Against the Rhetoric of 'Religious Experience'

A version of this piece was originally published some six years ago on my now-defunct Wordpress blog. But if you’ll forgive the reusing of an old piece, I think it is worthwhile enough to share here with significant updating.

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Religious experience has long had a privileged place in American Protestant thought and practice. The particular way in which religious experience is discussed varies, of course. On one hand, you have Evangelical talk about one’s personal relationship with God and emphasis on the emotional and experiential drama of conversion. On the other side of the theological spectrum, liberals are often wiling to reformulate or even revise doctrine or practice based on contemporary experiences of God, especially the experiences of those of us who have been oppressed or marginalized based on race, gender, sexuality, or other identity category. Yet for all their differences, the red-faced revival preacher and the gentle, nonjudgmental Mainliner share a commitment to an understanding of individual religious experience as the unmediated, unalienated, authentic “stuff” upon which Christian faith (or religion as such) is founded, the base (to borrow a Marxist term of art) upon which the superstructure of theology, religious practice, ethics, and the rest depend. But what if that commitment was wrong, and wrong in a way which makes the genuine good of religious experience bear more than it can, turning it from a gift to a requirement? I will sketch out an argument that this notion of religious experience is anthropologically and theologically suspect, and offer an account of the Christian life that seeks to properly situate religious feeling within a broader understanding of participation in God through Christ by the sacraments, prayer and worship, and ethical practice. My goal here is not to oppose Christian pietism - far from it! - but rather to defend a churchly, sacramental, Scriptural pietism, a proper account of affection and religious experience in Christian life.

To put on my religious studies hat for a moment, the first strike against this regnant conception of religious experience is the notion of its absolute immediacy. There’s this notion that religious experience (or at least authentic religious experience) is somehow pretheological or even prediscursive and presocial, that theology is a (flawed) attempt to explain the inexplicable experience that is the source and center of religion. While I have some sympathy for the Ottonian view that religion as such is a response to the combustible mix of fascination and repulsion that human beings experience in the presence of the holy, the problem for me comes in when any given individual’s experience of God is understood as somehow unstructured by one’s environment, culture, or tradition – or that it ought to be. One of the fascinating things about studying religion academically is coming to the understanding that those very experiences of God which we experience as the most individual, unmediated, or unscripted are often shared by many people, mediated by our background, and follow a script just as much as a Book of Common Prayer Holy Eucharist II does. There’s a reason that many of us have our personal experiences of God/the Divine/the Absolute/whatever out in the wilderness, and that a European peasant c.1400 A.D. didn’t! Any look at the history of spirituality or religious experience will make it clear that experience of God is as much mediated by theology as it is a source of theology. Now, this is not to say that these experiences of God somehow aren’t valid or real simply because they are inextricably cultural, historical, and theological – far from it! Indeed, an affirmation that religious experiences as necessarily bound up in culture and history, in the givenness of a particular person’s life, strikes me as a necessary result of taking the Incarnation seriously. But it does render unsustainable claims of authority rooted in religious experiences’ supposed absolutely priority, and indeed opens the space for an anthropology and even theology of religious experience to critically interrogate experiences of God rather than uncritically take them as the data upon which theological systems are built.

There are also some specifically theological reasons to be wary of the sort of claims that get made on the basis of religious experience in contemporary American Protestant discourse. I grew up Lutheran, and the Lutheran tradition in which I was raised tends towards a (perhaps immoderate) suspicion of precisely those feelings of connectedness or elevation or love that make up much of contemporary religious experience. For an old-school Lutheran theologian of the cross, it is precisely those moments where we feel the most religious – the most pious, compassionate, loving, and connected to God – that we need to be most wary, for it is in those moments where we are mostly likely to succumb to the theology of glory that leads us to believe that we have something to do with our own salvation. Certainly one must admit that in the old parable of the Pharisee and the publican, it was the Pharisee, not the publican, who likely felt that he was experiencing God in the temple (one must note here, parenthetically, that the admission of only “positive” experiences of God as authentic religious experiences is a particular problem for Christian liberals; more conservative Christians, to their credit, tend to make more space for experiences of brokenness or sinfulness).

One might add a pastoral reason for skepticism: religious experience is unevenly distributed, both among people and along a person’s lifetime. Some people – faithful churchgoers! – just don’t have experiences that they understand as experiences of God very often, or at all. It’s easy for the priority given to experience in our current moment to make them feel like somehow deficient Christians. Now, some might argue that the problem is less an actual absence of the experience of God than a lack of attentiveness, that mindfulness training with a good spiritual director, say, might sort things out. This is often true. But certainly the most careful chroniclers of religious experience in the Christian tradition – monastics – have made it clear that even for those who spent their lives in prayer and contemplation, experiences of divine absence are incredibly common.

Most worryingly, the elevation of religious experience in Christianity threatens to confuse what Christianity or the Christian life is actually about. I would argue, at least, that the goal of the Christian life is not to experience God as often as possible, to chase those religious “highs,” adjusting one’s theology or practice as necessary. Rather, I want to suggest that the goal of the Christian life is not to experience God but to participate in God via the means that God established and promised to be efficacious. The trajectory of Christian life is to be drawn into union with the Trinity, to be formed by the Holy Spirit into Christ’s body – and through participation in the Body of Christ to participate in God.

