Religious Experience and the Knowledge of God

The Evidential Force of Divine Encounters

Netland, Harold A.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781493434893
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Philosophie de la religion

For many Christians, personal experiences of God provide an important ground or justification for accepting the truth of the gospel. But we are sometimes mistaken about our experiences, and followers of other religions also provide impressive testimonies to support their religious beliefs. This book explores from a philosophical and theological perspective the viability of divine encounters as support for belief in God, arguing that some religious experiences can be accepted as genuine experiences of God and can provide evidence for Christian beliefs.

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Religious Experience

Mapping the Conceptual Territory

Just what counts as a religious experience? This might seem easy to determine, but there is an astonishing variety of experiences that could be regarded as religious. Experiences of God or of supernatural beings, such as angels or spirits, are typically treated as religious.1 Visions of Jesus or the Virgin Mary are religious, as is the experience of sunyata (emptiness) in Buddhism or samadhi (the insight into one’s unity with Brahman) in Hinduism. The experience of making ritual offerings to Tu Di Gong, the earth deity, in a Chinese village to ensure a good crop is religious, as is chanting the mantra namu-myoho-renge-kyo (I take refuge in the Lotus of the Wonderful Law Sutra) in Nichiren Buddhism. But not every human experience can qualify as a religious experience. Having a vision of Lord Krishna while meditating is surely a religious experience, but for most people, paying the water bill is not. Praying in a mosque is religious, but mowing the lawn is not. Invoking the blessing of the kami (deities) in a Shinto purification ceremony is religious, but filling out one’s income tax forms is not.

Other experiences are more ambiguous and harder to determine whether they are religious. For example, should the veneration of departed ancestral spirits be considered a religious experience? Although not typically discussed by Western philosophers, communication with ancestral spirits is common in much of the rest of the world. Western scholars do discuss experiences of paranormal phenomena such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, clairvoyance, and telekinesis.2 Are these religious too? What about the experiences of healing or cursing associated with shamans, witches, and other spiritual specialists? Though often studied by anthropologists and religious studies scholars, these phenomena are largely ignored by philosophers writing about religious experience.3 Reports about miraculous events, especially miraculous healings, abound across religious traditions. Are these also religious experiences?4

Many experiences could be considered religious or just as easily be understood in nonreligious terms. Consider, for example, the experience of feeling one with nature while hiking in the mountains, or the experience of tranquility and joy derived from hearing beautiful music, or the experience of amazed gratitude and wonder at the birth of a child. For some, these are profoundly religious experiences. Others, though deeply moved by these experiences, would not regard them as religious. Some people interpret all of life as permeated with the presence and activity of God, so that even in harvesting crops or passing a history exam one experiences the gracious provision of God. What are understood by some as perfectly ordinary experiences can be taken by others to be manifestations of divine presence. Any acceptable understanding of religious experience must acknowledge not only the clear paradigm cases but also the more ambiguous experiences as well. In this chapter we will sort through some of the issues involved in identifying an experience as religious. We will also look briefly at how the concepts of religion and religious experience have been shaped by developments in the modern era and will suggest some general types of religious experiences.

Ann Taves notes that around the year 1900 European and American intellectuals in a range of disciplines became preoccupied with the notion of personal experience. Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians as well as religious studies scholars “turned to the concept of religious experience as a source of theological authority at a time when claims based on other sources of authority—ecclesiastical, doctrinal, and biblical—were increasingly subject to historical critique.”5 The increased prominence of religious experience in justifying one’s religious commitments in the early modern period coincides with the growing religious skepticism of the time and disillusionment with traditional theistic arguments. Matthew Bagger states, “With all the more traditional avenues of theism’s defense generally in disrepute, modern theologians and religious philosophers have repeatedly sought to justify religious belief rationally by reference to the individual’s experience.”6

The idea that religion is grounded in the religious experiences of key individuals became popular in the academic study of religion as well, and remained so until well into the twentieth century. But from the 1970s and ’80s onward, the experiential approach to understanding religion has been sharply criticized.7 In part this criticism was due to growing skepticism about the notion of religion itself; it became widely acknowledged that the current concept represents a modern construct that serves various agendas. Dissatisfaction with an experiential approach also stems from what today are seen as naive assumptions about the commonality of religious experiences across religious traditions and cultures, with insufficient attention given to their differences.

