"EXPERIENCE" IN TWO CHURCH TRADITIONS:
DIFFERING SEMANTIC WORLDS
by,
Byron C. Lambert
Editor's Note: In recent years the Church of God movement (Anderson, Indiana) and the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ have been in dialogue, each seeking to understand better the other tradition for the sake of enhancing Christian unity and mission. The first group, a holiness body rooted in American revivalism, has had a particular understanding of the nature and role of Christian "experience." It differs at least in subtle ways from the understanding typical of the second group. In a dialogue session in October, 1994, Dr. Lambert, representing the latter body, prepared this essay in hope of furthering mutual understanding of this crucial subject.
*****
In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological theory defined in opposition to rationalism. In the early modem age it arose in reaction to the metaphysics of Descartes (1596-1650), Leibniz (1646-17 16), and Spinoza (1632-1677), who sought to bind the whole of reality together, including God, by deduction from one or two fundamental principles. The rationalists believed that the universe was best approached and understood along the lines of a logical system, whatever the five outer senses might lead humans to believe.
Varieties of British Empiricism
A science of nature was growing, however, which looked to the outer world of sense experience as a guide to what reality is truly like. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was one of the first to formulate and make popular the new approach in books like The Advancement of Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum (1620). Comparing the studies of metaphysicians unfavorably to that of spiders spinning theories out of their bellies, Bacon said men should rather use the bee as a model, collect data from everyday experience, sort it out in concert with one another, conduct experiments, and learn nature's secrets by organized observation of her regularities. It is no accident that philosophical empiricism should find a home in Britain.
Just as rationalism is said to rise from the thought of Descartes, so empiricism, in its modem form, is credited to John Locke.1 Locke held that the mind was awakened solely by the action of the senses. Pushed to the extreme, such an approach would hold that everything we know is limited to what the experience of the senses delivers. In its more moderate form, such an approach would only say that the materials for knowledge are sense-based. Locke was an empiricist in the latter sense, but the logic of his theory was carried to radical extremes by Berkeley and Ηυme.2
What has to be remembered is that Locke was not just an epistemological empiricist; he was also a rationalist. He was not a rationalist after the fashion of the Continental thinkers, however. Locke used experience-governed thought, not to build a complex ontology, but as a method of reining in irrationalism, hallucination, and superstition at the popular level. He also warned against imagining that the human mind has unlimited powers of knowledge and said that, for life's ultimate meanings and purposes, human beings have to depend on divine revelation.
Unlike Berkeley, who said that only minds exist, and Hume, who said that only experiences exist. Locke argued that there is an underlying soul-substance in which experience "happened," even though there is no way of experiencing that underlying reality itself. Although beyond sensory certainty, the "soul," for Locke, has to be there: how could "experience" take place except for a mind to receive it? The Greek word empeiros, from which empiricism gets its name, means experienced in or emperienced. The Latin term experientia translates empeiros and gives us the word experience. Dare one say that the Greek term points more in the direction of the mind and the Latin term more in the direction of the senses?3
The term experience, however it is used, has some real ambiguities, because there is no experience that isn't organized by the mind in some fashion. This was Kant's answer to Hume. Like Locke, Kant also posited a noumenon, or unknowable subject within which provides the rational framework for raw sensation coming from an equally unknowable-in-itself outer world.
Not only is experience a "mixed" phenomenon, but our range of experience includes much more than that delivered by our senses. The imagination, for example, gives us an amazing array of mental images and events, which from the point of view of the inner subject can be said to be "experienced." The human being can have delusions, emotions, and impulses clearly as unforgettable as sensory experiences. There is very little one could say he or she has not experienced, since even a process of exact reasoning can be recalled, with a certain indelibility, especially if it led to an important conclusion, and hardly any mental work is done without a feeling of overcoming resistance and a corresponding strain in body and nerves. William James, who developed a doctrine of radical empiricism (his term), held that even the relationship between things, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, were as much matters of "direct particular experience... [as] the things themselves."4
Empiricism is a philosophical theory, or way of looking at things, which can be stretched in more than one direction.
