Doctrine and Experience: Closer than We Think

Photo by EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA

Methodists are notorious for being concerned about experience. We want our faith to be real, to be living and active and determinant, at least in certain ways, for our lives. What is much less clear is how background beliefs shape our experience, and this lack of awareness causes no small amount of difficulty for growing to maturity in Christ. Too many Methodists are still too impatient with the process of forming beliefs through engaging the rich intellectual content of our faith. It seems too heady, too abstract and disconnected from life. But, if we want our experience of God to deepen and grow ever richer, we need to grasp more fully the constitutive role doctrine plays in experience. 

Since my focus in this article is on experience, I need to define it, which is no simple matter. Randy Maddox’s chapter on experience in Wesley and the Quadrilateral: Renewing the Conversation, demonstrates well the complexities of identifying our subject matter. For the present purpose, I want to focus on experience as an event, a “happening to” a person that draws out a response. For Methodists, a classic example is the witness of the Spirit. According to Romans 8:16, the Holy Spirit witnesses with our spirits that we are children of God. The Spirit’s speaking to us is the “happening to.” Our response is confidence in Christ and a sense of belonging to God’s family, and through the means of grace, walking the way of Christ in all aspects of life.

A core aspect of experience, therefore, is its conceptual dimension, and this is the part we so often overlook. Putting it bluntly, we don’t have an experience apart from some idea of the meaning of what is happening in the experience. The ideas engaged during an experience must come from somewhere. They become part of our mental framework (background beliefs) put to work in experience. What we are dealing with here is the relationship between theory and practice. They are mutually influential for each domain and ultimately cannot be separated. To grasp the force of this inherent relationship between what is taught (doctrine) and how we experience is crucially important.

Two examples, one from contemporary psychological research and one from Methodist history, support this claim. In a recent “For the Life of the World” podcast (Yale Center for Faith & Culture), psychologist Justin Barrett explained the integral role of concepts or theory in experience by offering the example of how he reacts to smelling hazelnuts. His wife is deathly allergic to them. The smell of hazelnuts repulses him because they evoke the concept “danger” for someone he loves. His conceptual framework – “Hazelnuts are dangerous to my wife” – governs his experience of hazelnuts. Barrett says that ample empirical evidence exists to suggest that our concepts unavoidably shape our experiences.

If we exchange the word “concepts” for “doctrines” we can begin to see the force of Barrett’s observation. For example, there is no way that we can talk about the experience of God’s love without the concept of a loving God (1 John 4:8) operating properly in our understanding. For analysis, we can pull apart the doctrine from the experience, but we cannot experientially separate them. Christian experience therefore relies on Christian doctrine. 

And now the example from Methodist history. Ann Taves, in her masterful book, Fits, Trances, and Visions, argues that religious experiences are constituted by the communities of discourse in which the experiences take place. For a Christian community, “discourse” can include all sorts of disciplines, but it certainly must include our doctrines, not exclusively, but centrally. To show how, Taves narrates the life of LaRoy Sunderland (1804-1885), known in Methodist history as the co-founder, with Orange Scott, of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in 1843. What is not so well-known is that, by that time, Sunderland was also leaving orthodox Christianity and moving toward spiritualism. 

Sunderland became a Methodist preacher around 1822 (age 18) and participated in the revival movements of the day. Taves narrates Sunderland’s description of the physical manifestations he witnessed from among his hearers. People cried out, fell to the ground, sank down under the power of God and even went into trances. During Sunderland’s first ten years of ministry, he witnessed many such dramatic responses.

One person in particular, a Mrs. Reading, testified to falling into a trance during a revival in which Sunderland was preaching. At the time both she and Sunderland took her bodily experience as the powerful work of God. By 1839, however, Sunderland had rejected this conclusion. He had begun studying mesmerism and other strands of research in what eventually became the modern field of psychology. Eventually, Sunderland came to believe that trances are nothing more than natural human characteristics induced in certain subjects under certain conditions. In other words, the bodily responses so prevalent in Methodist revival meetings did not stem from God’s supernatural action at all, but occurred naturally in easily suggestible people. In other words, the fits, trances, and visions were not of divine origin, but human. He traveled extensively to promote his findings, giving lectures and putting on demonstrations to show that the trances in his subjects were within human control. Mrs. Reading became one of his regulars for these demonstrations.    

Mrs. Reading insisted, as did Sunderland, though perhaps less strongly (he continued to re-think his views throughout his career) that she was having the same kind of experience, whether speaking of her earlier experience in the revival or later as the subject for Sunderland’s demonstrations. This is precisely where Taves takes issue with the testimony. Yes, obviously, some features of the experience are superficially the same. It’s a trance, whether in a Methodist revival or on a lecture stage, but beyond the obvious bodily manifestation of trance and the very basic use of that term, “trance,” as the referent, the two experiences are qualitatively different.

Why? Because we never have raw experience apart from thought. In Taves’ view, that thought is embedded in terms and values that groups of people share in their understanding of various phenomena. Hence, “communities of discourse.” Our interpretive processes, which necessarily include concepts shaped by the communities in which we are members, are always present and active, even if not at the forefront of the experience while we are having it. This point requires nuance, of course. Some uniquely powerful experiences seem so overwhelming “in the moment” that we very well may not be conscious of what we are thinking right then. Only later, sometimes, do we become aware of the meaning associated with the experience. One may get the impression that the experience is one discrete thing and the thinking about it is another, but this is not how our minds work. An experience – the “happening to” us – is always “about” something and how we construe that “something” is operative during the “happening to.” It therefore constitutes the quality of experience we are having.

Let’s circle back to Mrs. Reading for a moment. The trance she underwent in the revival she at that moment attributed to divine power. The trance she experienced later, under Sunderland’s manipulations, she understood as simply the evocation of a latent tendency within her own psychological makeup. The bodily manifestation – trance – may have seemed physiologically the same, but the “aboutness” of the two experiences are decidedly different. In the former, God is the object of her awareness and, in the theological framework of Methodist revival, God’s power and love and sanctifying Spirit are present and active. In the latter, Mrs. Reading herself is the object of her attention (and, perhaps, LaRoy Sunderland). The conceptual framework – the background beliefs – associated with each experience being different, the experiences therefore differ.     

Why does this train of thought matter for Methodist Christians? An anti-intellectual strain runs through Methodism, whether of the evangelically pietistic kind or of the Schleiermachian existentialist variety. We want experience and there we focus, at the expense of learning that contributes so richly to, and is constitutive of, experience. This impatience contributes to the impoverishment of experience. If, on the other hand, we are willing to take the time to learn not only the what but the why of our doctrines; in other words, if we are willing to go beyond the rudiments of doctrine, we will find our experience of walking with Christ going ever deeper. And righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit will be ours. 

Stephen Rankin is pastor of Arkansas City (Kansas) United Methodist Church and Executive Director of Spiritual Maturity Project