A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • Wesley on religious experience

    Theodore Runyon is a theologian, now retired, from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Among other things, he’s published a book on John Wesley’s theology (which I blogged about a bit a while back) as well as several articles on Wesley.

    In his book Exploring the Range of Theology, which collects articles he’s written over several decades, Runyon uses Wesley to retrieve the idea of “religious experience.” For much 20th-century theology, particularly that which was influenced by Barth, religious experience was disdained. This was largely because of the fear that it would lead to spiritual flights of fancy and subjectivism. After all, since everyone’s experience is different, how do you evaluate its validity?

    Runyon argues that, while Barth et al. may have been justified in their distrust of experience, particularly in light of the “German Christians” who supported the Nazi regime in Hitler’s Germany, they may have gone overboard in disparaging it. Following Wesley, he maintains that a religion without an experiential aspect will eventually dry up–neither right doctrine (orthodoxy) nor right practice (orthopraxy) are enough to sustain it. We also need “right feeling”–or what he calls “orthopathy.”

    Wesley, he points out, strongly affirmed the importance of actually experiencing the assurance of God’s love and of being empowered by the Holy Spirit to do good works and grow in love for one’s neighbor. Neither a rote orthodoxy nor a determined adherence to the moral law, he believed, could generate a such a living faith. And it was the birthright of every Christian to tangibly experience the Holy Spirit in her life.

    However, Wesley was no subjectivist and at many points had to defend the early Methodist movement against charges of “enthusiasm.” Religious truth isn’t produced by the feelings or experiences of the self. Rather, those feelings are the testimony of the Holy Spirit acting in response to the proclaimed Word, which, in good Lutheran fashion, Wesley insisted comes from outside the self. Wesley was an empiricist in the Lockean tradition, and he believed that everything we know comes from without. But he was also a bit of a Platonist in that he thought that human beings had “spiritual senses” that allowed them to perceive spiritual realities. But because of the Fall, these senses were dormant and had to be “activated” by God’s gracious activity. When we respond to the preaching of God’s love in Christ, the Spirit is that power within us that allows us to assent to it and which sheds the love of God abroad in our hearts. It is a personal, experiential response to a reality outside the self. “Genuine experience of God is therefore not my experience alone, it is the experience of the Other into whose life I am taken by grace” (Runyon, “Orthopathy: Wesleyan Criteria for Religious Experience”).

    Runyon also discusses other criteria that Wesley used to test religious experience. These experiences should transform us–Wesley believed, with Luther, that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, but he also believed with the Catholic and Eastern traditions that it is to be imparted to us. They should have a social effect–the goal of Christianity is not to create holy solitaries; the Gospel should propel us to share the God’s love and minister to the needs of others. They should be reasonable, measured by the norms of the Bible and the experience of the believing community. They should be sacramental in that the feelings associated with religious experience convey, or point to, a reality beyond themselves rather than being made into ends-in-themselves.And finally, they should be teleological–that is, they put us on a path toward the goal of the Christian life, or what Wesley called “Christian perfection.”

    These criteria, Runyon concludes, “assist in evaluating the legitimacy of claims to religious experience, while at the same time recognizing the importance of the experiential dimension for genuine faith and discipleship.” Borrowing from Kant, we might say that faith and discipleship without experience is empty, but experience without faith and discipleship is blind.

  • Baroness, “Take My Bones Away”

  • Schleiermacher on the dispensability of the cross and resurrectoin

    In The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher argues that, contrary to appearances, the cross and resurrection of Jesus aren’t actually essential to Christianity. His reasoning for this surprising conclusion is consistent with his overall method, but for that reason highlights some of the concerns that Christians of a more orthodox bent might have with it.

    For Schleiermacher, redemption means being brought into “living fellowship” with the Redeemer. This is because, according to him, Jesus had a perfect “God-consciousness”–that is, he was fully aware of his absolute dependence on God, and this gave shape to his life in the world. The rest of us, by contrast, have a more partial or fragmented experience of God-consciousness, and so we fall into sin. However, by entering into the church–the community that was founded by Jesus and takes its bearings from the portrait of Jesus contained in the New Testament, we can come to share that perfect God-consciousness. When we enter into this “living fellowship,” the God-consciousness of Jesus becomes the core of our selves and, gradually, it comes to predominate–overcoming our sinful tendencies.

    In Schleiermacher’s account, the cross is not necessary because salvation doesn’t require some act of atonement, either on our part or on God’s. Instead, our guilt is removed when we come to have the Redeemer’s perfect God-consciousness. In effect, our identity “in Christ” becomes our primary identity, so we are no longer defined by the “old Adam” and its sins. No guilt-atonement is necessary.

