---
title: 'The Heart of Christ: B.B. Warfield on the Emotional Life of Our Lord'
type: video
hasMedia: true
requiresPurchase: false
authors:
- 'Jonathan Master'
date: 2026-04-14
collection: 'Dead Presbyterians Society'
subcollection: 'Season 3'
topics:
- 'Christology'
- 'Deity, and Person and Work of Christ'
scriptures:
- 'John 11'
- 'Philippians 2'
- 'Isaiah 53'
- 'Luke 23'
- 'Hebrews 12'
url: https://confessional.org/dead-presbyterians-society/season-3/the-heart-of-christ-b-b-warfield-on-the-emotional-life-of-our-lord
---

# The Heart of Christ: B.B. Warfield on the Emotional Life of Our Lord

This episode explores On the Emotional Life of Our Lord by B. B. Warfield, showing that Christ’s compassion, love, anger, joy, and sorrow were true and sinless expressions of His full humanity. As confessed in the Westminster Confession of Faith, He is fully God and fully man, “yet without sin,” and His affections were perfectly ordered in accordance with His holy nature. In this way, the emotional life of Christ belongs to His perfect obedience and reveals the moral beauty of the Savior in the work of our redemption.

[Watch](https://vimeo.com/1183007165/dec7b44180?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci)

## Transcript

Have you ever really stopped to think about the implications of the shortest verse in the Bible? “Jesus wept.” What does it mean that our Lord Jesus Christ experienced the full range of human emotions, and yet without sin?

Greetings from the past. Welcome to Season Three of *Dead Presbyterian Society*. My name is Jonathan Master. I serve as President of Greenville Seminary.

The incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ is an astounding mystery. In fact, the more you reflect on the incarnation of the Son of God, the more mysterious, the more beautiful it becomes. There are depths there that we can hardly plumb with our own human minds, and one of those depths refers to the emotional life of the Lord Jesus Christ.

When the Gospels tell us that Jesus wept, that Jesus rejoiced, that Jesus was moved with compassion, they reveal not just fleeting moods, but the moral beauty of his sinless humanity. B. B. Warfield, in his essay “On the Emotional Life of Our Lord,” leads us to see that Christ’s emotions were not incidental, but they were essential to his redeeming work. Every sigh, every tear, every burst of holy indignation was part of his perfect obedience and his sympathy for his people.

To study, to examine, to ruminate on the emotional life of Christ is, in truth, to gaze upon the very center and heart of our salvation and his saving work on our behalf.

Now, this essay by B. B. Warfield comes in the context of a long-term and very fruitful ministry of one of America’s great theologians. He published this work in 1912, and it is really one of the most beautiful and searching studies ever done on the humanity of Christ. It is a distinctly theological meditation, yet it’s deeply pastoral in its aim. This essay invites us to consider not only what Christ felt, but why, and in so doing, it compels us to see his compassion and his joy and his sorrow as integral to his whole work as our Savior.

So who was B. B. Warfield? Well, we’ve looked at him before on this podcast.

B. B. Warfield was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1851. He was the son of a farmer. His mother was a daughter of a Presbyterian minister. He was part of a distinguished family from Kentucky, and a number of well-known nineteenth-century relatives of B. B. Warfield.

He was a student at Princeton College—the College of New Jersey—in 1871. He graduated from there at the top of his class. He spent a year after graduation traveling in Europe, and then he studied at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1873 to 1876. He was licensed to preach in 1875. He was married in 1876, and fairly early on in his ministry, he was called to be a professor at Western Theological Seminary. He began there in 1879 and served until 1887.

In 1887, he succeeded A. A. Hodge at Princeton Theological Seminary, and he remained there for an additional thirty-four years. Now, he was a prolific writer. He wrote many short works, many long works as well—hundreds of essays, reviews, and theological works, many of which are preserved today. He taught over 2,500 students at Princeton Seminary, so he really shaped an entire generation of Reformed pastors and theologians.

