Seeing is Believing: Explorations on Experience and Faith

Introduction:  The Background

The contemporary religious scene in Britain today, is often summarised by the statement that people are interested in the spiritual but not in religion.  Hay considers that religion is understood as primarily a institutional structure which controls and defines, and provides a system of rituals which can be useful for recalling the sacred.  Hence he presents religion with both negative and positive aspects.  At one level it is confining, defining and authoritative and concerned with maintaining and propagating the “metanarrative”.  As such it is a thing of suspicion in a post-modern context.  However it also provides rituals, symbols, language and a history which are useful.  When these become fixed into a past era and context they are rejected, but when they can be “mined”, regenerated and adapted for contemporary use they can have importance and influence.

Within the Western Church, and particularly the Protestant Church, religion has also been portrayed as primarily a cognitive and mental process.  This is partly due to the consequences of the Reformation, which had to reject experience and tradition in favour of “reason”.  This process was confirmed throughout the enlightenment period, when much emphasis was put on “reason” and the empirical nature of enquiry, and the rise in rational and scientific approaches to life and study.  The search for knowledge under the guidance of scientific enquiry led to the Church emphasising more and more that faith is about understanding and knowledge.  The outcome of this approach was that there has been an emphasis on knowledge and understanding, upon the cognitive aspect of faith and the diminution of the importance of experience.  As such the Church has been ambivalent about the place of experience in the process of faith and in its institutional forms of worship.  Acknowledging that faith may come through an experience, it then defines how that experience can be expressed and understood.  Again this has both negative and positive aspects, as the authority of the Church will define the boundaries for interpretation of experience, but at the same time provides the language through which it can be understood, interpreted and communicated.

However throughout the history of the Western Church there has been a counter movement which has attempted to re-emphasise the place of experience in faith and spirituality.  The medieval mystics, may be popular today, but at their time they were marginal to the main life of the church and even at times considered to be bordering on the heretical.  Joan of Arc was martyred because she could be condemned for her spiritual experiences.  George Herbert’s poems and hymns portray an interest in the experience of God through nature, that looked more to a mystical aspect of life, emphasising the senses and experience and so representing the spiritual aspect of the Reformation period.  In the contemporary era the invention of the neo-Celtic tradition with its reinterpretation of history, is seen as a challenge to orthodox Christianity because it emphasises the feelings, experience and emotion over against the cognitive and mental process.  Van der Weyer has used the neo-Celtic tradition to challenge traditional Anglicanism and attempt to establish a new form of Christianity where that faith is something that is lived out on the experiential level rather than something that is understood through doctrine and ritual.

The contemporary religious situation raises many questions for the church, which centre around the issue of the relationship between spirituality, religion, experience and faith.
Spiritual Experience

The beginning of interest and the study of Religious Experience can be illustrated by the work of William James, who published his Gifford lectures in the book “The Varieties of Religious Experience”.  In Britain this was taken up by Alister Hardy who founded the Religious Experience Research Unit in Oxford in 1969.  The interest in Religious Experience and Faith is then, largely, a 20th century initiative.  The normal approach of study has been from an interfaith perspective and so the term “Religious” has represented this.  However Religious Experience is not confined to people who are religious in the traditional sense, in that they are involved with an organised, institutional system of belief.  Indeed Hay challenges this idea and considers that Religious Experience is part of a universal experience and is not confined to religious systems.  He reports that in a study at Nottingham University in the 1970’s, a survey showed that 65% of students were prepared to claim that they had had Religious Experiences while only 14% claimed religious affiliation.  . 

A number of scholars have attempted to define and categorise Religious Experience.  Firstly, a Religious Experience must be an experience that is an encounter with the Divine, the “other”, the Transcendent” or God.  However this raises the issue of whether people who are not part of a religious system, and therefore do not have the language and worldview of religion can have a religious experience.  Gillespie says 

“for religious people there are no secular events, since the religious experiences we have are related to the significance we place on them as we interpret them according to our life-viewpoint.” 

So presumably the opposite is also true.  Can experiences be separated from their interpretation?  Most scholars would agree that they cannot.   The interpretation is an intimate part of the experience and therefore will also help to determine what the experience is. This is illustrated with a “Peanuts” cartoon where Linus, Charlie Brown and Lucy are looking at the cloud formations.  Linus sees the clouds as a picture of the martyrdom of Steven with Paul standing by, while Charlie Brown can only see “a ducky and a horsie”.  Therefore a more appropriate definition may be that a Religious Experience is an experience that is interpreted religiously. 

