbor. It reins in your temper not so you can win the negotiation but so you can love the very person you are furious at. It teaches you to listen not so you can better position yourself but so you can get up under somebody else’s load and carry part of the weight. Same skills on the surface. Opposite masters underneath.

The world teaches you to manage people. Scripture teaches you to love them.

So when I say the world found a shadow, that is what I mean. It caught the outline of self-control and discernment and compassion, the shape of them thrown down on the ground, and catching even the shape is no small feat. But it missed the center. It missed the love. And it missed the power, the Spirit of God Himself, so it is left drilling people in techniques for imitating from the outside what was only ever meant to grow from the inside out. We have the thing itself. We have had it all along. Let us walk through it, a piece at a time, and quietly take our own property back down off the shelf.

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sources & notes

  1. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words (Old Testament section), entries “Wisdom” and “Understanding,” on the Hebrew wisdom vocabulary that anticipates what the modern world labels “emotional intelligence”: chokmah (wisdom, skill in living), binah (understanding, discernment), and ormah (prudence, the foresight of the prudent; Proverbs 1:4; 22:3). The modern popular category derives largely from Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam, 1995); the argument here is that Goleman’s constituent skills are described more fully, and rightly ordered, in the wisdom literature.
  2. Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead, 2019), on how punctuation and brevity carry emotional freight online, and how readers supply tone from their own state when a message strips away face and voice. The “ladder” of communication richness, in person, then voice, then text, reflects long-standing findings in communication studies on the relative bandwidth of channels.
  3. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on Romans 5, on the transmission of the sin nature through the Fall (Romans 5:12; cf. Psalm 51:5; Jeremiah 17:9; Ephesians 2:1–3). The “corrupt code” image is the author’s illustration, not a technical term.
  4. Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Mature (on James), on the government of the tongue (James 1:26; 3:2–10) and the believer’s accountability for edifying speech (Ephesians 4:29). On rightly representing Christ to one another, see Ephesians 4:15, “speaking the truth in love.”
  5. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on 1 Corinthians 13, on the hearer’s obligation of charitable interpretation, that love “thinketh no evil… believeth all things, hopeth all things” (1 Corinthians 13:4–7) and weighs a speaker’s known character before assuming the worst. Charles Spurgeon develops the same theme in his sermons on the charity that puts the best construction on a brother’s words.
  6. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entries “Temperance” and “Sober, Soberminded,” on self-control (enkrateia) as fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23) and the New Testament ideal of sōphrosynē / sōphrōn, “soundness of mind,” from sōs (sound) and phrēn (mind). On the sequence of James 1:19 and the cooling function of delayed speech, see also Proverbs 15:1 and Proverbs 17:27–28; on ruling one’s spirit, Proverbs 16:32 and Proverbs 25:28.
  7. James 1:14–15, which locates the genesis of sin in a man’s own drawing-away and enticement rather than in the provocation outside him, establishing personal responsibility for one’s own response; with Proverbs 15:1 on the soft answer as the responder’s own choice. David’s sparing of Saul (1 Samuel 24; 26) stands as provocation met without sin.
  8. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Restore” (katartizō), on restoration rather than victory as the goal of conflict. The verb is used of mending nets (Matthew 4:21) and of setting right what is broken (Galatians 6:1); see also Matthew 18:15 (“thou hast gained thy brother”) and Romans 12:18. On forgiveness as release rather than mere pause, Ephesians 4:32 and Micah 7:19.
  9. A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, on being freed from the tyranny of human opinion, alongside Galatians 1:10, 1 Thessalonians 2:4 (“not as pleasing men, but God”), and Proverbs 29:25 (“the fear of man bringeth a snare”). Security anchored in God’s settled verdict rests on Romans 8:1, 31–39 and the assurance of Philippians 1:6.
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