Experience

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Where should "experience" fit in theological analysis? An oft-bandied concept in Anglicanism (misattributed to Richard Hooker) is that of the three-legged stool of Scripture, tradition, and reason. Some so-called liberals often add a fourth leg, experience. Some conservatives claim that experience is not to be trusted.

They’re both right, and they’re both wrong.

The problem isn’t that “experience” per se is unreliable. The problem is that any given person’s individual experience, taken in isolation, is incomplete. As such, it can be wildly off the mark. Saul of Tarsus claimed to have had an experience of God. So did David Koresh of the Branch Davidians. This is a natural consequence of our limitations as human beings.

Collective experience can be more reliable, at least provisionally. Everything we know or believe is based on the human race’s collective experience. Even “revelation” is a type of experience.

(ADDED 8-15-06: A commenter at Father Jake’s blog recalls: "Someone very wise once told me that we don’t learn a thing from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience. In other words, it takes some work, hence, the emphasis on reason.")

It might be useful to think of individual experience as like data points in a science experiment. In science class, most of us probably had to plot observational data on graph paper. Scientists do data plots all the time; they look for patterns that might help them understand what’s going on.

Data points frequently don’t fall neatly into a clean pattern on the graph paper. “Wild” data points are familiar phenomenon. It can be misleading for a scientist to to focus too intently on wild data points. The wild data may not represent what’s really going on. But when a plot has a sufficient number of data points, even with some wild ones, the resulting patterns can be enlightening.

We shouldn’t peremptorily dismiss “experience” as a possible source of insight. We just have to be careful how we use it.

Comments

8 responses to “Experience”

2005-02-01

Derek

Excellent point. This is also how it is intended–but usually abused–in the so-called Wesleyan Quadralateral (Scripture, Tradition, Reason, Experience). Properly speaking experience relates to the community’s experience of God.

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2005-02-01

bls

I agree that this is a very nice post.

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2005-02-04

Mark G

Interesting — I have often thought the same way. The huge rub is deciding what ‘data points’ count. Life is easy if we consider only the opinions of living ECUSA bishops. It’s messier if we consider as ‘data’ the opinions expressed by all clergy and theologians in the Anglican tradition, at all times since Henry VIII. If we consider the opinions of all christians since A.D. 36, and all times and places since, you end up with something like the canon of St. Vincent of Lerins — and an extremely conservative view of consensus, given that any modern idea that departs from traditional thinking will be ‘outvoted’ by the billions of Christians who came before and thought otherwise. And indeed, that is how my thinking generally comes out.

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2005-02-04

D. C.

Mark G., your approach is not per se unreasonable. But one difficulty is that your approach seems to give equal weight to the “data points” recorded in days when our “instruments” were even more “out of calibration” than they are today.
As you pointed out on another blog (Pontificator’s?), in the old days, people believed that illness was caused by “humours,” that the sun literally rose in the morning and set in the evening, that men should run things, etc. That should at least give us pause before we assume that their “votes” should outweigh our own collective judgment.
We should never blithely discard the thinking of our forebears. Their views still represent data that we need to carefully take into account.
But neither can we let ourselves be enslaved to their thinking, not least because they didn’t have the benefit of all that humanity has learned in the intervening centuries. Moreover, to automatically defer to the votes of billions of Christians of yore would be to abdicate our moral responsibility to exercise our own free will for ourselves.

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2005-02-04

Anonymous

But one difficulty is that your approach seems to give equal weight to the “data points” recorded in days when our “instruments” were even more “out of calibration” than they are today.
We began with your good analogy to science, making the search for (probable) truth more objective by plotting out relevant data. Now we are considering the weight to be attached to the ‘data points’ of christian dogmatic opinion of the first millenium (as distinct from the non-dogmatic ideas Christians of the time may have had about medicine or physics). In doing so, we should not fall into the bigotry of judging the reliability of old ‘instruments’ based simply on whether we agree with their views. We must suppose that we, as much as they, are prone to cultural biases and passing fads. So, it seems to me that the votes of the old Christians on a given topic can be sweepingly discounted only if we have objective reasons — beyond our own preferences — for thinking they were less competent than we are.
But honestly, I wonder how serious you are about your own model. You would clearly attach great weight to modern thinking, produced by centuries of learning — but does that not lead you to throw out 98% of the data, coming from less ‘modern’ sources, or from contemporary sources not in sync with your ideas of ‘learning’?
to automatically defer to the votes of billions of Christians of yore would be to abdicate our moral responsibility to exercise our own free will for ourselves.
Random connection — Robert Frost said “Freedom is when you are easy in the harness.” It would be absurd for me to propose that folks should abdicate the exercise of free will — even the most slavish dogmatist is such by choice, with some awareness of alternatives. But perhaps your point is more that we have a responsibility not to adopt any belief put forth by our church until we have critically examined it come to the opinion that it is correct. But I don’t know any Christians like that; even those that critically examine much take more on faith. To the contrary, I have seldom met a Christian whose views were not largely based on the influence of his or her chosen teachers in the faith.

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2005-02-04

Derek

If we’re truly consider the communion of the saints, don’t forget that it goes both ways… my great-great-grandchildren’s votes will weigh in too 😉

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2005-05-21

bill armstrong

The intent of the four-fold system is that each of the four must be viewed through the lenses of the other three.

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2008-02-01

Angie Van De Merwe

I thoroughly enjoyed your insight! It is so true that the data we are given does NOTHING to guaruntee how we “put together” the picture”…two people given the same date construct the picture differently depending on what experiences they have had before and what innately is of importance to them personally (the meaning of the “data”)…We socially construct our meaning and our worldviews.

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