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On the Value of Experience Not long ago, I went to a weekly bible study with Young Life that I attend regularly. It is at these gatherings that the more traditional, gospel-oriented members come to study God’s word. This means that most of the people there regard the scripture as just that—God-breathed. Every week we investigate a new area of scripture and discuss various themes, from human nature to God’s law, from violence to modesty, from drugs to sex. Ultimately this serves us by addressing issues that we are continually forced to deal with in the modern world, giving us a scriptural viewpoint with specific instructions. When last I went, there was another boy there who attended the meetings sporadically, whom I had known from another youth group. From past discussions I knew him to be strongly liberal, both in his views of human nature, scriptural authority, social values, and the like. While we are friends (I would say so in any event), I disagreed with him—but in addition, I was surprised to see him at a bible study at all, since he didn’t regard the scripture as God’s word, and since he didn’t recognize it as an authoritative document. The Young Life leaders, it later turned out, wondered the same thing. It was the Monday after Easter. As such, our bible study was oriented around the purpose of Christ’s death and resurrection, and its implications on Christianity and on mankind’s eternal fate. One of the questions we were given was this: “What would have happened if it all would have ended with Jesus’ death? (Our lives, not just the movie clip we watched).” We began—as one would expect—with a discussion about how the resurrection truly exposed Christ’s divinity, and how it demonstrated his ability to assuage our sin through death but still conquer it by going on living. A follow-up question to this was not part of the lesson plan, but was put forward by a leader: “Would we still be saved…could we be, if Jesus had just died?” I began by explaining that if he was not God and if he was not truly “the way, the truth, and the life” that can provide salvation alone, we wouldn’t be saved. We would be left to rot in our sinfulness, because we are incapable of being wholly righteous by ourselves. As we were about to move on to the next question, the boy asked another: “Do you believe there is only one way to God?” The rest of us did, citing the passage again—“No one comes to the Father but by me.” He asked another question: “Have you ever considered that all the religions in the world, perhaps, could all simply be different paths to the same God—that all of them could provide salvation?” And on the conversation went. For so long, in fact, that we didn’t get to talk about Easter. It developed into an argument over how the scripture reveals God, over whether or not homosexuality was wrong, over whether or not other religions could afford salvation, and over whether or not George Bush was a Christian. Eventually a leader posed a question that the rest of us had been wondering for some time: “If you don’t believe the bible, if all of this is just man grasping at something it can’t understand—why are you a Christian? Why Jesus?” We all wondered how he arrived at the beliefs he had, for he was a Christian (though we would argue a misguided one). The answer was, actually, the very thing I expected. “I learn from everything—from you, from my parents, from friends, books, music, family members, from young life, and from television.” In a moment of silence, I added, “So…experience then. Experience is your teacher.” “Yes. Exactly,” he said. I wanted so desperately to explain certain concepts of truth and reality to this boy, but we ran out of time and I had to leave. This view of learning, that anyone can derive their own absolute truth from the universe, through their own experience, frustrates me so very much. It is the trademark worldview of our culture, and it is ultimately the reason why Christianity is the only religion in the United States that is losing members. American religion is, as I have written elsewhere, an experiential faith. It relies on human ability in order to grasp truth—which, by the way, can now even be different for each person. This is not Christian. And in saying this I do not call the boy himself non-Christian. I know he regards Jesus as his savior, and relies on him to give him eternal life. But his view of experiential truth is not historically Christian. It is the result of indoctrination by postmodern humanist thought, and an earnest (and admittedly admirable) desire to see people fulfilled in their lives. Experience is certainly not meaningless—in fact, I regard it to be one of God’s greatest gifts to us. But Americans are suffering from a profound misunderstanding of what it is, and what it is for. Since the 'Enlightenment' era, we have grown so desperately attached to it, and it exclusively, that its original connection to truth and reality has been all but severed. Now it is instead a tool that one uses to probe the suddenly ‘undiscovered’ realm of truth. Why? Because up until this point, humanity has been