A Religious Experience, then, can only be such if it is interpreted with religious language and from the world-view of a religious system. Donovon makes this point that experiences can only be understood as religious, when they are interpreted from a religious perspective.  This necessitates first a belief in God, or the Divine, and that the Divine can communicate. Therefore, to use the term Religious Experience is to ignore a large part of the population. Did Linus have a spiritual experience, while Charlie Brown did not, or did neither of them have a Religious Experience? Hay considers that

“at some level, most people, even the most ill-educated are privately convinced that they have a religious dimension to their experience.  The problem is that they have neither social permission nor necessary language to articulate it so that it sounds coherent or acceptable to religiously orthodox ears.”

Second, in most definitions of Religious Experiences, the normal everyday experiences of life are generally excluded.  Scholars prefer to deal with exceptional or particular experiences which can be more easily classified.  Religious Experience then, tends to centre around mystical type experiences.  However Lewis, while wanting Religious Experiences to be “distinctive” from other experiences, prefers to understand Religious Experiences as everyday experiences that are interpreted religiously. To exclude the everyday experiences may make it easier to work with the concept of experience, but it does exclude a large part of life and experience. It would exclude Linus.

Consequently, to avoid the confusion, I prefer to use the term Spiritual Experience, which would mean an experience that is interpreted from a spiritual perspective.  The term spiritual will mean the recognition that there is “the other”, the “divine”, the metaphysical aspect of life, without having it defined by a system of belief.

The Bible as a collection of experiences not a theological document

The Gospels are presented as a collection of stories about the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  The emphasis then is on the person of Jesus.  However Biblical scholars have long agreed that the gospels contain as much interpretation and redaction, as they do simple fact.  Indeed such 19th century scholars as Bultman attempted to claim that there was little or no authenticity in the sayings and acts of Jesus in the gospels but that they were myth and legend perpetuated by the Church.  The position of Bultman, however, has always been marginal, albeit influential in the realm of Bible study.  However it does highlight the discussion about the type of material that is found in the Gospel stories.

Johnson takes another approach to the Gospel material and understands it not so much as the story of Jesus but as a collection of experiences of the Jesus of Nazareth and the Risen Christ.  He says that the New Testament is a book of experiences of the Transcendent Power seen in Jesus Christ.  However it is clear that it is not simply a collection of experiences, but includes interpretation, as the interpretation cannot be separated from the experience, particularly because experience is primarily personal and the person cannot separate himself or herself from it.

Likewise the Pauline material, which most scholars would consider the earliest written material in the New Testament, contains the presentation and interpretation of the experience of the Risen Christ.  Paul refers to the experience of the Risen Christ and the Spirit as essential to both the understanding, and the outworking of the Christian faith. For example the importance of experience is seen in Paul’s writings, when he considers that the proof of the resurrection, is not through interpolation of the empty tomb, but in the experiences of people who had met the Risen Christ.  Therefore clearly experience is the foundation of the Christian faith.  

‘Christianity came to birth because certain people were convinced that they had experienced God’s transforming power through the resurrection of Jesus.’

Consequently developing Johnson’s thesis, which is very much at an introductory stage, we can say that the development of the understanding of the early Church , and the faith of the early church was not centred around the development of doctrines of Christ, but around the experiences of the Risen Christ and the Holy Spirit.

The Contemporary Situation

The religious trends survey which has been analysed primarily by Peter Brierley shows that church attendance in England is declining rapidly, and that the largest decline is seen among young people and children.  This decline is in the number of people who attend worship regularly.  However there is another aspect to the statistics which show that patterns of attendance are changing, and that people are attending less frequently than in the past.  Also that there is a small move away from Sunday worship to midweek worship. Yet this trend is at a time when it is generally accepted that there is a growth in interest in spirituality.  While there may be a decline in Christianity in Britain, spirituality is a growth business.  This may indicate that the traditional churches are unable to satisfy the spiritual needs and aspirations of the general population, and in particular the younger generations.  Back as far as 1972 Kelsey, reflecting particularly on the church in the USA, but acknowledging that it is also true for “northern Europe”, warned that this was the trend. 

‘Anyone trying to take in the total religious picture in this country is likely to become perplexed.  Among the most varied groups he finds an active new interest in things religious and spiritual.  Young people in particular are searching in diverse ways - and many adults in very specific ways - for reality that could give religious orientation to their lives.  But at the same time the religious institutions in this country, the Christian church, is not doing very well.’

