Religious Experience
Religious Experience
“Experience” is an imprecise term. The origins of the word are relatively well understood: it derives from the Latin term experientia, which could be interpreted as “that which arises out of traveling through life.” In this broad sense, it means “an accumulated body of knowledge, arising through first-hand encounter with life.” When one speaks of “an experienced teacher” or “an experienced doctor,” the implication is that they have learned their craft through first-hand application.
Yet the term has developed an acquired meaning which particularly concerns us here. It has come to refer to the inner life of individuals, in which those individuals become aware of their own subjective feelings and emotions. It relates to the inward and subjective world of experience, as opposed to the outward world of everyday life. An emphasis on the importance of religious experience was characteristic of early Methodism, and we noted earlier how “the Wesleyan quadrilateral” grouped together Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. The first three elements of this quadrilateral reflect John Wesley's insistence that the task of interpreting the Bible was to be illuminated by the collective Christian wisdom of other ages and cultures between the apostolic age and our own, as well as being protected from obscurantism by means of the disciplines of critical reason. Most importantly, for Wesley, the message of Scripture must be received in the heart by a living faith which experiences God as present. The fourth element of the quadrilateral reflects this distinctive Wesleyan emphasis, characteristic of Pietism (see p. 45).
Wesley is not on his own in stressing the importance of experience. In his celebrated study The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the Harvard psychologist William James (1842–1910) stressed the importance of the subjective aspects of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. In developing his account of religious experience, James drew extensively on a wide range of published works and personal testimonies, engaging with religious experience on its own terms and taking accounts of such experiences at face value. James identified four characteristics of such religious experience:
While James notes that the second and third characteristics are “less marked” than the others, he considers them to be integral to any phenomenology of religious experience.
James's research demonstrates that Christianity is not simply about ideas (as our discussion of Scripture, reason, and tradition might suggest); it is about the interpretation and transformation of the inner life of the individual.
In what follows, we shall consider the four main approaches to the question of the relationship between experience and theology that you are likely to encounter within Christian theology:
We shall consider each of these approaches in what follows.
Experience as the Basis of Christian Theology
The idea that human religious experience can act as a foundational resource for Christian theology has obvious attractions. It suggests that Christian theology is concerned with human experience – something which is common to all humanity, rather than the exclusive preserve of a small group. This approach is often seen as useful when responding to the “scandal of particularity” – the concern that the specific historical location of Jesus of Nazareth denies direct knowledge of him to other historical situations.
More recently, this approach has been welcomed by some interested in interreligious dialogue. It suggests that the world religions are basically human responses to the same religious experience – often referred to as “a core experience of the transcendent.” Theology is thus the Christian attempt to reflect upon this common human experience, in the knowledge that the same experience underlies the other world religions. We shall return to this point later in dealing with the question of the relation of Christianity to the other religions (pp. 416–24).
Theology Connects with Human Experience
The Protestant Paul Tillich (1886–1965) and the Catholic David Tracy (born 1939) both developed theories of the correlation of theology and common human experience. If humans share a common experience, whether they choose to regard it as “religious” or not, Christian theology is able to address that experience. The problem of agreeing upon a common starting point is thus avoided; the starting point is already provided, in human experience. This approach is probably seen at its best in Paul Tillich's volume of sermons The Courage to Be, which attracted considerable attention after its publication in 1952. Tillich here sets out to “correlate” the various analyses of the human predicament produced in modem culture with the “answers” provided by “the symbols used in the Christian message.”
But there are some difficulties here. The most obvious is that there is actually very little empirical evidence for a “common core experience” throughout human history and culture. The idea is easily postulated and virtually impossible to verify. This criticism has found its most mature and sophisticated expression in the “experiential–expressive theory of doctrine,” to use a term employed by the Yale theologian George Lindbeck. In The Nature of Doctrine (1984), Lindbeck provided an important analysis of the nature of Christian doctrine (see pp. 78–9), which was critical of those models that appeal to common human experience.
Theology as the Interpreter of Human Experience
This approach regards experience as something unfocused or ambiguous that needs to be interpreted using the framework provided by Christian theology. Theology aims to interpret experience. It is like a net which we can cast over experience, in order to capture its meaning. Experience is seen as something which is to be interpreted, rather than something which is capable of interpreting itself.
For example, the dialectic between the Christian doctrines of creation and sin can be deployed to provide an interpretation of a common human experience – an awareness of dissatisfaction, or a curious sense of longing for something undefined. To illustrate the relationship between theology and experience, we may consider Augustine's analysis of the implications for experience of the Christian doctrine of creation.
According to Augustine, our feeling of dissatisfaction is a consequence of the Christian doctrine of creation – that we are made in the image of God. There is thus an inbuilt capacity within human nature to relate to God. Yet, on account of the fallenness of human nature, this potential is frustrated. There is now a natural tendency to try to make other things fulfill this need. Created things thus come to be substituted for God. Yet they do not satisfy. Human beings are thus left with a feeling of longing – longing for something indefinable.
