Who Do We Trust?: Experience

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring the different and complex array of elements that make up ‘authority’ for Christians, from official ones like Scripture, creeds and canons, and hierarchy, to those which few people would suggest should be authoritative, but yet unavoidably impact our faith and theology, such as reason and culture. Today we’re going to look at the most difficult one of all: personal experience. Experience is itself a complex concept, but today I’ll be focusing on two aspects of it: life experiences, and that subset we call religious experiences.

As with a lot of the ‘authorities’ we’ve looked at in this series, experience has had a strange journey in Christian history. At first, Christianity was almost entirely an experiential faith: As much as the Apostles appealed to Scripture, they interpreted the Scriptures entirely through their personal experience of Jesus. We see this in the so-called Corinthians Creed, which mostly just appeals to all the eye-witnesses to the resurrected Christ. And, in the Acts of the Apostles, Peter is convinced that Gentiles should be accepted into the Church as they are, in part through his experience of a dream, but mostly when he sees a group of Gentiles receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. His conclusion in his report back to the Jerusalem Church put it plainly: “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?’” But, as that first generation of Christians who had been witnesses passed on, a more cautious approach to experience took over very quickly. The Rule of Faith, which was the primary source of Christian authority in the second and third centuries, recorded the direct experiences of that previous generation, sublimating the experiences of the present one to it. Thus already authority shifted away from personal experience to faithfully receiving Holy Tradition. The same period also saw strong appeals to obedience to the Church Hierarchy, and in at least some parts of the Mediterranean world, a crackdown on prophecy and the exercise of manifestations of the Spirit. (If you’d like to know more about this, it’s known as the Montanist Controversy.) So, perhaps shockingly quickly, Christianity transformed from a movement that prioritized direct experience to one that subordinated it to Holy Tradition and Hierarchy.

And yet, it’s impossible to eliminate the influence of personal experience in the life of faith. Whether we live through times of war or peace, wealth or poverty, health or illness, whether we experience life as a series of successes or failures — all of these are going to impact how we think about God. So St. Augustine’s most complex theological work was his City of God, which wrestled with the implications of the sack of Rome, St. John of Damascus wrote while wrestling with his new context of living under Muslim rule, and in more recent times, the theologies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jürgen Moltmann were both shaped by heavy shadow of Nazi Germany. In addition to such social and political contexts, more personal struggles and tragedies also have a huge impact on theology, an influence that is often pretty apparent: St. Augustine struggled with sexual restraint in his youth, and he interpreted the Fall in terms of sexual sin; Martin Luther struggled with legalism and trying to earn God’s favour, and he makes a dichotomy between Law and Grace the centrepiece of his theology; the question of justice dominates Black and pretty much all non-WEIRD theology; and suddenly in 2020 a whole range of theology books were published wrestling with the question of where God was in a global pandemic. Even if life experience doesn’t determine the answers we comes to, it does in large part determine the questions that will drive our spiritual and theological journey. For me, an obvious example has been my sexuality. While I never wanted it to determine my theology, and while I remain generally uninterested in a lot of ‘queer theology’, there is no doubt that, whether I took a ‘conservative’ position or ‘progressive’ position on the topic itself, it was always the arena in which my wrestling with God took place. That wrestling is a big part of what made me cling to certainty so strongly in my Evangelical youth, what drove me into the deep wells of Eastern Orthodoxy in my mid-twenties, and finally what burst the dam of my natural conservatism and forced me into the more progressive and practical theological perspective I have today. It’s simply impossible for me to imagine what my faith would look like without this context, since it was so much of what drove my spiritual quest in the first place.