Religious Experience for Christian Churches and Churches of Christ
Both Christian Churches/Churches of Christ and the Church of God movement (Anderson) belong philosophically to the British Empiricist tradition, but they understand experience in quite different ways. Alexander Campbell (1788-1866) and John Wesley (1703-1791) both took the Lockean analysis of knowledge as a given, but went in contrasting directions in their use of it.5 Neither accepted the further developments of empiricism by Berkeley and Hume, preferring the more widely disseminated and enduring opinions of the great originator of the philosophy.
For Campbell and his co-laborers, experience, as a test of fact, was what is publicly verifiable. When they spoke of Christian experience they referred primarily to what had happened in gospel history, as verified by faithful witnesses in Scripture. The faith of the Christian was to be based on the apostolic experience, since it alone could be reliably certified as revelation. While "Christian experience," as an expression, necessarily includes what happens to Christian people as they live out their spiritual development in all times and places, these multitudinous personal experiences, each private and particular, for Restorationists are hardly the test for truths that must serve the Church as a whole and universally. It is normative, not clinical experience which must serve to unite the Church.
Christian Church/Church of Christ people, therefore, tend to have little regard for subjectivity, as such, in religion. If they speak of their "religious experiences" they do so diffidently, thinking of God's answers to prayer, unusual providences, or the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives as phenomena understood best at a distance and in retrospect. Almost all of their enthusiasm centers around the notions of belief, correct understanding, and obedience. Terms like loyalty ("our loyal brethren"), faithfulness to Scripture ("inerrancy"), joy of duty done, satisfaction with things being worked out according to Divine plan, seeing the deeper meanings in' Christ's words, or those of the apostles, define what they mean by "Christian experience."
In the last generation there has been a growing emphasis on the inward workings of the Holy Spirit, but it is a sanctification doctrine entirely gradualist in its approach. Attempts to bring "deeper life" studies into the life of Christian Church/Church of Christ people have met with only marginal success. Expressions like, "God told me to do thus and so," or "Ι felt irresistibly moved in this direction by the Holy Spirit," or "God laid it on my heart to tell you this" are met with suspicion, if not outright rejection a priori. Restorationists do not hold testimony meetings.
All of this does not mean that the people of Restorationist churches are unemotional. They weep when believers come forward in their services to accept Christ; they enjoy music, poetry, choruses, and sermons that excite the heart and deepen commitment; but these are expressions that fix loyalties previously entered into mentally and volitionally. They do not weep in order to be saved, but because they are saved.
The people of the Wesleyan tradition struggle with the quality of their Christian commitment; the Restorationist struggles with the initial commitment itself, as the defining act of Christian birth. The former wants to feel he or she has gone through the proper exercise; the latter considers only that a decision needs to be made and maintained. The Restorationist too often is thought of as a rationalist, but is better described as a volitionist, not typically intellectualist, but a pragmatist, a doer, one who looks for results. Christian experience for such believers is primarily found in success in a congregation's numerical growth, faithful giving, a respectable missionary budget, an efficient church staff, excitement in the fellowship gatherings, and the quiet joy of prayer circles and Bible studies.
Obviously, there is much of Locke's genteel rationalism embedded in the thought patterns of early Restorationists, but it is not so much the epistemology of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding as the style of thinking found in The Reasonableness of Christianity and his commentary on Galatians.6 Locke's fundamental picture of the human mind works its way into the latter works, since they presuppose the limitation of human knowledge, the need for specific revelation, and the vanity of dogmatizing.7 For Locke there are only a few majestic truths God asks us to believe. For example, he says that the four gospels have only one purpose, that of showing Jesus to be the Messiah and Savior of the world. Walter Scott's Messiahship (1859) is only a descant on this theme.8
Historically, the emotions calling the Stone-Campbell movement into existence were strikingly different from those giving rise to the Church of God (Anderson) holiness movement. The Campbells and company were distressed at the uncharitable and wasteful divisions among Presbyterians, and then by extension the many more numerous divisions in Christendom. Their solution-one they thought the New World had been called into existence to support-was simple: return to the universally accepted word of the New Testament, abandoning all those post-apostolic institutions and tests of orthodoxy that clutter and clog church history, and allow to reappear the fundamental unity of the church that lay concealed under it all. The plan was rational, simple, and Scriptural.
