The Failure of Experience
presupposes faith in that resurrection. Without it, the believer could not recognize this experience for what it is.
The Failure of Experience The method that seeks to derive the objective facts of Christendom from the religious experience of the church by reasoning from effect to cause ought to be rejected. The Holy Scriptures never point us in that direction. In I Corinthians 15, Paul does point out to the church of Corinth the indissoluble unity between the blessings believers share in and the resurrection of Christ. But he does so only after establishing and confirming it with the witness of Scripture and the appearance of the risen Savior. The Holy Scriptures never make a believer dependent only on himself. They always bind him to the objective word—to the law and the witness. If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. If they have rejected the word of the LORD, what kind of wisdom do they have?
The church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets.
Paul threatens with God's curse anyone who preaches another gospel.
One cannot counter by recalling the words of the Samaritans, who said they no longer believed simply on the basis of what the woman at the well had told them, but because they had heard Christ Himself and knew that He truly was the Savior of the world. We may, to be sure, conclude from this that in the gospel it all comes down to personal faith, individual conviction. But in no way does this suggest that faith is independent or should gradually make itself independent of the witness of the apostles. The apostles have a much different task relative to the church than the woman at the well had in relation to her fellow townsmen. They soon met Jesus themselves; they heard
His words and saw His deeds. But we do not meet Jesus; we cannot
hear or see Him except in the witness of the apostles. Our fellowship with Christ is bound to our fellowship with their words.
John does testify that believers have for Christ's sake received the anointing of the Holy Spirit and therefore know all things and don't need anyone to teach them. But this also does not mean that believers can bring forth the truth out of themselves through reasoning. The believers to whom John was writing had already heard the proclamation of the gospel. They knew its content and perhaps they had no need of anyone to teach them more than what accorded with the contents of the gospel. They had only to stick with what they had heard from the beginning, and they would remain in the Son and the Father. What the apostles saw and heard, they proclaimed; so that those who believed might have fellowship with them and with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ.
In essence, all the truths of the Christian faith come to man from the outside. They are known to him only through revelation, and they become his possession only when he accepts them like a child in faith. Faith, including genuine, saving faith, therefore always involves knowledge. Not an immediate, direct knowledge, not a knowing from face to face, not seeing. Not a knowledge gained through personal investigation, argument and proof, through observation and experiment. But a knowledge gained from a reliable witness. Not until we know and acknowledge truth in this way can it evoke trust and stir up different kinds of experiences in the heart. As long as the Christian faith retains its uniqueness, this knowing and assenting element cannot be denied. Only when faith is completely robbed of its Christian character and content can it lose this element, but then it also stops being a religious concept. In rationalism, which still clings to the trilogy of God, virtue, and immortality, the focal point is no longer faith but works, not religion but morality.
The inadequacy of the method of experience is abundantly clear because at various times everything or nothing can be deduced from it, and not without justification. All religions awaken religious
emotions and experiences. If they give us the right to conclude to the truth of that faith and of its content, in philosophical language, if judgments of value are the ground and proof of judgments of being, then the Buddhist can conclude to the truth of nirvana from his experience, the Muslim mystic similarly to the reality of his sensible heaven and the Roman Catholic to the right of the cult of the virgin
Mary. And all of them could agree with Zinzendorf, giving this ultimate ground for their faith: Es ist mir so, mein Herz sagt mir das (It is so to me; my heart tells me).
When we get down to essentials, this experiential method resembles that of pietism, which reversed the order and made experience the foundation of faith. There is a difference, however. Pietism used its method against dead orthodoxy and did not intend to throw doubt on the objective truth of the Christian religion. In recent times, however, this method became attractive because the certainty of faith had been lost and this was seen as the only way to restore it.
This method arose after Kant restricted man's knowing capacities to the sensible world and after historical criticism had thrown doubt on the truth of Scripture. It is a child of unbelief but harbors the secret hope of nevertheless being able to salvage some faith. It is a secret hope that science will respect the inner sanctity of the soul and leave the plant of religion to subsist there undisturbed. It concedes everything—the whole world, nature, history, and almost the whole man with his senses and perceptions, memory and imagination, understanding and reason—to positivistic science, as long as it is permitted to retain a small, modest place somewhere deep in man's heart for faith. To this end it surrenders bulwark after bulwark, allowing man to apply his self-emancipation and secularization even to the largest part of theology and dogmatics. In the thought of its most consistent interpreters it is left with nothing more than a few universal religious concepts.