A certain subset of life experiences, religious experiences, requires special consideration here. These can be collective (community worship, friendship, service, etc.) or individual (things like experiences in sacred practice, manifestations of the Spirit, answers to prayer (or lack thereof), peak religious experiences and Dark Nights of the Soul). There are few experiences in life more powerful and transforming — but also more unpredictable — than big spiritual experiences. And this is, I think, why the Church has had a challenging relationship with them throughout its history. It hasn’t necessarily been antagonistic towards them — the lives of the saints and great theological heroes are full of visions, dreams, and miracles — but has kept them on a short leash. Sometimes this has been more about reinforcing the status quo than actual spiritual concern, but there is also good reason to be cautious. Religious experiences can inspire, connect, and transform unlike any other; they can also puff up, distract and delude unlike any other. And, mental illness can often manifest in false religious experiences, with tragic effects. This means that we, both as individuals and with our communities, need to exercise a lot of discernment in sorting through how to apply and act on spiritual experiences. By all means, have them: Enjoy the experiences of love and consolation, sit patiently with the experiences of desolation. But don’t take your stories about them too seriously. We’d do well to remember the example of Julian Norwich, who spent years in prayer and study trying to unpack what she saw in her visions, and the advice of St. John of the Cross, who took pains to remind his readers that exuberant experiences, such as dreams and visions, are often for the young and immature, so ought to be received with humility, and to expect them to be supplanted by more harrowing experiences to come, experiences that lead to genuine wisdom not inflated ego.

Such experiences are unavoidably going to to impact our theology and broader life of faith. It would be silly to deny it. But, to my knowledge, there have really only been two broad movements in Christianity that have intentionally tried to harness experience as an authority. The first of these, perhaps surprisingly, was Liberal Christianity. As a technical term, Liberal Christianity refers to a theological movement that arose at the turn of the 19th Century and dominated European theology until it was largely discredited by the First World War. Just as movements such as Empiricism and Romanticism arose in response to the Enlightenment’s cold intellectualism, so too did Liberalism arise in response to Rationalism in Protestant theology. Led by figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Liberal theology understood doctrine not to be about facts about God, but rather a way people put ineffable religious feelings and experience into words. In Schleiermacher’s words:

Religion … answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. … Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle. (On Religion)

While I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with what he’s saying here, on its own, it makes theology very abstract and insubstantial, utterly unable to speak to the issues of the day. There is no greater example of this than the War that proved to be the movement’s downfall: The Liberal theologians, with their romantic sensibilities that so often bled into nationalism, bought in completely to the jingoism leading up to the War. In the eyes of those who experienced first-hand the consequences of such an abstraction of theology, this discredited them completely. And so, ironically enough, it was the experience of men who fought in the trenches that dealt the fatal blow to this form of theology that valued experience.

The second movement that has championed the role of religious experience in theology is Pentecostalism. Growing out of a series of historical movements, including seventeenth-century Pietism, eighteenth-century Methodism, and the Holiness Movement and Revivalism of the nineteenth century, Pentecostalism emerged in the early twentieth century and emphasized the direct experience of the Holy Spirit as the fundamental feature of Christian life. Pentecostals believe that this represents a restoration of the experience of the first Christians, and that the Church today is no less empowered and inspired by the Holy Spirit than the Church in the first century. Theological authority rests in nothing other than the presence of the Holy Spirit in the life of the faithful. While this is a beautiful idea in theory, it’s not hard to see how this can go wrong in practice. But rather than quash the Spirit, Pentecostalism has installed a guardrail to help keep things on track, namely a strong emphasis on the Discernment of Spirits, and especially the role of the local church community in this process. I certainly don’t think it’s a perfect solution, but if this series has demonstrated anything it’s that the whole concept of theological authority is challenging and lacks perfect solutions. The Pentecostal approach isn’t any more or less problematic than putting authority entirely into a text that needs to be interpreted or the faltering words of finite human minds. At the very least, it has the advantage of being honest about its dangers and placing discernment so highly in its priorities.

So what are we to make of all this? Once again, here are some of the considerations that have become important to me over the years as I’ve contemplated the issue:

• Like tradition, culture, language, and reason, our experiences will unavoidably shape our theology and practice.
• Our experiences influence our beliefs, but do not determine them. Different people will have different takeaways from similar experiences.
• All experiences — like anything else claiming authority — need to be interpreted and carefully discerned. And the more theological content a religious experience contains, the greater the amount of discernment that is required. (While there may be exceptions, for the vast majority of us, any legitimate spiritual experience is going to be exhortative, not revelatory: that is, it will encourage us along the way of faith, not give us new religious knowledge.)
• Discernment is a personal process but must be done within community. In order to prevent delusion, it is imperative to talk through one’s experiences with at least one other person of faith, preferably more, and always someone whose life of faith one respects. At the same time, no one can discern our experiences for us. In my experience, bringing a vision or dream to community for discernment has never told me what it meant, but it has provided helpful questions and considerations to help me find the right track.