“Spirituality but not religion” seems to be the key to the contemporary situation.  In a post-modern context it may well be that the emphasis is on personal spiritual fulfilment rather than on institutional expressions as individuality is more important than community.  Similarly post-modern concepts emphasise experience, feelings and choice over against authority, tradition and dogma.  So how does this affect the church and how should the church respond?  In particular, where is the place of experience as determinative for faith, in today’s church?

A very small pilot study using a questionnaire was undertaken earlier this year among 4 members of a church in Birmingham. The pilot study was primarily set up to test the technique and to evaluate the questionnaire created.  Consequently it would be wrong to make any serious deductions from the results.  The questionnaire asked people if they had had any spiritual experiences and how these have influenced their life, faith and how these experiences relate to the type of church they attend.  No definition is given of spiritual experiences as it was left for the individual to understand this in his or her own way.  Of the four people taking part in the survey, one did not understand the questionnaire, and in particular the concept of spiritual experience, so could not complete it, but the other three people may show an interesting trend. One person is 25 years old (X), one is 49 years old (Y) and one is 65 years old (Z). However looking at the brief summaries on the questionnaire there is much in their background that is similar, so a comparison can be made.  All had a Christian upbringing, being related to the church in one way or another, and all have had a number of spiritual experiences.

The survey indicates that all three had had spiritual experiences while alone, with others and in the countryside but only Y and Z had had them in church. Yet all claimed to have had spiritual experiences while at worship, in prayer and listening to music.  The young person (X) had had an experience during worship, but not in church. X indicates that this was a particular occasion when a group of young people had spontaneously worshipped together and celebrated communion. Further Y indicated that there is a strong relationship between church worship and spiritual experiences (giving it a score of 7 out of 10), and both Y and Z said that personal experience had influenced the way they worship (6).  X, however,  felt that there was little connection (average of 3.5) and that personal experience had less influence on the way she worships (4.5)

Y and Z also indicated that thinking about life and God had produced spiritual experiences but that this was not so strongly influential in the way that they understand the world (Y = 5, Z = 4).  X on the other hand did not indicate that thinking about life and God produced spiritual experiences, but that her spiritual experiences had strongly influenced her understanding of the world (8).  Finally, all three felt that their spiritual experiences had strongly influenced their understanding of God and their faith (X = 9, Y = 8.5, Z = 8). 
 
If it is possible to draw any conclusions from this survey, it might indicate that experiences are important in the life of faith, and worship, and by implication that the doctrines and institution of the church is less important.  Y indicated a basic rejection of “church and chapel” in younger days and a continuing “precocious tendency to critique religion”. Younger people find that mainline church worship is less relevant to their personal spirituality.  Kelsey speaking about the modern church says:

‘The  church has relied on authority and doctrine, on theological understanding about experiences, instead of trusting the experiences themselves.  But this new generation, both young and old, are not satisfied with authority; they want experiences of God, and the Holy Spirit to verify the theology and the dogma.  And this, ... is exactly what the modern church and modern theology is short on, even hostile to.’  and   ‘If the institutional church does not wake up to this fact [that people need  their own encounters with God], it is in for even worse days than it has had.’

Is this not also true for the church in the post-modern context

Conclusion

From all of this, the results of the English Church survey and the Experience and Faith questionnaire, some issues are raised for further investigation:

1. How much is faith cognitive and how much is it dependent on experience?

2. How much does the church relate to the understanding of reality in the 21st century, taking seriously the place of the spiritual realm and spiritual experiences in people’s lives?
	
3. Should worship include the opportunity to express spiritual experiences, and be the place to help interpret them?

4.  Is experience the starting place for mission?

Notes:

Appendix 1:

Seeing is Believing by Kent, Jones, Fyffe, Geoffrey, Richard, Winter   1969

Seeing is believing and believing what you see
The artist of the mountain,
the designer of the tree.
If you’re looking for the answer
if you’re searching for the key,
You’ve got to open your eyes and open your mind.

The shapes of the shadows of clouds on the hill;
the morning, the mist and the dew;
the motionless stars on a cold night clear and still;
there’s more to be seen than the view.
But there’s one stipulation that I find
You’ve got to open your eyes and open your mind.

Appendix 2:

Teach me, My God and King   by  George Herbert (1593 - 1633)

Teach me, my God and King,
in all things thee to see,
and what I do in anything
to do it as for thee.

A man that looks on glass
on it may stay his eye;
or if he pleaseth, through it pass
and then the heavens espy.