    The resurrection isn’t necessary, he argues, because our situation has to be essentially the same as that of the first disciples who knew Jesus when he walked the earth. But they were able to be saved by entering into fellowship with Christ before his death. While we enter into that fellowship by means of the image of Jesus presented in the New Testament and mediated by the church, it is the same kind of relationship that the first disciples had. Otherwise, ours would be a wholly different faith. But this implies that the resurrection can’t be essential to our redemption. l think Schleiermacher is a bit ambiguous at this point (or possibly I’m misreading him), because I don’t see how we can enter into a “living fellowship” with Christ now, unless he’s alive in some sense. And that would seem to make the resurrection essential at least as a means by which fellowship with the Redeemer is made possible for succeeding generations.

    More fundamentally, though, Schleiermacher’s account shows how focused his overall theology is on the interior life of the individual. For him, redemption is not a public, historical event, but one that takes place in the subjective consciousness of each person. By contrast, the New Testament seems to portray the cross and resurrection of Jesus as epochal events that objectively changed not only our situation before God, but also constitute a turning-point in the cosmic story. Not just human beings’ self-consciousnesses, but their bodies, and indeed the entire cosmos, are to be redeemed from bondage to sin and decay.

    You could argue that Schleiermacher’s account is a defensible “demythologization” of the language and imagery of the Bible and that it provides a more “existential” understanding of the Christian faith by dispensing with supernatural and/or metaphysical beliefs that many people no longer find plausible. But many Christians would protest that the public, embodied nature of our salvation is an essential aspect of the Christian message.

  • Francis Spufford’s speech to religion’s cultured despisers

    This essay from Francis Spufford has been getting flagged quite a bit in my little corner of the Internet. Spufford is an English author who writes mostly non-fiction (his recent book Red Plenty was the subject of a book event at Crooked Timber this summer). Spufford’s essay seems to be a summary of his new book Unapologetic, a defense of Christian faith that carries ths subtitle “Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.”

    Since I’ve been deep in Schleiermacher recently, this set off some bells for me, and indeed Spufford’s argument, at least based on the article, does seem like a sort of updating of Schleiermacher’s argument for thinking of religion as an essential aspect of human nature which is rooted in a particular kind of feeling.

    Spufford writes:

    The point is that from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don’t talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue. If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether the crap I talk is true. I do, as a matter of fact, think that it is. I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas.

    As Scheleirmacher said in his Speeches, religion is a “taste for the infinite,” and in The Christian Faith he defined it as “a feeling of absolute dependence.” Doctrine, for Schleiermacher, is an elaboration of this feeling, but the feeling–piety–comes first and is more basic. Theology takes this as its starting point–it doesn’t try to “prove” God’s existence. (Schleiermacher does allow that philosophy may construct arguments for God’s existence on its own terms, but this has little to do with the life of living faith.) Like Spufford, Schleiermacher didn’t deny that religion makes truth-claims, but its living heart is feeling.

  • Schleiermacher vs. theistic evolutionism

    So-called theistic evolutionists sometimes distinguish themselves from creationists by saying that God used evolution to creation life on earth, rather than creating it directly through a special divine act. I’m generally sympathetic to this view, at least in the sense that I’m a theist who believes that evolution is the best account going of how life developed on earth.

    However, after reading Schleiermacher, I’m having second thoughts about theistic evolution, or at least how it’s frequently explained. This isn’t because Schleiermacher was a “creationist”–at least not in the sense that we would think of that term. He certainly didn’t take the biblical creation stories to be offering historical or scientific accounts of how God made the world.

    What he did think was that everything that exists is an expression of the divine creativity. Schleiermacher has an austerely non-anthropomorphic view of God: it’s a mistake, he argues, to think of God as one cause among other finite cause, or as one agent among others. There are not divine actions, but a single, eternal divine activity that expresses itself temporally in the unfolding of the created universe. God doesn’t act in response to events in the world on an ad hoc basis; everything that happens, happens because it is part of the whole created order which is willed by God. Science is capable, in principle, of giving a fully adequate account of the interconnections between events in the world; at the same time, though, the entire created order is grounded in the single divine creative act.

    This implies, according to Schleiermacher, that for God there is no distinction between means and ends. Thus, to talk about God using evolution as a means of bringing about some other good (e.g., the existence of human beings) is to lapse back into the very anthropomorphic language he criticizes. Everything that exists is inextricably bound up with everything else, and we are in no position to suss out what is an end and what is a means. Or more accurately, everything is both end and means  because everything that exists is interdependent. Regarding the divine wisdom, he says this: “There is nothing outside the world which could be used as means; all things within it, rather, are so ordered that viewed in connexion with one another they each stand related as parts to the whole; while every particular in itself is so entirely both things–means and end–that each of these categories is constantly abrogating itself and passing over into the other” (The Christian Faith, § 168).

    So I think Schleiermacher would say that “theistic evolutionism,” at least in some forms, is guilty of errors similar to those of “vulgar” creationism. That is, to the extent that it tries to identify certain natural processes as means that God uses to achieve a particular end, it is still thinking of God as a finite, personal agent. He would deny, I think, that Christians have any particular stake in the theological significance of evolution. Christian faith is grounded in our experience of redemption in Christ, and this transfigures our view of creation, allowing us to see it, in its entirety, as a gift of God’s good pleasure.