He’s probably best known for his defenses of the inspiration and inerrancy of the Scriptures and for his work on the deity of Christ and the harmony of faith and reason. He was addressing issues that were prevalent in theological studies during his own day. His wife, who had very poor health for most of their married life, died in 1915, and then B. B. Warfield himself died in February of 1921.

So what is this work about, “On the Emotional Life of Our Lord”?

Well, he begins by talking about the reality of the emotions that Christ experienced. Here’s what he writes: “It belongs to the truth of our Lord’s humanity that he was subject to all sinless human emotions.” Now, think about that for a moment. That is a profound sentence, packed with all kinds of meaning. All sinless human emotions were those that our Lord’s humanity was subject to.

In that single sentence, he really captures the paradox of the incarnation—Christ as fully God and fully man, yet without sin in thought, word, or feeling. Warfield insists that genuine humanity requires genuine emotion. The Gospels are not shy about depicting this emotional life of Jesus.

Warfield writes, “The play of a great variety of emotions is depicted,” and when we look carefully at the emotions that are depicted—that the Lord Jesus Christ really experienced—they give a picture of someone who is not unstable, but they give a picture of moral beauty and strength.

Now he’s going to highlight four particular emotions, and again, each of these could really deserve a work in its own right. Each of them reveals something very profound about the work of the incarnate Son of God.

The first of the emotions that he mentions is the compassion of Christ. This is the emotion most frequently ascribed to Jesus—that Jesus was compassionate, that he had compassion. Here’s a quote: “The emotion which we should naturally expect to find most frequently attributed to that Jesus, whose whole life was a mission of mercy, is no doubt compassion.”

And Warfield explains it in this way: “The divine mercy has been defined as that essential perfection in God whereby he pities and relieves the miseries of his creatures.” And so this compassion that we so frequently read about in the Gospels is not merely a sentiment. It’s the holy pulse of divine pity expressed through human flesh.

When Christ beheld suffering during his earthly ministry—whether it was the hunger of the multitudes or the grief of a widow or the misery of a city—his heart throbbed with pity. He was filled with compassion. It was out of this compassion that we see him feeding the hungry and healing the sick and even raising the dead.

Warfield writes this: “The ready spontaneity of Jesus’ pity is even more plainly shown when he intervenes by a great miracle to relieve temporary pangs of hunger: ‘I have compassion on the multitude…’”

This is Jesus testifying of his own feeling of compassion for his people.

Sometimes this compassion even manifests itself in tears. We think of the death of Lazarus, where Jesus wept, and then, of course, Jesus’ own weeping with compassion over the stubbornness of Jerusalem. His compassion is not weakness. It cannot be confused with weakness. It was love in action, moving powerfully toward human need.

So that takes us to the second emotion that is described in the Gospels: the love of Christ.

Warfield observes this: “Love lies at the bottom of compassion.” In other words, if you look at the compassion of Christ and you go deeper, there is a deep source of that compassion, and that deep source is the well of love.

Nowhere is this more clearly seen than when Jesus looked upon the rich young ruler, and Mark tells us simply, he loved him.

Warfield puts it this way: “It is not the love of complacency, but the love of benevolence—the love not that finds good, but that intends good.” This is the love that moved Christ to seek and to save.

In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus’ compassion is emphasized. In the Gospel of John, love is often emphasized. And both, as Warfield points out, reveal that same holy movement of Christ’s heart toward those he came to redeem.

Warfield puts it this way: “Love to God is the love of pure complacency. The love for man which moved Jesus to come to his succor in his sin and misery was the love of benevolence.”

Warfield means that Christ’s love for God was one of perfect delight in the Father’s holiness, but his love for humanity was one of active mercy. It was a love that sought our good, even in the midst of sin and misery.

This is the pattern Warfield notes for the Christian life itself: “Self-sacrificing love is thus made the essence of the Christian life and is referred for its incentive to the self-sacrificing love of Christ himself.”

Christ’s followers are to have the same mind in them which was also in Christ Jesus—Philippians chapter 2.

One of the highlights of the year for us at Greenville Seminary is to meet together with other brothers who are engaged in the work of ministry at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America. We hope you’ll join us for our luncheon at this year’s PCA GA.

