« Life-sized and 28,000 Years Old
Main
Priorities, Priorities »
July 26, 2005
On the Validity of Religious Experience
In the late sixties, I would have understood all this but I have either outgrown it or grown dimwitted.
Ben Witherington is a New Testament Scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary who writes an interesting post on "The Validity of Religious Experience." Asbury Theological Seminary has a strong United Methodist tradition not unlike the one I attended nearly 40 years ago. It is perhaps not so liberal. Witherington gets off to a good start.
How many times have we heard the phrase "I cannot deny my experience"? This is all the more the cry when it comes to religious experience. But in fact the issue is not the reality or the clarity of the experience, the issue is the source, the content and trajectory of the experience.
And then things turn strange,
What distinguishes a good from a bad religious experience in part depends on whether it has come from the one true God, or from some other source. It also depends on what that experience leads, impells (sic), or prompts you to do.
So he proposes a test that will indicate a good (?) religions experience from a bad (?) one. He means a valid religious experience and an invalid religious experience. His validity test has two necessary conditions.
- A valid religious experience must come from "the one true God."
- And it must prompt one to act in certain ways.
He then cites the work of C.H. Dodd and the author of the first Epistle of John both to support his position and to supplement it. Yet we are never told how we are to know that the experience comes from "the one true God" except by way of the second leg of the test. So the first criterion seems of no consequence or, at best, dependent on the second. Among the actions he has in mind,
Does it (the religious experience) lead to the belief that Jesus is the Son of God come in the flesh, as the Johannine Epistles put it, or to some sort of heterodox belief about Jesus?
And this, of course, speaks to the first leg. If a valid religious experience comes from "the one true God" then it leads to some modified but more intense belief in that one true God. This has a vexingly circular character.
There is also an ethical element in the second part of the validity test but neither Witherington nor Dodd, at least in the passage quoted, nor the First Epistle of John tells us explicitly what that ethical element is beyond "setting of the affections and will in the direction of the moral principles of the Gospel."
I took a course in seminary on the nature of religious experience from a teacher who was in the Rudolf Otto school of thought, who saw religious experiences as involving experiences of the "numinous." For this reason, he accused me of being a "fundamentalist" for offering and trying to defined in class a definition of a religious experience that went something like this,
A religious experience is any experience that one describes in the language of his or her cult.
I still think this is still a good definition.
This definition is a far cry from Otto and the numinous but it is a lot closer to Witherington than Witherington might like to admit. The real problem is how to test the validity of the language of a cult; in Witherington's case the Christian cult. Just to be clear, words like "the one true God" or even the word "god" with or with out a capital "g" are part of cult language. Once one recognizes this as cult language, then language like "that Jesus is the Son of God come in the flesh" is even more obviously cult language. As far as I can tell, Witherington's validity test involves nothing more than claiming that a religious experience is correct if it is described in the language of the Christian cult and that it furthers actions pursuant to the ethics of that cult. And there is no reason to believe that that language connotes anything at all.
My definition of religious experience is objective independent of cult language; Witherington's definition restricts valid religious experiences to a single cultic tradition. Neither offers a test for the validity of a religious experience outside of the language of a cultic tradition and therefore neither speaks to the question of the validity of religious experiences. They both just step to the side of the issue. Witherington assumes that some religious experiences are indeed valid and I only assume that there are various cultic languages.
In the late sixties, I would have at least understood Witherington's post and by the comments of many of those who read it so can others today. But only those who see themselves within the Christian cultic tradition (in some way more than simply historically) can understand what he means. For this reason, I no longer get it.
Posted by Duane Smith at July 26, 2005 8:17 PM | Read more on Religion |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1281