The Tyranny of the 'Christian Experience'

The bondage of felt authenticity

Photo by Billy Pasco on Unsplash

1. The ‘Objective Experience’ Paradox

Evangelical Christianity often insist on two things simultaneously:

• The gospel is objectively true (independent of us)

• but it must be personally experienced

In contemporary evangelicalism, this has often become:

• the gospel is objectively true

• because it has been personally experienced.

This is true even in the more apparently rationalistic forms of evangelicalism. Even though there’s an emphasis on growth through learning cognitively, and on ‘bible teaching’ rather than preaching, there’s still an implicit assumption that an emotionally framed experience of conviction of sin and then joy in grace are foundational.
We sing:

‘You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart.’

But if experience becomes the validation of the truth, then those who lack such experiences are left in a kind of suspended uncertainty. Can it be true for me if I don’t feel it?

I am asked this question both by lifelong Christians and by outsiders. An experiential validation, they say, would confirm the reality of God. For the long-time Christian, there is the struggle to feel constantly connected to God through the deserts of everyday chores. For the non-Christian, a direct experience of God would quell doubts about the existence of God.

I find this intriguing, not least because there’s a set of assumptions here about how the world works and about God’s nature.

2. The Romantic inheritance

We’re all post-Romantics, even those who would deny it. Romanticism and the evangelical movement were contemporaneous - as you can see by figures like Friedrich Schleiermacher, who attempted to bridge the gap between pietism and the cultured despisers of his day by giving an account of Christianity in terms of the 'feeling of absolute dependence’.

Even traditions that would strongly reject Schleiermacher’s liberal theology have, in practice, absorbed his anthropology:

• The self becomes the primary site of religious verification

• Authenticity is measured by intensity of inward feeling

The implicit narrative in evangelical faith is conversionist - the bringing of the individual to a moment of overwhelming recognition of their sin and the grace of God. Think of “Amazing Grace”, and the internal story powerfully and emotionally embedded within in it. It is an exclamation - ‘Amazing Grace!’. I was ‘a wretch’, but now I have been inwardly transformed - ‘found’. Grace has ‘taught my heart’.

What begins as a person’s testimony, becomes a normative experience.

3. The Neurodivergent Challenge (and Gift)

However, for many neurodivergent people (and, frankly, many others), the expected emotional script doesn’t occur or occurs differently. Or is simply not central to how they process reality.

So they feel alienated from the experience they’re told to expect and from the community that normalises that experience. Reasonably, they then ask:

If I don’t feel this, do I really believe in God?

This is not a marginal issue. It exposes a deeper theological question, which is: what kind of human being does our theology assume?

4. Why “Objective” Traditions Feel Like Relief

This explains, I think, the attractiveness of traditions like the Roman Catholicism, where the centre of gravity shifts from an inner state to an external reality. Rather than felt assurance lying in experience, it shifts to participation in practices. The sacraments involve me, but don’t rely on my feelings for them to be effective.

To receive absolution, you don’t need to feel forgiven - and to receive the Eucharist, you don’t need to feel an emotional intensity. This can feel like an incredible relief after pursuing experiences.

5. The resources in Protestantism

The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century was a battle, in part, about assurance. Luther critiqued the sacramental system for its dead formalism and for its lack of biblical foundations. It may have provided an externalised assurance, but it only did so by building on a faulty theological reasoning that diverted faith from the cross of Jesus Christ.

But Luther did not simply advocate for a sort of mystical alternative. He spoke of faith not as a feeling but as a trust in the external promises of God (extra nos). As someone who battled with uncertain feelings all his life, he knew not to place the burden of assurance on the depth on inward experience. Assurance for Luther rests not in the heart’s temperature, but in God’s word and Christ’s work. The sacraments work because they are tangible proclamations of the gospel which we receive by faith.

Once Protestant faith wandered from its anchor in the Word of God and became, in liberalism and in some charismatic theology, an experiential faith, it gave itself over to the primacy of the inward.