It is easy to see that the roots of Restorationism sink deep into the eighteenth century. In many ways it would be possible to see the Stone-Campbell movement as an eighteenth century movement in assumptions and style, one working its way through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-albeit with increasing difficulty.
Religious Experience for John Wesley
On May 24, 1738, at 8:45 in the evening, at a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate near London where a reading of Luther's commentary on Romans was in progress, John Wesley felt his heart "strangely warmed" by an assurance that his sins were forgiven. He had been baptized as an infant in the Anglican church, brought up in a priestly home, accepted the teaching of all the Thirty-Nine Articles, ordained as a presbyter in 1728, sent as a missionary to Georgia, had gathered around himself a small group of believers who were seeking to reach new levels of Christian devotion and purity at Oxford ("the Holiness Club"), and had steeped himself in the devotional literature of Thomas A. Kempis, William Law, and Jeremy Taylor, but was still dissatisfied with his Christian experience. On his way to America, Wesley had been struck by the calmness of certain Moravians on shipboard during a storm and, in a conversation with one of them, Peter Bohler, was questioned about the adequacy of his Christian faith: "Have you the witness within yourself?" Bohler asked, "Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?"9
Wesley had never had the question put just that way. Conversion, real conversion, was what the 18th-century church had lacked. The whole upper class in England appeared lost to unbelief, a lostness that threatened to spread to the rest of society. The Church was largely latitudinarian; immorality in the streets and on the stage seemed out of control. Yet all these citizens, listed in church baptismal registries, were supposed to be Christian. But they had no "living experience" of their religion. They needed a conscious awakening to Christ's power for their lives. What they needed was Wesley's experience to be theirs.
In January of 1738, Wesley wrote in his journal, "I want that faith which none can have without knowing that he hath it."10 It was the tangible, palpable work of the Holy Spirit in his heart, directly recognized inwardly, at once and infallibly, that validated all he had previously believed and hoped. The truth of Christ now had "the living sense" which the apostles of the first century had written about; he believed he now had the assurance of salvation they spoke of. The experience was self-authenticating.11
Perhaps it could be argued that Wesley's experience is anything but empiricist in the usual sense, since it transcends sensory knowledge and is not subject to public test. But Wesley extends Locke's doctrine in a new direction:
[S]eeing our ideas are not innate, but must all originally come from our senses, which in this respect profit nothing, as being altogether incapable of discerning objects of this kind: Not those only that are called natural senses, which in this respect profit nothing, as being altogether incapable of discerning objects of a spiritual kind; but spiritual senses, exercised to discern spiritual good and evil. It is necessary that you have the hearing ear, and the seeing eye, emphatically so called, that you have a new class of senses opened in your soul, not depending on organs of flesh and blood.. . . The ideas of faith differ toto genere from those of external sensation. . . . What a gulf is here! By what art will reason get over the immense chasm? This cannot be, till the Almighty come in to your succor, and give you that faith you have hitherto despised. Then upborne, as it were, on eagle's wings, you shall soar away into the regions of eternity; and your enlightened reason shall explore even "the deep things of God"; God himself "revealing them to you by his Spirit."12
Wesley was one among a number of prominent empiricists of his age to extend the meaning of experience beyond the limits of sensory knowledge. After Hume had taken Lockean empiricism into the reductio ad absurdum of denying there was any soul or mind because no such entity was ever "experienced" by anyone, he ventured into the field of ethics where he had to account for the fact of human morality. Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) before him, drawing on Locke's "internal sense" (a source of ideas in addition to the external senses) had worked up a whole set of internal senses to account for the civilizing instinct, one among them being the "moral sense," the feeling of approval we experience when we see someone act out of benevolence.13
Hume carried Hutcheson's idea further; changing the word, sense to sentiment, he argued that moral distinctions are not grounded in reason, but sentiment, It is sentiment that selects the ends of life; reason serves only as a means to bring these ends about. Since only moral judgments can be a motive to action, they cannot be dictates of reason.14 Moral sense philosophy became a'la mode throughout 18th-century Britain and fed unquestionably into the broader stream of "natural feeling" as a source of truth developed by later Romanticists.
