As a young Christian, I was torn between bafflement, amusement and embarrassment when the good old King James Version was read aloud in church, and we heard Paul telling the Philippians that he longed after them “in the bowels of Jesus Christ” (Phil 1:8). I mean, it almost sounds blasphemous, doesn’t it? Or, at the very least, an invasion of privacy. Did we really need to hear that in church? And then a bit later on in the same letter, Paul is at it again: “If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies …” (Phil 2:1).
Clearly this has to do with the affections, the emotions, and not the messy bits inside human bodies (although bowels was also used in that literal sense, for instance to describe Judas’ horrible end in Acts 1:18: “falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out”). In this other sense, bowels seems to have been used, more or less, as we use ‘heart’ today. The older anatomists (back in the days when they had only the vaguest idea where the bits were inside the body and what they did) supposed the bowels to be the seat of the emotions—or, rather, of the tender, sympathetic emotions.
Oddly enough, Tyndale didn’t use bowels. In Philippians 2:1, for instance, he writes: “if there be any compassion and mercy”. Now Tyndale’s New Testament was 1526 and the KJV was 1611. Perhaps bowels for emotions had become more common usage in the intervening years? Certainly Shakespeare used it: “There is no lady of more softer bowels” (Troilus and Cressida, Act II, scene ii, line 11).
The bottom line (sorry) is that the facts of faith are not disconnected from feeling. Reformed evangelicals are sometimes accused of being coldly propositional, whereas the Christian leaders I most admire (all of them reformed evangelicals) are men (and women) of warmth, sympathy and passion. Have you never felt tears well in your eyes when you think (or talk about) the cross? Well, there may be something wrong with your bowels (or, more likely, your faith).