Photo by Massimiliano Morosinotto on Unsplash

6. The incarnation, creation and transcendence

I mentioned above that I think this expectation of experience rests on some assumptions of how God relates to the world he made that are worth questioning. The first of these assumptions is epistemological. That is: there is a romantic assumption that the things I can know for certain are things I have experienced. Reason and expert knowledge can be faulty. I can be deceived. But if I feel it, I know it is real.

But is that so? Has inward feeling really earned its place as the most certain place in our lives? Radiohead once chillingly sang:

Just ‘cos you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.

We need to learn to doubt ourselves more. Why should we privilege this way of knowing? Why are we so certain of these and so doubtful of others?

But there’s a theological assumption here, too, which goes to our definition of what an ‘experience’ of God ought to feel like. I would say it is ‘interventionist’ - that is, what is desired is an emotional experience that is like (say) the experience of Paul or of Moses or Abraham. God certainly does reveal himself directly in human history - most fully in the person of Jesus Christ.

But God’s revelation of himself in Christ is from within the ordinary world as well as through acts of power. God is revealed in the sweat on Jesus’ brow. He discloses himself in the mundane as well as the extraordinary.

The world, as Hopkins will say, is ‘charg’d with the grandeur of God’. Creation is itself already miraculous - permeated with the presence and power of the divine being. Even when we don’t acknowledge or recognise it, this is the case.

What am I getting at?

At one level, all experience in God’s world - whether ecstasy or boredom - is experience of God, if you understand it in the right way. It’s the framing that matters. Even an experience of felt God-abandonment - horror and suffering, indeed - is not an experience of the actual absence of God. Not that God is in an act of evil, but that God works through and around and over even evil things. This is what the cross of Jesus Christ surely teaches us.

I had my greatest experiences of God when I was in hospital on pethidine. I wept for joy at the overwhelming sense of the love of God that I suddenly knew. Was that invalid because there was a ‘rational’ explanation? No, because God was (I believe) using the experience to tell me a great truth about himself. The experience inwardly confirmed what I knew to be true externally.

7. A Possible Way Through: Reframing “Experience”

I don’t think we need to reject experience holus bolus, as if we could in any case. Theologians rightly talk about the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit that leads to a deeper conviction about sin and the grace of God. But these experiences may feel differently or not feel particularly like anything. I may be overwhelmed with guilt. Or I may know that I have done the wrong thing and not feel anything much at all - but still know that it needs to be dealt with.

It helps to understand that not all experience is emotional. The are multiple modes of receiving truth into our lives so that is not merely true, but true for us ourselves. The reality of God embeds itself through our understanding, in memory, through our shared commitment, through our habits of life, through our participation in community, in the ministry of others, in relational trust, in the perception of natural beauty, and through emotions or affections.

What post-romantic culture has done is to privilege just one of these - the emotional. I feel it, therefore it is true. Evangelicalism is deeply intertwined with that culture, and shares many of its assumptions.

But objective truth and subjective feeling are not the opposite of one another. Rather, we subjectively engage objective reality in many different ways. The world God made and the gospel of Jesus Christ are apprehended by us as his creatures in all the facets of our humanity.

7. Conclusion

The truth of God’s being and the truth of the gospel is not dependent on the vividness of my inner life. Rather we receive these realities through the prism of personality - in weakness, in ecstasy, in dullness, in numbness, in joy, and even when God seems absent. The absence of intense feeling is not the absence of God.

If we aren’t careful in speaking about experiences, we will norm types of experiences that other people don’t have. We will lead those who believe to doubt, and we will give the impression that you can’t be a Christian until you’ve had the ‘zap’.

Evangelicalism has always cast itself as an alternative to the dead formalism of institutional forms of Christianity. It tends to be suspicious of pattern and ritual, and not without reason.

But we may have created a new bondage - to felt authenticity.