I am not trying here to develop the historicist thesis that Wesley was an emerging figure in a powerful Romanticism which was to turn neo-classical England on its head, although it has been argued that his theology, like Schleiermacher's, was simply a reaction against the rationalizing, respectable Christianity of the cultural church. What I am trying to do is show that there is an empiricism of the heart, that it seems as perfectly plausible as that of the head, that it can be based as surely on Locke as the empiricism of the senses. The thing that it does, however, is overturn Locke's particular sort of rationalism.
Take, for example, Wesley's doctrine of sanctification. While there is much evidence to show that, over the course of his life, Wesley changed his view of how holiness comes about, he seemed to settle for a stage in the regenerated Christian life when we "experience a total break from sin." Like the conversion experience, this ultimate sanctifying experience is said to be achieved in a moment.15 J. Kenneth Grider defines the experience as "an instantaneous cleansing from Adamic sin, and an empowerment, which Christian believers may receive, by faith, through the baptism with the Holy Spirit." Wesley regarded this teaching as "the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists." 16
Once again, it can be debated whether Wesley ever consistently held to an instantaneous second work of grace or to the more gradualist doctrine of "growth" in perfection, or in both at 17 What is operative in any form of Wesleyanism, original or contemporary, is the notion of experience. The Roman Catholic interpreter of Methodism, Maximin Piette, says that Wesley was not trying to reform Anglican doctrines, but conducting a campaign of spiritual fervor. He was a man presenting a new, but necessary spiritual experience: "[S]ince experiment was shown to be so extraordinarily fertile in the field of natural sciences, might he not expect as wonderful results for the spiritual life?" Piette goes on: "To justify his experimental method, Wesley appealed to the practical results of his preaching; the moral betterment of his hearers."18
"Experimental religion" was the early nineteenth century way of conflating science and religion, presumably to the support of both. Nothing could be closer to the language of Baconian/Lockean empiricism.
Wesleyanism in the New World
Wesleyanism became something different when it was transplanted to the American frontier. While Wesley was Arminian, his close associate, George Whitefield (1714-1770) was Calvinistic and, in bringing open field preaching to the colonies, had linked up with Jonathan Edwards. Although the Great Awakening in New England had already begun by the time Whitefield began his many trips to America, the special enthusiasm of Methodism was blended with the ecstatic phenomena of the Congregationalist election sessions to produce the familiar American "revival." D. Newell Williams, the Disciple historian, calls the new religious experience the Edwardsean/Wesleyan synthesis. Conversion is entirely the work of the Holy Spirit, following a basic three-step process-awakening to God's existence and love, distress/conviction over one's hopeless sinfulness and separation from God, and deliverance through prayer and putting oneself in the way of the Holy Spirit (Edwards, a modified Calvinist, allowed that a person could cooperate with God to some extent). 19
Both Wesley and Whitefield had witnessed the outbreak of unusual spiritual phenomena under their preaching in the British Isles, but it did not compare to the sweeping fire of tongues, trances, seizures, chest music, and joyous screamings of the American frontier. In America not just Methodists and Congregationalists, but Presbyterians and Baptists of many descriptions flocked to the growing camp meeting revivals which established a new non-sacramental, evangelical, and individualist Christianity at the heart of the new nation. The test of the genuineness of one's Christianity became one's experience of the Holy Spirit either in conversion (if predestinarian, then in the confirmation that one was of the "elect") or in full sanctification. A certain irrelevant nostalgia for vestigial usages like infant baptism and clerically ordered communion sessions kept old ecclesiastical forms in place, but logically they had little to do with what the new denominations regarded as essential Christianity.
Was this still empiricism? It was not only empiricism, it was a representation of one of the key notions-too often understated and misunderstood-of Locke. The "modern age" begins with Descartes' cogito ergo sum, and Wilhelm Windelband sums it up when he says, "[T]he heterogeneity of the outer and inner worlds gives the mind a proud feeling of a substantial quality peculiar to itself as contrasted with things. . . ." He goes on:
This favoring of inner over outer reasserts itself in Locke, despite the fact that he made reflection dependent on sensation, because in the dualism which was followed, sensation, furnishing knowledge of the corporeal outer world, was less reliable as a source of true knowledge than reflection, which gives knowledge of the mind itself and is more suited to its task. Our knowledge of our own states is intuitive and the most certain of all.20
How beautifully this predisposition to the inner, the psychological, the superiority of the mental attaches itself to the Scriptural teachings about Spirit witnessing to spirit, knowing what is the mind of the Spirit, being filled with the Spirit, and having God's love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Indeed, one can almost see empiricism as a kind of preparatio evangelica (prevenient grace?) for the Wesleyan revival.