  • Semi-hiatus

    As readers of my Twitter feed may be aware, my wife gave birth to a healthy and beautiful baby boy last Thursday morning. We’re extremely happy (and tired, etc.). However, a foreseeable, if unintended, side-effect of the new addition is less time (and energy) for blogging. So expect few if any posts for the next few weeks at least (not that this will be a huge departure from my usual posting frequency). Thanks as always to everyone who reads this blog, and thanks to all who’ve sent good wishes our way.

  • Liberals aren’t sexual relativists

    In an article that otherwise makes some good points about conservatives’ “populist” defense of junk food, Rod Dreher just can’t resist taking a swipe at a time-honored liberal strawman:

    For conservatives, it may be revealing to compare the defensiveness with which many of us discuss what we do in the dining room to the defensiveness liberals approach discussion of what they do in the bedroom. Liberals, to overgeneralize, believe that what consenting adults do in bed with their bodies is immune from moral judgment. Social conservatives recognize the falsity of this view, understanding that immoderation in sexual matters corrupts individual character and can have deleterious social consequences.

    I can see why this neat bit of parallelism may have been too tempting to leave on the editing-room floor, but it just doesn’t wash. A more accurate approximation to the “liberal” view would be that what consenting adults do in the bedroom is not a fit matter for state regulation. But liberals are hardly barred from making moral judgments about sexual relations. This is because consent is a necessary, but not sufficient, criterion for morally appropriate sexual acts. A liberal can easily say, for instance, that a relationship of equality and mutuality is morally superior to one based on humiliation and degradation, even if all the parties involved consent to their treatment.

    Dreher here makes the common conservative mistake of assuming that because liberals object to some longstanding moral prohibitions (on, say, homosexual relationships) that they must object to all moral judgment in matters of sex. This only follows if you treat sexual ethics as a seamless whole that can’t be altered without the whole thing unraveling. But liberals typically take a different approach: they look for the deeper, underlying principles that justify a particular sexual ethic and try to prune off the bits that seem inconsistent with those principles, understood in light of changing social contexts and new knowledge. Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant made some particular judgments about sex that nearly all of us (conservative and liberal) would now reject, but we can still use the principles of human flourishing or respect for persons to articulate a consistent sexual ethic.

  • How “liberal” is Schleiermacher?

    Before I started reading him, I had some preconceptions about Schleiermacher, owing in large part to his reputation as the father of “liberal” theology. But the more I read him, the more convinced I am that those preconceptions were wrong.

    First, I had assumed that Schleiermacher built his theology on the foundation of a “generic,” supposedly universal human religious experience. Yet he’s quite explicit that Christian dogmatics is essentially a reflection on the specifically Christian experience of being redeemed by Christ. The famous “feeling of absolute dependence” is, it seems, an explication of this experience, not a more foundational concept from which it is derived. It does seem that Schleiermacher regarded human beings as having an innate capacity for religious experience, but the content of Christian religious experience is not derivable from this.

    Second, I was under the impression that Schleiermacher regarded doctrines as mere “expressions” of subjective religious experience without cognitive purchase on reality. This now seems completely wrong to me. It’s true that he says that dogmatics is an elaboration of Christian religious experience, but this seems to mean that dogmatic theology should make statements that, ultimately, derive their authority from Christians’ experience of redemption in Christ. We might put it this way: Christian dogmatic theology is the collection of statements about God and the world that must be true if Christian religious experience is valid or veridical. This method actually seems quite similar to the one used by many of the early church fathers–the debates over, for instance, the two natures of Christ were driven by considering what must be the case for Christ to be our redeemer. This is not “subjectivism” in some pernicious sense; rather, it roots theological reflection in the Christian experience of being saved by Jesus.

    Both of these points seem closely related to the overall purpose of Schleiermacher’s dogmatics: he’s writing theology for the church, not as an exercise in free-floating speculation. In many ways, he seems close to some of the “post-liberals” who have so stridently criticized the liberalism Schleiermacher is said to have inaugurated. That said, I’m only through the first volume of The Christian Faith, and I’m not at all confident that I’ve fully grasped what Schleiermacher is doing. So consider these some provisional thoughts.

  • The Civil Wars, “From this Valley”

  • Barth on universalism and the fear of antinomianism

    One question should for a moment be asked, in view of the “danger” with which one may see this concept [i.e., universalism] gradually surrounded. What of the “danger” of the eternally skeptical-critical theologian who is ever and again suspiciously questioning, because fundamentally always legalistic and therefore in the main morosely gloomy? Is not his presence among us currently more threatening than that of the unbecomingly cheerful indifferentism or even antinomianism, to which one with a certain understanding of universalism could in fact deliver himself? This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our theological duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before.

    –Karl Barth, The Humanity of God, p. 62