But giving more attention to the differences among religious traditions simply highlights the difficulty of determining the boundaries of the concept of religious experience. Robert Sharf observes that the current use of “religious experience” by religious studies scholars “is exceedingly broad, encompassing a vast array of feelings, moods, perceptions, dispositions, and states of consciousness.”8 There is no clear consensus on what is to be included or how we are to understand the nature of religious experiences. Yet despite its ambiguity, we cannot just dispose of the concept of religious experience. People do have experiences that are commonly identified as religious, and these experiences can be highly significant both for those who have them and for others. Taves wisely remarks, “After decades of critical discussion of the concept, we can neither simply invoke the idea of ‘religious experience’ as if it were a self-evidently unique sort of experience nor leave experience out of any sensible account of religion.”9

In attempting to clarify the meaning of terms, it is always tempting to look for precise definitions. Definitions, of course, serve different purposes. Consider, for example, the definition of “religion” given by Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary: “Religion: a daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.”10 Although witty, this definition tells us more about Bierce’s own views on religion than it does about the meaning of the term “religion.” Acceptable definitions of “religion” and “religious experience” should accurately reflect current usage of the terms as well as the lived realities that they denote.

But we should not assume that the only, or even the best, way to clarify meanings is by providing unambiguous definitions. Some concepts can be clearly defined, while others cannot. Meanings can be clarified through means other than definitions. Moreover, we should not be misled by the difficulty of defining terms like “religion” or “religious experience.” Many important concepts are very difficult to define, but we nevertheless are able to use them meaningfully in discourse.11 Consider, for starters, the difficulty of defining the words “meaning,” “knowledge,” “justice,” or “beauty.” Even though precise definitions are almost impossible to provide, it does not mean that we cannot know the meanings of these terms or that we cannot, through careful description and contrast with other concepts, give accurate accounts of their meaning. Not all words lend themselves to tidy definition.

Even when use of a definition is appropriate, we should not expect greater precision than the subject allows. The meanings of some terms are vague because they are used to depict realities that are not very clear. Vagueness in a concept can be a necessary tool for effective communication when the reality one speaks of lacks clear boundaries. Consider the word “tall.” Its meaning is imprecise and somewhat relative (Is 6′0″ tall for a man? How about 5′10″?), and yet we have no problem understanding the word in general usage. As we shall see, there is some ambiguity and vagueness in the concept of religion, and therefore in the concept of religious experience as well. But, in part, this is because it is not always clear just what is to be included in the set of things designated religious. The problem, in other words, is not necessarily with the definitions as such, but rather that the realities these terms refer to are themselves messy and unclear.

The Concept of Experience

Since religious experiences are a kind of experience, let’s begin by thinking about the concept of experience. On one level, of course, we all have a basic sense of what “experience” means, for experience is a fundamental and pervasive feature of human existence. The passing moments of each day include a vast array of experiences, some perhaps significant but most rather mundane. Even so, it can be difficult to characterize the notion of experience with any precision.

It is helpful to distinguish between an event and an experience. For example, a tree falling in the forest is an event but someone observing a tree falling in the forest has the experience of seeing the tree fall. The event itself is one thing, someone perceiving it is something else. Experiences, for our purposes, occur with people; they require a subject who undergoes the experience.12 But we can also think of experiences themselves as events, for a person having an experience is an event. We normally think of experiences as momentary events of varying duration; they have a beginning and an end and occur at particular points of time.13 We can, of course, consider experience in an extended sense as well, such as one’s experience as a nurse in the oncology department or the accumulated experience of a lifetime. Unless otherwise noted, however, we will use “experience” to refer to particular momentary events or a series of such events rather than in its more general or extended sense.

Experience typically involves awareness of an object or state of affairs. But in having an experience, must one be consciously aware of what the experience is about? Many philosophers include conscious awareness as a necessary feature of experience. Richard Swinburne, for example, maintains that “an experience is a conscious mental event.”14 Similarly, Caroline Franks Davis claims that an experience “is a roughly datable mental event which is undergone by a subject and of which the subject is to some extent aware.”15 Keith Yandell states that to have an experience “is to be in a conscious state which one is at least somewhat capable of describing.”16 The point here is that we do not normally speak of those in unconscious or comatose states as having experiences. But to say that having an experience requires being conscious does not mean that one is directly aware of everything that she experiences. One can have the experience of seeing the green lawn outside the window without being aware of just how long the grass is or the squirrel sitting in the grass.

Having an experience typically involves making a judgment of some kind ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Religious Experience
• 2. Religious Experience and Interpretation
• 3. The Critical-Trust Approach
• 4. Edwards and Wesley on Experiencing God
• 5. Experiencing God, Basic Beliefs, and the Holy Spirit
• 6. Mysticism
• 7. Theistic Experiences and Religious Diversity
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover