This is an incredible post. I think it resonates for me so much because this fact, that experience matters to the Christian life, has been a real emphasis of my education, my Christian maturation, these past several years.

We cannot deny experience. We are human. That’s what we do. Things enter our plane of existence and we encounter them, we experience them.

Right now I am reading a book written by Luigi Giussani called, The Journey To Truth Is An Experience. The premise can be summed up in the event of Christ and the encounter of Andrew and Johnn with Him. (Look at John 1:35-42). The importance of experience can be seen in the way the Baptist’s claim about Jesus (”Behold the lamb of God!”) is verified in the lives of Andrew and John so that Andrew is able to say to his brother: “We have found the Messiah!” Look at the difference between those two. Like the Baptist, the Church throws the truth out there into the deep, and trusting that it will correspond with our being if encountered — because we are made for Him — it allows us to go off (like Andrew and John did) to test and verify. And when we do. When we verify the truth in our experience, it takes such a deeper root in us, it takes up conscious meaning for our lives, it transforms. [There's a lot more to be drawn out from that Gospel passage about the nature of the Christian life, but for now let's focus on that.]

So it is sad to me when many Christians reject experience out of a fear that it is inviting relativism. But we follow a Person not a set of ideas. So how can we reject experience, without falling into the trap of reducing Christ to something less than He is — substituting a packet of dogmas, a set of morals, etc., in His place.

On the other hand, we must be careful to not think that experience is the same as feelings. The emotions are involved, to be sure. They are a powerful tool. In another of Luigi Giussani’s books, The Religious Sense, he highlights that it is an illusion to think that we can free ourselves from them. No man has accomplished that. In fact, they help us experience things. They draw us in to what is before us. The challenge is to ensure that our judgement of what the experience means places them in their proper place.

You have highlighted so much of that Michael, both in your emphasis on the importance of experience, but the need for community to assist in reaching judgment about it. For on our own, we are often tempted to mix in our images of what we want it to be with our judgment of what it is. It is the help of another, someone outside of me, someone outside of my control, that can be crucial in making sure I stand before what is in front of me and see it as it is, not how I would like it to be.

Michael, I highly recommend Luigi Giussani’s works that I mentioned above, along with his At the Origin of the Christian Claim and Risk of Education. The reason I do so is because he is the only Christian author that I have come across who seems to have so deeply dove into these questions of experience and reason that ring so vital these days.

I’ve heard somewhere that “experience is the best expositor”

As long as the foundation is Scripture, we must have experiences are we don’t have “religion” (religion in the purely Edwardsian Puritan sense of divine life implanted in the soul)

This is a very important issue and makes all the difference in whether our doctrine is just a mole hill we defend like kids guarding a fort, or whether we “know” truth and love it. I like your example and how you trickle “experience” down a biblical stepping stone until neither are compromised. Even reading Scripture is an experience.

i wish some people would start to understand that in anything they do (e.g. reading the bible) is an experience. sure, we don’t want to become entirely individualistic (me and god and nothing else matters) but we have to realize that subjective experiences with god are not only real but essential.

in the spirit of learning from and interacting with believers in other denominations, i was commenting in a blog thread (more like a charybdis) with some orthodox and anglican people a few weeks ago which, unfortunately, turned out to be pretty pointless. they would not accept that anything other than the inerrant [T]radition of The Liturgy could be worship, especially not the “experiential” and “subjective” flavor.

i think when christianity moves away from this idea of subjective=bad/objective=good fallacy, the world will be better off.

nonetheless, i found your thoughts here wise about the bounds of subjective experience within the context of the church. we have to be very careful about that side of the debate as well.

This one for me is a super important one too. A few years ago I was a youth pastor at a church in Columbus and had three crazy things happen in the matter of one week all concerning God’s Will.
1. A young couple, just married and the husband was looking for a Job. There was a particular job that he hoped to get and was confident that he would get it. His wife even told him to not even apply to other places because God “told her” that this was the job he would get. A couple weeks went by and he finally got the new that he didn’t get the job. Now he’d lost a couple weeks worth of time, not searching for work!
2. A young Christian lady told my wife and I that “God told her” to date a certain guy. Problem was that this guy wasn’t a Christian himself. When we warned her, she ignored us and dated the guy. The guy slept with her and left after a couple days, leaving her with a broken heart and confused mind.
3. A young guy who was attending a Christian college was in trouble with the law. He stole a couple hundred dollars worth of video games etc… from a friend, but was wrecked with guilt and was in the process of thinking how to give it back, when he was found out and arrested. A couple days before his court date he saw a church sign that said “Everything Will Be Ok” he thought it was God “telling” him that he would recieve a mild sentence. Knowing this, he decided not to have a lawyer present (against the advice of myself and his parents) and went to court. Turns out the judge handed him the most aggresive sentence that a first time offender could be handed given the offense.

All this to say that in all three of these cases there was a lack of maturity in diciphering God’s will. So this is super important stuff to understand and I really like the widsom that you bring to the experience of God. I’d probably fall a little bit more on the wisdom side of things in any case, but could see that anyone folling your example would sit well within God’s moral will and would probably end up making a good choice.

By the way, have you ever read “Decision Making and the Will of God” by Garry Friesen? Really good read. I’d love an internet monk review of that if you ever have the time.

Thanks for all the great posting!
Dan Price