Monthly Archives: March 2011

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On Experience

It depends how you define it, but “experience” probably needs to play more of a role in theology than it does. How can it not? Taken at its broadest, “experience” simply means everything that happens, all that occurs, as it enters the field of human awareness. Thus, revelation itself is one particular form of experience–the experience of God showing himself; the reading of Scripture is an experience; praying, being baptized, and thinking about the Trinity are all experiences in this sense.

Typically, experience gets slagged, I think, because of two fears. They are two narrowings of the notion of experience. The first is the fear that granting “experience” a role means granting that an individual’s experiences shape their theology. But of course the individual–along with their experiences–shapes their theology: the real question is whether they are going to shape it apart from Scripture (and the Church and its tradition). So bad theology takes the form: “God for me is more like…” Good theology proceeds in the light of revelation, in the form given to it by particular individuals.

The second fear, closely related to the first, is that “experience” will form some kind of second (or third or fourth) source after and potentially against Scripture. It can. But it doesn’t have to. Certain forms of feminism want to leverage women’s experience against parts of Scripture. But if reading Scripture is itself an experience, then their relationship is a bit more complex. Experience is properly the all-encompassing web–from the human side, for experience too is a creature–within which the reading of Scripture is an event, a particular experience. And further, we should not assume we know what we are experiencing. Only after the resurrection, and then sometimes only gradually, did the apostles discover what they had experienced (John 2:22). Note the past tense. Put starkly, the unbeliever thinks they are experiencing life, but the Christian understands it is really death they know (1 Tim 5:6).

All this is to say: spiritual theology is important. And how did we get here? Well, any spiritual writer worth their salt–Augustine, Merton, those collected in the Philokalia–knows that we are often willing to deceive ourselves about what we experience. We only know in part the realities of which the Bible speaks (1 Cor 13:12). As Merton puts it, “Yet we act as if we understood sin and as if we were really aware of the love of God when we have never deeply experienced the meaning of either one” (A Search for Solitude, 23). And sometimes we know them plain wrongly: in 1966, Merton had an affair with a nurse. At the time he talked of the “mysterious, transcendent presence of her essential self,” but later he was able to see it as “incredible stupidity” (The Intimate Merton, 297, 336). The deception is not always so severe, and sometimes, when we are given the grace, we are able to see with gratitude-inducing clarity the traces of God’s work in our lives.

“Experience,” then, is not something that has to be excluded from theology; rather, it has only to be named. And it can be named as limited, healthy, destructive–more theologically, as “sin” or as “grace,” as “death” or as “life.” Indeed, so objective a thinker as Aquinas can say, that “anyone may know,” at least “conjecturally,” that “he has grace, when he is conscious of delighting in God, and of despising worldly things” (ST I-II Q112 A5). A theologian who does not experience the realities of which he speaks, who is not “delighting in God,” will write a theology that at best sounds oddly hollow, and at worst is false and destructive of faith.

But we must trust that Paul’s prayer is for us as well: “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe” (Eph 1:17-19a).

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The End of Ecumenism

Halden Doerge and Ry Siggelkow have a post up called The End of Ecumenism. It’s quite an interesting and provocative little piece, detailing three approaches to Christian disunity: (i) the approach which thinks dialogue at “official” levels and the production of doctrinal documents is the solution; (ii) the approach which focuses on local congregations and sharing between denominational bodies; and (iii) their own, an approach which recognizes that in Christ we are all actually one, and so any attempt at “ecumenism as negotiation” is disobedience. The solution is to refuse to recognize false boundaries (i.e., those not really there in Christ) and to welcome our brothers and sisters in love. I have to disagree: it seems the breaking of the wall between Jew and Gentiles–which Doerge and Siggelkow have as a theological backdrop–did not happen simply by ignoring the boundary or proclaiming it null and void in Christ; rather, they both worked toward doctrinal agreement (Acts 15) and learned to share life together in local, common life. They did this, of course, because they saw their disunity as really null and void in Christ. Nevertheless, it is a helpful little piece to get one thinking.

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Anselm’s Song

I used to sing a delightful little song as a child that went like this:

He paid a debt he did not owe
I owed a debt I could not pay
I needed someone to wash my sins away
So now I sing a brand new song,
Amazing Grace, because he paid a debt
That I could never pay.

What I didn’t know what that it was lifted from Anselm:

Nor did anyone ever pay a debt to God which he did not owe. But Christ of his own accord gave to his Father what he was never going to lose as a matter of necessity, and he paid, on behalf of sinners, a debt which he did not owe. (Why God Became Man 2.18, in Major Works, p.349)

Of course, I’m stretching a little. But the idea’s there.

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New Brian McLaren

I haven’t really kept up on the emerging church conversation, but Anthony Smith highlights something in Brian McLaren’s newest book I think we already saw happening with Everything Must Change: there is a movement from “deconstruction” to “reconstruction.” And this is why I think the emerging church movement is basically post-evangelical: a dissatisfaction with evangelicalism, the megachurch and church growth movements led a bunch of pastors to break away and seek something else–hence the largely critical early phase of the emerging church. But now they’ve found something else: namely, the long Christian tradition. So they’re writing books like (his newest) A Naked Spirituality, A Generous Orthodoxy, and Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices. To which I say, amen. It’s just a shame many people stopped listening too early.

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Faith, Rationality and the Passions

The papers from the 2010 conference at Cambridge on “Faith, Rationality and the Passions,” convened by Sarah Coakley, are now available: half of them in Modern Theology here and the other half in Faith and Philosophy 28/1. In the latter, the interesting-looking bits include Paul J. Griffiths, “Tears and Weeping: An Augustinian View” (19-28) and Merold Westphal, “Kierkegaard on Faith, Reason, and Passion” (82–92). What this really means, however, is not one, but two new Coakley articles! Sort of: they’re really just an introduction and postscript to the collected papers. But when her systematics has been “forthcoming” for as long as it has, you take what you can get.

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Augustine on the Resurrection

The earthly material, then, from which mortal flesh is created does not die for God; but in whatever dust or ash it is scattered, in whichever vapour and wind it is dispersed, into whatever other substantial body or the elements themselves it is changed, into whatever animal and also human food it may pass and flesh it may be changed, to this human soul it returns, in an instant of time, as that which it was originally, in order that the person may come forth living, being revived. (Enchiridion 23.88)

Non autem perit Deo terrena materies de qua mortalium creatur caro; sed in quemlibet pulverem cineremve solvatur, in quoslibet halitus aurasque diffugiat, in quamcumque aliorum corporum substantiam vel in ipsa elementa vertatur, in quorumcumque animalium etiam hominum cibum cedat carnemque mutetur, illi animae humanae puncto temporis redit quae illam primitus, ut homo fieret cresceret viveret, animavit.