Religious Experience

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Bill, this article by Harold Netland, professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, talks about the importance of religious experiences.^[1] He distinguishes between ordinary daily experiences and the more unusual or dramatic experiences. He begins the article,

Christians do not generally speak of having “religious experiences” but they do pray to God, meditate on Scripture, have feelings of guilt due to sin and then experience God’s forgiveness upon repentance, worship God through song and liturgy, hear God’s voice of guidance in perplexing times, experience God’s special peace during trials, and so on. All of this involves experience.

I suppose he's right. We don't tend to label the day-to-day exercise of our faith a “religious experience.” We just call it things like “our daily walk.” But is he saying that that's part of the category of religious experience?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, and I think Netland is quite right about that. I think that the most fundamental religious experience is the experience of the witness of the Holy Spirit in the life of a Christian. Paul says that when we cry “Abba! Father!” it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God and therefore joint heirs with Christ. So there is, I think, this fundamental religious experience of the witness of the Holy Spirit and of being a child of God that every Christian can have. Then certainly these other feelings that he mentions are important as well, a feeling even of dependence upon God for one's existence moment by moment, or for guidance in life. I think for the Christian his whole life is in one sense suffused with religious experiences even if they aren't the sort of dramatic things that we often think about when we say that God spoke to someone or something of that sort.

KEVIN HARRIS: Netland continues,

. . .for the ongoing daily exercise of faith entails undergoing many kinds of experiences. Simeon Zahl observes that, “To a significant degree, the question of Christian experience of God is the question of God’s presence as it is perceived in human lives in various forms and under various conditions and with various effects.”

Can we make another distinction here? The existence of God and the presence of God in the life of the believer?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I think that that is a perceptive remark on your part, Kevin. There's clearly a difference between saying that God exists and that God is present to me. When we say that God exists, we mean that there is this external reality that is not manufactured by my mind that still exists when I'm not thinking about him. But when we talk about God's presence, there's a kind of personal there-ness to it that you experience when God is present to you. I think we want to cultivate that notion of God's presence. We want to live our whole life in the presence of God so that he's more than just something that exists, but he's someone who is present.

KEVIN HARRIS: The article continues,

In addition to ordinary experiences, there are also the more unusual and dramatic experiences of those who have visions of Jesus or dreams in which God is said to communicate directly to them. Scripture itself is full of examples of God or angelic beings appearing in dreams or visions to individuals or groups. The history of Christianity is replete with examples of those claiming to have directly encountered God, Jesus, or an angelic being in a vision, dream, or other perceptual experience. Many people around the world today report experiences in which Jesus appears to them.

This is what laymen usually refer to as religious experience – that rare or more dramatic kind.

DR. CRAIG: If so, this is not an experience that I've ever had. I've never had any sort of vision or appearance in this way. The late Nabeel Qureshi, who became a Christian out of a deep Muslim background, shared with me that as part of his conversion experience a dream was involved which was so real and so vivid to him about his being invited to a great dinner but being excluded at the door much like the parable of the man who wasn't correctly dressed for the feast, and this troubled Nabeel that he would be excluded from the fellowship of eternal life. This helped to lead to his conversion. I said to him, “Nabeel, I have very vivid dreams – really Technicolor dreams – that seem so real when I wake up, but they're just dreams. How do you know this was something that was real?” And he said this was just totally apart from anything else he had ever experienced. He was absolutely convinced that God had spoken to him through this dream, and he used it to change his life. Well, who am I to question his experience?

KEVIN HARRIS: The next religious experience Netland identifies is,

A testimony—a personal account of how one’s conversion to Jesus Christ through the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit results in a dramatically changed life—gives voice to an especially important kind of experience. The narrative of personal transformation, expressed powerfully in the dramatic statement of the blind man in John 9:25—“One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”—has always been significant for Christians.

Right here I want to point out that I hear believers say they wish they had a dramatic testimony like the apostle Paul or a member of the mafia who becomes a Christian, rather than the more mundane testimony of coming to Christ at a young age (which is my story). I don't have a dramatic testimony. I came to Christ at a young age, and it's been wonderful. But I did want to point that out while he's talking about having that testimony.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I can understand that. It is wonderful to have a dramatic story to tell. I'm grateful that I have a testimony that I often share about how God worked in the life of this miserable 16 year-old teenager through the witness of a girl who sat in front of me in my German class, and how my life was just turned upside down by her radiant witness. Everyone has a different story. I very frequently have opportunity to share my testimony with people about how I came to Christ.