This phenomenon has been recognized since the dawn of human civilization. In his dialogue Gorgias, Plato compares human beings to leaky jars. Somehow, human beings are always unfulfilled. Perhaps the greatest statement of this feeling, and its most famous theological interpretation, may be found in the famous words of Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
Throughout Augustine's reflections, especially in his autobiographical Confessions, the same theme recurs. Humanity is destined to remain incomplete in its present existence. Its hopes and deepest longings will remain nothing but hopes and longings. The themes of creation and redemption are brought together by Augustine, to provide an interpretation of the human experience of “longing.” Because humanity is created in the image of God, it desires to relate to God, even if it cannot recognize that desire for what it is. Yet, on account of human sin, humanity cannot satisfy that desire unaided. And so a real sense of frustration, of dissatisfaction, develops. And that dissatisfaction – though not its theological interpretation – is part of common human experience. Augustine expresses this feeling when he states that he “is groaning with inexpressible groanings on my wanderer's path, and remembering Jerusalem with my heart lifted up toward it – Jerusalem my home land, Jerusalem my mother.”
Augustine's approach was echoed by the twentieth-century Oxford literary critic and theologian C. S. Lewis. Like Augustine, Lewis was aware of certain deep human emotions which point to a dimension of our existence beyond time and space. There is, Lewis suggested, a deep and intense feeling of longing within human beings, which no earthly object or experience can satisfy. Lewis terms this sense “joy,” and argues that it points to God as its source and goal (hence the title of his celebrated 1955 autobiography, Surprised by Joy). Joy, according to Lewis, is “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction [...] anyone who has experienced it will want it again.”
Lewis addressed this question further in a sermon entitled “The Weight of Glory,” preached at the University of Oxford on June 8, 1941. Lewis spoke of “a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy,” “a desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies.” There is something self-defeating about human desire, in that what is desired, when achieved, seems to leave the desire unsatisfied. Lewis's basic point is thoroughly Augustinian: the creation creates a sense of longing for its creator, which it cannot satisfy by itself. In this way, an essentially Augustinian framework is applied to common human experience, to provide a plausible theological interpretation.
God as a Misinterpretation of Human Experience
As noted above, many theologians have regarded experience-based theologies as providing an escape from the impasse of Enlightenment rationalism, or from difficulties relating to the alleged particularity of Christian revelation. F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is an excellent example of a theologian who was concerned to use human experience as a starting point for Christian theology. In particular, Schleiermacher drew attention to the importance for theology of “a feeling of absolute dependence.” By exploring the nature and origins of this feeling, it was possible to trace it back to its origins in God.
However, the atheist German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) argued that any such approach was potentially problematic. Experience did not lead to God; God was simply an improper objectification of human experience. In the foreword to the first edition of his highly influential Essence of Christianity (1841), Feuerbach states that the “supernatural mysteries of religion are based upon quite simple natural truths.” Human beings, Feuerbach argues, have created the gods, who embody their own idealized conception of their aspirations, needs, and fears. Human “feeling” has nothing to do with God; it is of purely human origin, misunderstood by an overactive human imagination. A so-called “experience of God” is “nothing but self-intoxicated, self-contented feeling.” We experience ourselves, thinking we experience God.
Feuerbach's critique of religion loses much of its force when dealing with nontheistic religions, or theologies (such as that of Karl Barth) which claim to deal with a divine encounter with humanity from outside. However, it remains significant when applied to a theistic construction or interpretation of human emotional or psychological states. Has anyone really spoken about God or Christ? Or have we simply projected our longings and fears onto an imaginary transcendent plane, or onto a distant historical figure about whom we know very little? The growing conviction that Christology must be objectively grounded in the history of Jesus of Nazareth (especially prominent, for example, in the writings of Wolfhart Pannenberg, 1928–2014) is due at least in part to Feuerbach's critique of religion.
Karl Marx (1818–83) believed that Feuerbach had failed to explain the origins of such a fundamental category mistake. What motivated human beings to mistakenly interpret their feelings in terms of the existence of God? For Marx, the answer lay in their social and economic conditions. The interpretation of human experience in terms of the existence of God was a result of economic deprivation; if this social context were changed – for example, through a socialist revolution – there would no longer be any reason to interpret experience in this mistaken manner.
Feuerbach therefore fails to see that “religious feeling” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual who he is analyzing belongs to a particular form of society. [...] The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it.
Feuerbach and Marx thus argued that there was no objective basis for religion, whose origins were to be explained on societal or psychological grounds. This was further developed by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who offered a psychoanalytical account of belief in God as “wish-fulfilment.”
This reductionist approach to religious belief thus holds that religious ideas tell us nothing about God but a lot about human beings. This consideration is important in understanding the rise of “religious studies” in many universities. Although this is sometimes justified in terms of serving the needs of a multicultural society, some argue that the best reason for studying religion is to learn more about human nature itself.
This chapter has provided a brief exploration of the resources available to Christian theology and of some of the debates concerning their potential and their limitations. In the chapter that follows, we shall consider the notion of revelation, which plays a leading role in much Christian thought.