The luncheon is going to be Wednesday, June 24, at the Kentucky International Convention Center in Louisville. And this gathering offers all of us an opportunity to reconnect with one another, to enjoy great fellowship, and to hear a little bit more about what’s going on at the seminary.

This year, I’ll be presenting, and Pat Daly will be presenting on the work of the seminary. We also have a special speaker planned for that luncheon. And don’t worry—for all who attend, there will be plenty of Greenville Seminary merchandise that we’d love to give away to you.

Space is limited this year, so register early. You can register at gpts.edu/events.

Now, there are other emotions as well that are revealed about the Son of God and his incarnation. And the next ones that Warfield deals with are indignation and anger.

Because Christ was perfect in holiness, he could not behold sin and hypocrisy or cruelty without righteous anger. Warfield reminds us here that anger, rightly ordered, is not the opposite of love, but is really the defender of love.

Here’s how he puts it: “It would be impossible for a moral being to stand in the presence of perceived wrong indifferent and unmoved.”

And so for the Lord Jesus Christ, whose moral nature was flawless, to witness sin and to witness hardness of heart without any reaction at all would be to deny holiness itself.

And we see this again and again throughout the Gospels. When the Pharisees watched to see if Jesus would heal on the Sabbath, refusing to answer his searching question, here’s what we read: “Then Jesus’ anger rose. He looked around them with anger, being grieved at their hardness of heart.”

And Warfield notes something that perhaps you noted when you heard that: both emotions—anger and grief—coexist perfectly in Christ. His wrath was not an ungoverned passion, but sorrowful righteousness at their own sin.

At the tomb of Lazarus, this emotion reaches its most mysterious depth. As he beheld the wailing of those around him, Jesus, it says, “groaned in the spirit and was troubled.”

Warfield explains that the Greek term here is far stronger than mere sorrow. It conveys, “a deep, inarticulate groan of indignation.”

And then he writes this: “The spectacle of the distress of Mary and her companions enraged Jesus because it brought poignantly home to his consciousness the evil of death, its unnaturalness, its violent tyranny.”

And then Warfield continues: “In Mary’s grief, he contemplates the general misery of the whole human race and burns with rage against the oppressor of man.”

This was not anger at those mourning, but at the cosmic tragedy of death itself—sin’s last and greatest enemy.

Christ’s wrath here is love in agony. His compassion and his indignation rise together in perfect harmony.

Of course, the most striking manifestation of Christ’s righteous anger appears in his cleansing of the temple. Warfield calls this act “the outburst of a holy zeal for the honor of Jehovah.”

The zeal that consumed him was not personal irritation in the sense that we might experience it, but burning devotion to the purity of his Father’s house.

“In this act,” Warfield writes, “Jesus, in effect, gave vent to a righteous anger.” His wrath wasn’t a lapse from meekness, but its fulfillment—zeal for holiness expressing itself in purifying judgment.

Warfield then cites another author who observes this: “He who loves men must needs hate with a burning hatred all that does wrong to human beings.”

Warfield concludes and summarizes this by saying, “It was therefore precisely the anger of Christ which proved that the unbounded compassion he manifested to sinners was really mercy and not mere tolerance.”

Christ’s anger is not contrary to his compassion—it is its completion. “Compassion and indignation rise together in his soul,” as Warfield puts it.

And then fourthly, we see the joy and sorrow of Christ. And these are placed together for a reason, because they appear together so often.

We often remember Jesus as a man of sorrows. That’s how Isaiah 53 portrays him, and that is absolutely true. Yet Warfield reminds us that sorrows did not eclipse his joy.

Here’s what he writes: “If our Lord was the man of sorrows, he was more profoundly still the man of joy.”

He notes that Christ’s sorrows were real and were profound, but they didn’t result in constant gloom or despair. They were the sorrows of one who entered fully into the world’s suffering, bearing the burden of sin and death upon his own soul.

