IWS: Reason and Experience

For two days I’ve been here in Jacksonville, the days booked solid with classes and meetings until 9 PM.

There are nineteen of us beginning the doctoral program, fifteen men and four women from varied denominations. We meet in a Sunday school classroom of a local church and the teachers sit to speak or stand to scribble on a blackboard with half-inch stubs of chalk. Around us rise the murmurs of other students farther along in the program, in other Sunday school classrooms. Since we’re in a Worship Studies program, I pretend these murmurs are chants and I’m sitting in a monastery—an ironic pretense since every one of the students in this “cohort” is married. But we are possibly as committed as the monks to the glory of God through the pursuit of academic studies and the renewal of His worship. It’s a good crowd.

The first day was spent with personal introductions, course overview by my professors (Lester Ruth and Andy Hill), presentation by Robert Webber on “An Ancient Evangelical Future” and his conveniently numbered 39 Articles, and oh-so-informed worship services.

The second day was spent with more worship services, communal meals, Q-and-A on issues in the Episcopal/Anglican churches in America, and two chunks of classes, morning and afternoon, on a historical overview of Christian thought (Biblical period to postmodern), ancient Biblical themes, and ways of reflecting on 20 centuries of Christian worship.

The most interesting point was that in the Modern era (1750-1950’s), Christians began to think of their faith as provable in terms of reason or experience. The rationalists set out to prove the existence of God, the physical reality of the resurrection, etc., as if faith was primarily about a set of intellectual beliefs. This led, of course, to worship services that were heavy on the preaching. The experientialists focused on the individual experience of salvation, for example, the ability to say that I was saved on such-and-such a date, which led to worship services with a strong revivalist tinge and songs like “I Serve a Risen Savior”—“you ask me how I know He lives; He lives within my heart.”

Besides determining the structure of worship services, both of these views can lead to anxiety about one’s personal salvation: “Am I really able to believe this stuff? And do I understand enough about Christ’s work for me in order to be saved?” or “Have I really felt the love of Jesus? And do I feel loving toward God?”

Bob Webber remarked that both of these views put the burden of salvation on the individual rather than on Christ’s saving work, regardless of how we feel or whether we exhaustively understand.

Do your churches focus on reason or experience or something else? What have your backgrounds focused on? How do you think this has affected your understanding of God?