KEVIN HARRIS: Continuing the article,

Moreover, for many Christians, it is precisely this personal experience of God that provides the grounds for confidence in the truth of the gospel and one’s acceptance by God. The conviction that comes from personal experience is captured nicely in this early twentieth-century hymn:

You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart.

You can sing that hymn for us, if you would like! This might be a good time to point out that many in the Christian philosophy and apologetics community tend to lean the other way. They believe and argue for the Christian faith based on more objective facts and evidence and downplay personal experience. That may not be the right thing to do, but is that your observation, too?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I don't know if it is. I have heard people mock this hymn – “He lives. He lives. You ask me how I know he lives; he lives within my heart.” I do not mock that at all. I think that Netland is absolutely correct. It is fundamentally your relationship with the risen Lord that gives you knowledge of the truth of the great things of the Gospel. Fortunately, I think that since the advent of Reformed epistemology, spearheaded by Alvin Plantinga, we have moved away from what I call theological rationalism – that is to say, the belief that in order for faith to be rational it has to be based upon arguments and evidence. I think Plantinga argues quite properly that, no pun intended, belief in God and the great things of the Gospel is a properly basic belief that, though can be confirmed by argument, is not based upon argument.

KEVIN HARRIS: Professor Netland continues,

There is a sense in which Christians can legitimately claim to know the reality of God because of their experiences of God. Any biblically faithful perspective should acknowledge this. But, as we shall see, this affirmation must be qualified in certain ways and needs to be appreciated within a broader epistemic framework of beliefs that itself requires justification.

Of course, as far as I can see, Netland doesn't really say much in the rest of the article about the qualification of religious experiences. So can you perhaps give us some of your thoughts on that?

DR. CRAIG: I think that what he's referring to here is what I just called Reformed epistemology, and that would be that belief in God in a properly basic way is consistent with a whole range of beliefs that we hold in properly basic ways. Things like belief in the reality of the external world, the reality of the past, the existence of other minds like your own. When you think about it, none of these things can be proved on the basis of argument. Rather, they are basic beliefs that belong to the very foundation of a person's system of beliefs which are grounded in experience. For example, the experience of seeing and touching and hearing things or of remembering things or of talking with other persons. Similarly, I would say that belief in the existence of God and the great truths of the Gospel is grounded in the experience of the witness of the Holy Spirit. I think Netland is right that this is a biblical view. The New Testament teaches this when you read what it says in Romans 8 and in John's first epistle about the way in which we know the truth of the Christian faith through the witness of the Holy Spirit that we've received from God.

KEVIN HARRIS: Netland concludes the article by referencing William Alston. He says,

Experience plays a significant role in people coming to accept Christian commitments and to have confidence in the truth of the gospel. . . . These experiences can take a bewildering variety of forms and come with varying degrees of clarity or intensity, but they provide some support for religious commitments. William Alston observes that for ordinary Christians,

somehow what goes on in the experience of leading the Christian life provides some ground for Christian belief, makes some contribution to the rationality of Christian belief. We sometimes feel the presence of God . . . we hear God speaking to us in the Bible, in preaching, or in the words and actions of our fellow Christians. Because of all this we are more justified in our Christian beliefs than we would have been otherwise.

Alston’s point is not that Christians consciously construct formal arguments for the rationality of Christian beliefs using aspects of their experience as premises. . . . But he is highlighting the fact that for many believers there is a relation between what they take to be experiences of God and their conviction that basic Christian teachings “make sense” or are “reasonable” and thus should be accepted. Moreover, there is an important sense in which this ought to be the case. Alston comments, “If I could not find any confirmation of the Christian message in my own experience, I would be less justified in accepting that message than I am in fact.” And surely Alston is correct in this.

DR. CRAIG: Austin also agreed with the proper basicality of belief in God. He wrote a very important book entitled Perceiving God in which he compares religious experience with sense experience – our experience of the external world – and argues that just as you cannot prove the reliability of your sense experience that there is a world of physical objects around you, so you may not be able to prove the existence of God. But in both cases you are rational in accepting those beliefs, and he would say you are pragmatically justified in believing in the external world and in the existence of God grounded in that experience. So this is very typical of Reformed epistemology. The one thing I think I would want to highlight here is that for Netland, as for Alston, the witness of the Holy Spirit is experiential. It's not as though there is this external cognitive mechanism called “the witness of the Holy Spirit” which magically makes beliefs pop into consciousness in my head. Rather, it's more like testimony. Beliefs that are based on testimony are also a species of properly basic beliefs, and the witness of the Holy Spirit seems to be a type of testimony. God bears witness to his Son. So I think this is an experience, as Netland says – a religious experience.^[2]