Experiences versus the Bible

Preface

I love Jesus. Most of the time I like Jesus. I am learning to love the church again. I am allowing myself to ask questions I never asked before. I don't ask because I want to degrade Jesus, but because I think He is strong enough for my questions. These are thoughts as I continue my faith journey from deconstruction to reconstruction and beyond…

Prayer

God. I was always taught to ignore my experience and that the Bible had preeminence over my experiences. So I always accepted this as truth. But then I realized we did accept experiences that supported faith. Honestly, this seems illogical to accept experiences as appropriate to support faith and discount them when they did not support faith. Of course should I really apply logic to faith? Can you give me some insight here please. Thanks, Tom

Musings

Christianity has an odd relationship with experience. We live in the natural world and the vast majority of our interactions are with natural life. Yet we believe in an alternate dimension, the spiritual world. As we understand it the spiritual world is described by our Bible and there is little argument here. We also maintain that the natural world is described by the Bible wherever the Bible chooses to comment on it. Here is where we find conflict and confusion.

There are two separate ideas birthed from these paradigms.

• When evaluating experience which conflicts with the teaching of the Bible, the Bible should be considered authoritative and the experience disregarded.
• When evaluating experience which supports the teaching of the Bible, that experience should be memorialized in order to increase our faith.

I never allowed myself to  question this potential inconsistency, but in recent months my resistance to this question has broken down.  It seems that what we experience in this world should always be valid or never valid.

I don’t love the never valid idea. Obviously the things we experience are real. That leaves me with experience always being a valid way to  help us understand our relationship with God. Of course we can always evaluate experience in light of the Biblical teaching, we don’t have to give that up. We just stop covering our eyes and plugging our ears pretending we did not experience something.

Embracing all our experiences, good and bad, will lead us to a more healthy place and as a bonus will be better for those outside the church. If God is in fact who we think He is, He is tough enough to deal with all the experiences we have. If we acknowledge all our experiences, we can leave behind a life marked with cognitive dissonance. People outside the church look at the church with disdain when we argue for Jesus by ignoring experiences and facts rather than doing the hard work of discovering truth. Therefore, Christians should embrace all our experiences for our sake and that of the world.