an ignorant mob of Neanderthals, wandering around in the dark with silly notions in their mind—namely, notions of absolute truth, immutable morality, a just standard of living that applies to all humans, and a negative view of its own nature. But now that we are breaking free of this mold, we are suddenly able to rediscover truth—uncover real reality, and not the dogmatic fictional truths purported by humanity, despite its previous four millennia of thought on the matter. No, it was only in the past few centuries that we truly began to understand. And what do we find? Several things. Our secular cultural exodus from the past has revealed that truth is, in fact, entirely dynamic and unique for every individual. What matters isn’t that some higher power (church, the state, God himself) declares a certain way of living is just and good. Rather, what does matter is that each of us finds our own way of living, one that we feel fulfills us the most, because we are intelligent individuals who know perfectly what is in our best interest. Want is, in effect, synonymous with personal need, and whenever some want is taken away it is called a violation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This sort of rampant individualism, then, reaches a point where it is diverted onto the past discoveries of those who came before us. History, because it is not modern—or more importantly, ‘scientific’—falls under the scrutiny of revisionists with an agenda to modify the past to turn the milieu of history into our own cultural story. We call Jesus the first feminist, the rest of his contemporaries patriarchal, we start referring the God he represented the ‘divine feminine’, and to the early church fathers as power-hungry bureaucrats vying for political influence, and suddenly we have an antique version of American cultural history. History is written by the ‘winners’, we now say. Well, it is today—the ‘winners’ are postmodern revisionists. But Jesus paints for us a very different picture. In the place of individual ambition and self-advancement, we hear “blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” We do not see a message of self-serving greed and temporary fulfillment. Rather, we see true fulfillment for all mankind, provided by steadfast faith in Christ and by a righteous submissive lifestyle that results from it. Experience changes also here. It is no longer the tool used by humanity to probe truth. Instead, it becomes spiritual aid, given by God to show us how he works in our lives and in the lives of others. Most progressive Christians would probably still be nodding their heads at this description, but now the definitions will differ. Experience, while it certainly shows the ways God moves in people’s lives, cannot be understood accurately when divorced from ultimate truth. What Americans, like this boy at the bible study, have done is remove absolute truth from the equation—thus relegating the interpretation of experience to the tides of human emotion. I will illustrate an example (that unfortunately may anger some). Imagine two lesbians living together with kids they adopted. They are happily fulfilled in their lives, and operate much like a so-called ‘normal’ family. The make dinner every night and eat together, like others would. They talk about their days and what happened, as well as what problems they had, like other families would. They go to familial social events with the rest of their relatives on holidays, tell jokes, laugh, have a good time, and watch movies together. Just like other families. The progressive view of experience would see all of this as good. As I said, it is based on emotion as its standard, and we all can see that these lesbians feel fulfilled. And this is good because fulfillment is the postmodern truth. When something causes fulfillment, it is a beautiful thing. And a notion of what fulfills and what doesn’t is attained through experience. So we arrive at the solution: experience equals fulfillment equals truth. And so, by the law of syllogism, experience equals truth. This, as I said before, is not Christian. However, it is so cleverly disguised, and so relentlessly forwarded by our culture, that even Christians fall prey to it. Experience cannot be understood without truth. It must have some sort of criteria, an interpretive tool to decipher it; that something is truth. Progressives look at this unique familial arrangement through their experiential lens, and see good. Christians for the past two millennia have looked at this through a god-breathed, biblical lens—their absolute truth—and see a very different image taking shape. They see that humans find fulfillment in things that God tells us are wrong. They see that without Christ’s guiding hand, we would be stranded and blind, right and wrong being impossible to set apart from one another. This is experience as far as we Christians need be concerned. Our purpose for it is utterly opposite of and polarized from our society’s purpose. And this is very much why the world hates us and why it hated (…hates) Christ. Truth is not derived from experience. Rather, experience is derived from truth. |