Beneath that sorrow, though, ran a current of joy—a deep, unshakable gladness in doing the Father’s will. His life was marked by sorrow, yes, but also by holy delight—the joy of redeeming sinners, the exultation of setting captives free.

And yet, as the cross drew near, he entered into suffering deeper than any human soul. Here’s what Warfield writes: “The prospect of his sufferings was a perpetual Gethsemane. The immediate imminence of them in the actual Gethsemane could not fail to bring with it that awful and dreadful torture which Calvin does not scruple to call the exordium of all the pains of hell.”

In that anguish, Jesus sounded the depths of grief in the human heart. And yet even here, the harmony of his soul remained perfect. His sorrow never drowned his faith.

Warfield puts it this way: “If he cried out in his agony for deliverance, it was always the cry of a child to a father whom he trusts with all and always.”

His final words on the cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” give us a glimpse into this unbroken, unwavering, steadfast confidence.

This mingling of joy and sorrow, of anguish and trust, shows the moral beauty of Christ’s emotional life. Warfield observes this: “Compassion and indignation rise together in his soul. Joy and sorrow meet in his heart and kiss each other.”

Christ’s joy was purified by his suffering. His sorrow was sanctified by his joy.

For believers, Warfield’s insight offers us both comfort and calling. Our Savior was not untouched by grief, nor unacquainted with gladness. He felt both perfectly, without sin or imbalance. In him, our own joys and sorrows are redeemed.

And so in the end, Warfield turns from the particular expressions of the emotional life of our Lord—his compassion, his anger, his joy and sorrow—to their perfect unity. And he’s been hinting at that all along.

What emerges is a portrait of moral symmetry—an emotional life without imbalance or excess. Christ felt deeply, but never disproportionately. He was truly human, but entirely holy.

Here’s what Warfield writes: “Compassion and indignation rise together in his soul. He remains ever in control.”

The emotional life of Jesus becomes not only a revelation of his humanity, but a pattern for ours. His affections were never quenched, but they were never uncontrolled. They were vibrant, real, and always in harmony with the divine purpose.

Here’s what Warfield concludes—this is a tender and profound quote:

“When we observe him exhibiting the movements of his human emotions, we are gazing on the very process of our salvation. Every manifestation of the truth of our Lord’s humanity is an exhibition of the reality of our redemption.”

“To look upon the emotional life of Christ,” Warfield reminds us, “is to contemplate the atoning work of the Savior in its fundamental elements. The cup he drank to the dregs was not his own, but was ours, and the emotion that was stirred in his heart was moved by his work of redeeming us.”

He is the perfect embodiment, the perfection of humanity, and also brings God with his people. His compassion was not mere sentiment, but redemptive power. His anger was not loss of control—it was the holy opposition of love to evil. His sorrow did not result in despair—it was the willingness to bear our griefs and carry our sorrows. His joy was not naïve gladness or optimism, but the deep exultation of the One who, for the joy set before him, endured the cross.

Perfectly ordered emotions—pure, purposeful, harmonious with divine righteousness. In him, the passions of humanity were not erased, but redeemed: pity made powerful, anger made righteous, sorrow made sacred.

The Son of God entered into our emotional life to redeem it, to sanctify these things. Every feeling in Christ was holy. Every movement of his heart was for our salvation.

Contemplate this for a moment and ask these questions:

Do you feel compassion as he did—moved not by sentiment, but by holy love that acts?
Do you feel grief over sin and suffering with a heart that burns against the tyranny of evil?
Do you rejoice in obedience, even if that obedience leads to suffering?
Do you bring your emotions, your affections, your fears, your desires under the gracious lordship of the One who felt and experienced these things perfectly and without sin?

In the end, of course, Warfield brings us to a point not just of admiring Christ’s emotional life, but of being transformed by understanding it better—to have the same mind in us that was also in him.

The more we behold Christ’s perfect affections, the more our own may be sanctified. The more we feel as he felt, the more we become what he is making us to be, conformed to the image of his Son.

And there is only one way that we could be reconciled to God, our Creator, as his human creatures—and that, of course, is through the one mediator, the man, Jesus Christ.