“How’re you guys doin’ today?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“Uh-sim. Will you be using a rewards card today?”
“Uh, no.”
“Uh-sim. Cash back?”
“No, not today.” Swipes card, takes receipt.
“No prob. You guys have an uh-sim day!”
***
I’m probably not being fair to the cashiers at Target, but that was certainly how their pronunciation of awesome sounded to my ears. But it’s entirely fair to say that in their usage, awesome could be substituted with the words nice, great, good, or even okay. There’s no small irony that a word that denotes trembling amazement is now a synonym for things easy, familiar, and casual.
Without being overly scrupulous about how people are using words, such usage is surely a sign that the culture no longer pays attention to the concept of awe or reverence. To speak of an awesome hamburger or an awesome hotdog is to either misunderstand hamburgers and hotdogs or to misunderstand awe. Hamburgers and hotdogs evoke pleasure, excitement, laughter, and heartburn, but not awe. In a moment of awe, a human is overwhelmed with something vastly superior to him in beauty, power, size, something possibly threatening and dangerous to him, something unfamiliar, uncontrollable, and in some ways, unknowable. Responses of awe include silence, wonder, amazement, fear, humility, gratitude, submission.
The point is, the pleasure of a hotdog and the pleasure of beholding the galaxies are fundamentally different pleasures. They are not the same thing directed at different objects. This is precisely why we mean different things by horror, terror, despair, dread, timidity, panic, trepidation, intimidation, awe, sobriety, and reverence. We use different words because the objects we encounter are different in nature and call for corresponding responses. These words for different affective responses are not interchangeable.
This is why we can speak of ordinate affection, but not of ordinate emotion. The impreciseness of the word emotion means that it partly refers to feelings. Feelings, being so much more a matter of the body and the appetites, are irrational. But when the heart understands the true nature of what it is encountering, it can choose to respond truthfully, or rationally. Such a response is our “reasonable service” (Rom 12:2). It can see the glory of God and respond with awe: this would be ordinate affection. It can see the glory of God and respond with irreverent casualness: this would be inordinate affection. Affections can be rightly ordered in the same way that doctrine can be true or false. The rational soul can respond with right desire, right love, or wrong desire and wrong love. Again, how deeply it feels these affections is not the important matter. What matters is if the heart is inclined toward an object of value with inclinations that match its value.
If everything is uh-sim, then nothing is awesome. And if nothing is awesome, worship is impossible and meaningless.
About David de Bruyn
David de Bruyn pastors New Covenant Baptist Church in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a graduate of Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Minnesota and the University of South Africa (D.Th.). Since 1999, he has presented a weekly radio program that is heard throughout much of central South Africa. He also blogs at Churches Without Chests.
