Reflections for 5/29/10

"Experience is the only honest place to begin. Because even when we don't admit that we're beginning out of human experience, we do anyway. We begin out of our so-called first principles, but even those are planted in the experience of Italian people, German people, American people or African people, who all read it through their own eyes but don't admit it. And that's why the gospel has been so culturally trapped. We assume we've all been true to our totally objective first principles of philosophy and theology. But in fact it's all filtered through the cultural eyes, prejudices and assumptions of each country....We've got to be honest enough to admit that. Deductive theology never worked anyway except in the textbooks, and for those few who lived there. Every viewpoint is a view from a point."(R. Rohr "Radical Grace" p.202)

Experience is something everyone has. Unless you've never moved out of your cell, never watched anything but the clouds go by, you have experience. And even those drastic things are experiences themselves.

Our experiences are what I often refer to as lenses. They affect how I view the world. How I process information. There is nothing in my life that is not truly first filtered through those lenses. The lenses of course become very obvious when my experience clashes with someone else's.

How many times in your life can you recall having a heated discussion with someone. Usually based on what happened or what something means. The problem is that we don't own our biases up front, yet argue vehemently from them. Doesn't matter what the topic is, or what the decision confronting us is.

In the Anglican Communion we like to trot out our "three-legged stool" of scripture, tradition and reason. These are supposed to be the three ways we make theological decisions. One of the things I've noticed is that we ignore experience here. It has been suggested that experience is perhaps a fourth leg. I have a different thought. Most stools have a ring around the legs of the stool. Without that ring, if you sat on the stool it would collapse. Experience is that ring. I read scripture through my experience. I view tradition through my experience. All reasoning is fueled by my experience.

This is not to say that experience has the final word. However we do need to start owning our experiences before entering into deeper debates. We also need to honor the experiences of others that may be different than ours, rather than forcing them to conform to ours.

Faith for me will always be more about how I experience God, not about what I've read about God or what I think.

Blessings,
Ed