Danny ChaiWhat is the difference between joy and happiness exactly? Yes, I hear all time that they’re different. And if you argue that joy differs from happiness in that happiness is an emotional reaction to circumstance, whereas joy is more abiding, than I completely agree. But if you argue that they’re also different in that happiness is emotional and joy isn’t, as Scott and j seem to be suggesting, well I’m just not quite sure that’s true. It’s an idea that makes logical sense. I’m just not sure it’s Scriptural.
I actually did do a loose word study on the two, and it wasn’t that fruitful, as “happy” and “happiness” don’t appear enough to really be clear about the supposed different contexts. Supposedly the word rendered “blessed” in the Beatitudes also means “happy”, but supposedly that’s not a fully accurate translation either. And Scott’s reference to James makes no sense whatsoever since that passage doesn’t say to not be happy, but to not have joy, which kind of goes against his point.
When I look at when the word “joy” appears in Scripture, it’s just really, really hard for me to reconcile that concept as not including an emotional component as well. Seriously, just page through the search results for joy on Bible Gateway. It’s associated with shouting, singing, dancing, feasting, celebration, gladness, all these emotional activities. I’m not quite sure how you can read how the word joy appears in Scripture and not recognize that emotion is involved somehow.
Let me explain why I’ve been thinking this. For a while I think I’ve had similar ideas about love. That real love isn’t about a feeling at all, that it’s just about conviction and commitment. That’s how it makes logical sense that we can love our enemies. We don’t have to emotionally like them, we just have to treat them well, serve them or whatever. I wasn’t sure if emotion was a critical component in loving others.
Then I came across this passage by D.A. Carson:
One of the most striking features of this statement about love [1 Cor 13] is how it rules out of bounds one of the definitions of love that still persists in some Christian circles. They say that Christian love does not belong to the emotional realm, but is nothing other than an unswerving resolve to seek the other’s good. That is why, they say, love can be commanded: one may throughly dislike the other person, but if one conscientiously resolves upon his or her good, and acts accordingly, it is still love. Quite frankly, that sort of casuistry is reductionistic rubbish. What has just been dubbed “love” is nothing other than resolute altruism. But in these verses Paul firmly distinguishes between altruism and love: “If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames” (13:3): here are both altruism and self-sacrifice, but Paul can imagine both without love. So love must be something other than, or more than, mere altruism and self-sacrifice.
I totally love that for so many reasons. One, it compellingly contradicts thinking that I previously had. Two, it’s an erudite, Quebecois way of basically saying “B.S.” Three, he uses the word “casuistry”, which I don’t understand, but quite frankly, that makes it more compelling.
In any case, it challenged my ideas that real love could be separate from emotion. He’s talking about love, not joy, but it made me reconsider that as well. Does Scripture really bear out that real joy can not involve emotion? And I don’t know. Reading how Scripture describes it, it just seems to require too much mental gymnastics to arrive at that conclusion.
So at least right now, I’m going out on a limb and saying that God wants us to have joy, which includes some measure of an emotional component that we associate with happiness. (Although I don’t think this includes comfortability.) And that when we’re called to love each other, that this includes some measure of emotional affection for each other as well. Of course, I could be wrong.