Now, this may sound like a lot of mystical gobbledygook. But what it means in practice is simple. I believe that through the Church and through encounter with the neighbor, through baptism, Eucharist, prayer, and service, we are really incorporated into the Body of Christ, regardless of whether or not we experience ourselves as near to God in those moments. I believe this because of God’s promise recorded in Scripture to ‘show up’ in these moments, whether we feel him there or no. I am a strong realist when it comes to my sacramental theology: I confess that in eating the bread and wine of the Supper, we truly eat the Body and Blood of Christ. What’s more, the sacramental reality of the Eucharist depends neither on the faithfulness of the consecrating minister nor on the faithfulness of the recipient (a position which the Calvinist as well as the Lutheran can affirm: all agree Christ’s Body and Blood is truly offered to every communicant!). More to the point, while one may certainly receive the Sacrament impiously, proper reception of the Sacrament (and thus being united to God through participation in the Body of Christ) does not depend on the Eucharist eliciting a strong experiential response  – one need not experience God in the Eucharist to truly receive God in the Eucharist!

Indeed, there may be times when one really encounters God in moments when one is unlikely to have moments of profound ‘religious experience’ in the Jamesian sense. I’m reminded of the familiar passage in Matthew 25 where Jesus suggests that we serve him in serving the poor. I’m inclined to take this rather literally: while subjectively we may most easily encounter God off on the beach by ourselves, Christianity teaches us that we are actually close to God (indeed, literally face-to-face with God) when we are confronted by and respond to the destitute, sick, naked, and imprisoned, regardless of how, say, being yelled at by an irate drunk in line at the soup kitchen makes us feel.

So where does this leave religious experience, especially of the highly affective sort? I want to be very clear: my goal here is not to suggest that affective religious experiences are a bad thing. Far from it! Christ came to save the affections as much as the rest of us, and God can and does use such religious experience to communicate with us. My goal rather is to rightly situate it within the Christian life so that it does not end up bearing more weight than it can or should, freeing it to be received as the gift from God that it is. What might that proper situating look like?

First of all, I’d say that part of the work of Christian formation is forming our capacity for religious experience such that we experience God when we are in fact closest to God – in eating a wafer and drinking a few milliliters of wine, in praying the office, and in our encounter with others and especially the poor. The metaphors of enlargement and redirection both work here. It’s not that religious experience is unimportant; it’s that religious experience itself needs to be shaped and molded by the demands of Christian faith. Our capacity for the transcendent - what an older tradition called the spiritual senses - is itself in need of redemption by God! To be a Christian is to confess that one is really united with God in sacrament, prayer, and service, because God promises that he is present there. And it also is to be formed by the grace of God through a disciplined spirituality to see, and hear, and experience such that one does more frequently subjectively experience nearness to God in the moments that one is objectively nearest to God.

Secondly, we must subject moments of subjective experience of nearness to God - visions, prophecies, and the like - to the testing of Scripture, as both St. Paul and St. John command. Note well that this is not a denial that such experiences exist! I think that the Pentecostal and charismatic traditions are correct that such experiences do continue to happen in the life of the church as the Spirit bestows his gifts upon those united with Christ; I am not convinced that cessationism is Biblically justifiable or compatible with the history of the church. But such experiences - real but often difficult to discern or understand - must be tested against God’s trustworthy, public revelation to all humankind as recorded in Scripture. Thus, for example, Luther’s Turmerlebnis did not lead him to assert a new (or recovered) understanding of salvation on the basis of that experience alone, but rather led him to a deeper and fuller engagement with Scripture, especially the writings of St. Paul. Here is where the aforementioned Lutheran suspicion of feelings of religious well-being has its proper place, although it need not have the final word.

Thirdly, within the disciplining sketched out above, we ought indeed to ask God for, seek to discern, and thank God for religious experience. I’ll add that this is where my own thinking has developed most in the last six years since the original version of this piece. I want to affirm very strongly that God does desire intimacy with us, and desires it not just our objective but also our subjective intimacy with him. God wants us to feel his nearness, his guidance, his direction, so that the soul says ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth’! Sacrament, Scriptures, prayer, and yes, even being moved by the greatness and grandeur of creation out in the mountains can all be instruments of this subjective intimacy. It is a good thing to hold onto the reality of God’s presence in the sacrament whether one experiences it or no, on account of God’s promise. It is also a good thing to feel great joy and nearness to God in the sacrament!

The point of this critique of a particular ideology of religious experience is not to derogate it, but rather to free it from an inappropriate role so that it can be received as the gift it is. I have sketched out an ideology of religious experience that understands such experience to be the private, prediscursive ground for individuals’ religious faith in general and Christian faith in particular. I have argued that this is a highly questionable view, on both historical and sociological grounds and theological and pastoral ones: religious experience - especially of the ecstatic, highly affective sort - is not the test of true Christianity. And this is deeply liberating, at least for me. As someone who wrestles with low-grade but fairly constant anxiety and depression, there are seasons of my life in which elevated religious feeling is hard to come by. The ideology of religious experience can lead people like me into anxiety or even despair precisely by making experience the test of genuine faith. Rather, I am profoundly reassured to know that our closeness – my closeness – to God does not depend on us feeling the right things or having the right experiential reactions. God promises to be really present to us, to offer himself to us in baptism, in the Holy Communion, in prayer, in our neighbor, and in the poor. However close or far from God we feel, God is here, closer to us than we are to ourselves, to paraphrase St. Augustine. A lack of religious experience need not accuse us before God; we are freed from the accusations of the Law because we are saved by grace alone! And when one realizes this, when one ceases to make religious experience a sort of (unscriptural!) Law, one can accept such experiences as God intends them to be: as the operation of a capacity to be disciplined by grace and above all (especially in their more dramatic, supernatural forms) as free gifts to be treasured as just that, gifts. This, it seems to me, is the proper place of a distinctly Christian account of religious experience, one which invites us into the discernment of such experiences precisely by removing from them weight they cannot bear.