What is not at all evident here is the cool, genteel rationalism of Locke's "reasonable" Christianity. While there is certainly a turning away from traditional conventions and established authority, there is no appetite in Neo-Augustinian terms, for the rare power of simple ideas, cogently expressed. In a comparison between Wesley mid Alexander Campbell, it is Campbell who is the Neo-Augustinian, non-experience centered empiricist (if the paradox can be permitted), mid Wesley, who carries Lockeanism in religion to its ultimate expression. Let Piette say it again for Wesley: the rebirth in the Holy Spirit puts the believer in a new universe. Like the new infant, suddenly the convert has an awareness of God, new spiritual senses [italics mine] to see good mid evil, "sees" what it is to be loved and pardoned by God, can now "hear" and "obey," "knows" joy and peace, "dwells" in God.21 In Lockean language, the convert's "cognitive substance" is totally transformed.22
Religious Experience in the Church of God Movement
Once the experience of conversion and sanctification had passed into the freer atmosphere of the new nation, it was not long before a number of "holiness" groups, dissatisfied with the turn the Methodist Episcopal Church was taking, west off on their own, taking new interpretations of justification and Christian perfection with them, and leaving behind ecclesiastical forms of the church that Wesley had bequeathed to the new land. In studying the literature of several of these groups, in evidence are a number of varying interpretations of what both the conversion experience and the experience of the second blessing convey. What I am trying to bring to light for myself as a member of the Christian Churches/ Churches of Christ is what the "experience" is that is being asserted, and not especially the results of the experience, however important. I focus on the Church of God movement (Anderson) as a helpful case study.
That it is "the experience" itself which needs focusing on, and which thus places the Church of God squarely in the empiricist tradition, is confirmed in the paper "Defining the Vision: a Heritage to Cherish," delivered by Merle Strege at the annual meeting of the Indiana Ministries of the Church of God, September, 1993. In section 2.5 of his paper, titled "The Church is Experientially Grounded," he states that the Church of God movement holds that "the church [is] a place where the experience of salvation makes one a member of that church." He traces this emphasis to the Pietistic roots which feed the epistemology of the movement. "Knowing God" and being "certain" of one's salvation are phrases springing from such an epistemology.
Strege states that the fundamental notion that "we 'know' by way of experience" allows Church of God people to alter their traditional doctrine if it needs to be brought "into conformity with new insights derived from experience." He cites as an example this movement's changed belief about divine healing which has undergone modification through the experience of "new light." He notes that it is this doctrine of experience which grounds the movement's opposition to creeds, since creeds represent "a spurious substitution of the Spirit by the letter."23 He says, Church of God folk rally around Christ "experientially."24
Arlo Newell, in an editorial in Vital Christianity (June, 1993), writes, "Holiness does not make it impossible to sin, but it is an experience [italics mine] of grace that makes it possible not to sin." He says it is "an experience of spiritual surrender," one that must be normative for the Christian community.25
Kenneth Jones delivered a paper titled "What the Church of God Understands about Conversion" to the Dialogue on Doctrine (Church of God mid Christian Churches/Churches of Christ) August, 1991. He stated that conversion gives the believer "the witness of the Spirit. One can know for sure that God has worked salvation and forgiveness in the heart. He cited certain key Scriptures to substantiate his point.26 The Bible is what the Holy Spirit works through [as a means?], but the Spirit's actual work is "within" the heart and mind of each person.27 Saving faith, he
avers, is not rational acceptance of a fact or belief in propositional form, nor even a decision to follow Christ, but response to the inward initiatives of the Holy Spirit in the heart.28 In another paper, "Authority of the Bible in the Church of God," Dr. Jones writes that "the only way to interpret Scripture correctly is under the guidance of the Holy Spirit,"29 presumably the lengthening out of the "experience" of the Holy Spirit felt initially at conversion. He does not explain what an interpretive experience would be as compared, for example, with either the experience of conversion or the experience of sanctification.
