Responsible Experience: Following the Spirit
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A student sat in front of me and shared that she was unable to believe in anything that she could not immediately perceive. “It’s obvious that your cup exists, but God is questionable. And I’m not sure that I can say that I’ve had an experience of God. Most experiences of God have some kind of rationale.” In other words, we live in a world where naturalistic explanations abound and overshadow belief in the transcendent.
These sentiments have become increasingly common in my office as young adults are less familiar with Christianity. Students feel trapped in the immanent frame, to borrow a phrase from Charles Taylor, where experiences are always self-referential and the “God of the gaps” is a stumbling block to serious intellectual inquiry. Experiences of God are no more than universal human experiences of beauty that are baptized in the name of Jesus and called “holy.”
"It feels manipulative," said another student. "We know all the right buttons to press to elicit an experience of God. Certain chord structures will give you a healthy hit of dopamine. Once the brain is relaxed and euphoric, good orators come in and land a spiritual gut punch. It's all explainable.”
Why believe in experiences of the divine when you know about brain chemistry? God-talk has a way of cowering in embarrassment in a world obsessed with telescopes and microscopes. It was Rudolph Bultmann who noted the impossibility of flipping an electric light switch and still believing in the world of the New Testament. Modernity reduces the world into mere materiality—laws and atoms. And the threat is that many of us can't find a way to peek behind the reductionist veil and discover that the divine is actually present. Explanations are abundant, but wonder is lost.
The loss of experience of God is part and parcel to the decline of the church. A closed, determined world leaves no opening to be surprised by a God who waits for you, burning in a thorn bush. There is no intellectual real estate for an experience of the Spirit that enters your life like a hurricane, ripping doors off hinges, and hurling you out into the streets. Is a life devoid of mystery and transcendence a life worth living? If not, the church must find a way to talk about experiences that can’t be easily elucidated without the help of a reality that transcends modernist epistemologies.
Making Sense of Life
The problem is that disenchantment makes my life nonsensical. I've felt the kind of warmed heart that John Wesley wrote about after Aldersgate. But those experiences have been less mysterious and profound than the times God has asked me to go to places I do not want to go and do things I had no intention of doing. Most recently, I sat alone in a quiet chapel. The familiar sensation of the Divine infused the space until I realized that "Someone" had returned, uninvited, and had the nerve to tell me it's time to move into a different season of life. Can't I wait one more year?
This seems to be the way God works—interrupting people with road trips, pregnancies, and dreams in the night. It’s never convenient, lest we make idols of our own desires. Lives are flipped upside down, uprooted, or they take a hard U-turn. How do we explain the man that is on a one-way trip to Tarshish, but still ends up on the shore of Nineveh? The Christian life can be as strange as quantum dynamics, which means that it doesn't follow any of our presumed norms, governed by the virtues of money, power, and individualism.
The only explanation I have is the Holy Spirit. Maybe that’s not palatable, but it’s at least strange enough to stir up a skeptic’s curiosity.
A Wesleyan Theology of Experience
One gift that Wesleyan theology offers the church universal is a rich theology of experience. For too long experience has been a source of our shame and embarrassment. Central to Wesleyan theology is that the role of the Spirit is normative and universally accessible to all peoples. Methodists believe that the Spirit can be felt. Even more audacious, the Spirit should be felt. And to succumb to a rationalistic faith, and trade the heart for the head, is to strip the Spirit of his transformative power. Right knowledge isn't enough to change our hearts. After all, a good theologian doesn't always make for a good disciple, but the theologian has a better chance at discipleship if she starts every day with prayer.
Wesley believed that the Holy Spirit played a strong soteriological role within the Christian life. That is, the Spirit could actually bear witness to our souls in real and personal ways, particularly with regard to our assurance of salvation. For Wesley, this meant that if you show up to the church (even unwillingly), then you're giving the Spirit free reign to poke and prod at your heart (even during a reading of Luther's Preface to the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans). More importantly, that same Spirit never leaves us alone; he shows us the image of Jesus and then, he shows us again—and again—until we're transformed into his likeness. Therein lies Wesley's commitment to sanctification, and his belief that righteousness isn't just imputed. Rather, the inward Spirit of God imparts Christ's righteousness, actually making us holy. In other words, you can expect to be bombarded by the Spirit continually, even when you'd rather be left alone.
Here is where Wesley is particularly helpful: experience is much more than the experience of emotions and feelings. Sure, we’re part of the same revivalist tradition that swept across America giving people the jitters and shakes. But Wesley also knew that feelings are fickle, often untrustworthy, appearing and disappearing depending on moods and air quality. Feelings can be the golden calf at the bottom of the mountain that distracts us from actually meeting God. After all, Wesley vehemently opposed enthusiasm as a kind of religious opiate that made Christianity more palatable to the whims and desires of the individual under the guise of “spirit.”
My students are rightfully suspicious of any Christian experience that only results in goosebumps and tranquility. Why not get the same sensation at the local music venue? This kind of Christian experience can easily slip into a theological form of confirmation bias, where the human ego is mistaken for God and then magnified to cosmic proportions. I've met plenty of church planters who feel called by the Spirit to plant churches in hipster mountain cities or in quaint beach towns. More rarely do I hear folks called to plant a church in rural Appalachia. As Wesley said, "These inward feelings may come from God, or they may not.”
Experience, on the other hand, is richer, deeper—more holistic. It engages the heart, sheds abroad the love of God in one’s heart, but also requires intellectual honesty. A true Christian experience isn't subjective fideism—a free-for-all without the interpretive help of Scripture and community. Experience is always tested. We worship a living God, who is always up to something new, but we’ve got a pretty good record of the ways God has chosen to live in the past. It’s helpful to compare notes.
Maybe most importantly, Wesley always created space for response. A right and good Christian experience bears witness to the presence of the Spirit, the natural presence of God who often compels us toward an unnatural way of life. Right experience moves us toward God's transformation of the cosmos. In other words, experience isn't a possession to be coddled and stored, it's an encounter with the indwelling Spirit that thrusts us further and deeper into the world. A fire flickers in your heart and before you know what's taken place, you've started a school for children of coal miners. Or, boarded a boat to mosquito-infused Savannah. Or, started preaching in the fields when reason says it's vile and uncouth. Like grace, experience is also response-able. Could it be that part of the veracity of the experience is proven in the response?
John Wesley often asked his friends this question: "Is Christ real to you? How? Tell me a story." Wesley paid attention to the encounters of early Methodists, eager to hear the strange things the Spirit was doing in their hearts. Though he handled these experiences with care, always testing them with Scripture, he was also always ready to be surprised by the ways that the Spirit was blowing scriptural holiness across the land.
Perhaps one of the most crucial practices for Methodist leaders in a secular age is to listen to the stories of our people. And we must expect more out of the Spirit than butterflies and shooting stars. Our burgeoning Christians expect more than good feelings. After all, it’s very possible that we don’t hear from the Spirit because we refuse to hear hard things. In right experience, the heart receives God. The problem is that when God comes, God brings a concern for the cosmos. It’s a package deal.
Postscript
Later in the semester, I sat with the same student as she described a strong, unnerving feeling. "There's no reason why I should care about this organization or these projects," she said. "But I do.”
"I can't definitively tell you that this is the voice of God," I said. "But it makes you a little angry? Pumps passion through your veins? Helps you love your neighbor? It sure sounds like you've had an experience of God.”
It's the foolishness, ironically, that makes the whole experience more believable.
Ryan Snider is an elder in the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church.