In recent decades, theology has seen renewed interest in affect theory, philosophy of emotion, and trauma studies. The connection is not new—one need only gesture to Schleiermacher's religiöse Gefühle, or James' and Otto's theories of religious experience to establish the longstanding relevance of emotion to theology. This paper proposes a heuristic distinction between contemporary movements in embodiment theology, trauma theology, and systematic theologies of emotion before turning to a critique of the latter's misplaced normative emphasis. Hartmut von Sass' theology of hope typifies this tendency in its attempt to define an ideal type of hope and trace the theologically orthodox contours of emotional life. Such approaches neglect the facticity of emotion and exhibit a covert kind of governmentality. Following Hanna Reichl's methodological commitment to theologizing with the world as it is, this critical inquiry advances a better theology of emotion—one which begins with emotions as they present themselves, rather than with the pretence of "redeeming" emotion through systematic reckoning. I ultimately reject the conflation of emotions with virtue or vice as well as definitions of religious emotion that hinge on the sacred/profane distinction. This paper closes by reaffirming the category of religious or theological emotion (a la Schleiermacher, Tillich) within a specific set of parameters. It endorses an identification of theological emotions based not on their content but on their object. Emotions are not 'theological' because they are somehow 'pure', but rather because they reach toward the divine from within creaturely life.