Larry C. Taylor, in his paper "My Vision for Christian unity," delivered at the Open Forum, March 15, 1990, says that the origin of the Church of God movement, as seen by D. S. Warner, was the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the church in the last days before the Lord's return, whereby the Spirit was gathering the "sanctified" into one family before the final judgment. The sanctified in other fellowships or churches were considered to be in "Babylon" and warned to "come out." Leaders typically took the position that the saved were members of God's church whether they left their denominations or not (as long as they walked in all the "light" they had).30
It would appear from the above that early Church of God leaders really thought of their unity movement as a call of the sanctified into a visible unity, the logic being that only the truly sanctified could ever be united, and that therefore the call to sanctity in all reality is essential to a call to unity. It is not at all clear, however, whether the sanctity and holiness called for was specifically the second work of grace. James Earl Massey says that unity is trans-denominational and is achieved when all believers have an experiential knowledge of Christ.31
In a Bachelor of Divinity thesis, written for the School of Theology of Anderson University in 1953, Charles Alford, comparing the two approaches to Christian unity in the Church of God and Disciples of Christ, stresses that the vital basis for Christian unity can only be that of "a Christian experience." But he goes on to say that this vital basis is no longer that of entire sanctification as held by early pioneers of the Church of God, but "Christian experience as a living and growing thing."32 Who are members of God's church, he asks? Not those who depend upon what "the mind thinks mid the lips confess, but upon what the heart and the soul 'know." 33 He states that the difference in the approach to Christian unity in the two movements is that, while Church of God people stress "experience," Disciples focus on "the core of assured Divine revelation" held in common by all Christians, needing exposure simply by stripping away all of those doctrines and practices extrinsic to the unity already existing.34 The Church of God, he writes, consists of a group of holy individuals, possessing "a personal experience of Christ in the atmosphere of a prophetic charism" who make up the church. Disciples, by contrast, he holds, believe in a holy institution which people join.35
Spencer Spaulding comes as close as any contemporary Church of God writer to an analysis of the experience of sanctification for my purposes in his paper, "Some Observations on Sanctification in the Church of God," read at the May, 1993, Doctrinal Dialogue. He points out that the word "experiential" does not mean "emotional." He says that the two are easy to confuse since emotion often accompanies religious experience. He holds that there is more of the affective than the cognitive in the experience of sanctification, but the experience cannot be defined as "sheer emοtionalism." Since, he argues, it is spiritual wholeness the believer seeks, it is to be expected that cognitive approaches to the experience are less effective in trying to understand what happens than the affective approach.36 Like Kenneth Jones and others, Spaulding says that this experience is "a kind of real world validation of the theological beliefs of the group" mid serves as a proper guide to the interpretation of Scripture, since there is much of Christian doctrine "still open to whatever the Holy Spirit might reveal."37
I have corresponded finally with David Lawson and Kenneth Jones to get their understanding specifically of what an experience of conversion or an experience of sanctification actually consist in-as an experience. Those of us in the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ have difficulty grasping how one distinguishes between a true and a false experience, if a specific kind of experience validates doctrine and guarantees a proper understanding of Scripture. We want to know what we are missing, if there is something here to be missed, because it appears to be something added over mid above to simple belief and the decision to follow Christ.
David Lawson38 responded to my inquiry in a letter dated June 8, 1994. He said that I was imagining Church of God people "to be relying on 'experiences' [plural] of the Holy Spirit, when in fact it would be more correct to say.. . we 'experience' the Spirit in His enabling, empowering presence." He went on to say that the presence of the Holy Spirit in the believer's life has to meet two tests: agreement with the promises of Scripture mid consistency of witness (I suppose the agreement between profession, practice, mid spiritual endurance). He explains that Church of God people don't get their concepts of God out of philosophical reasoning and doctrinal study so much as through "the conviction that they have a personal relationship with this God through prayer and meditation and through sensing Him at work The object of conversion in Church of God thinking is said to enable the convert to live Christ's style of life, and the Holy Spirit is given so that life can actually be lived with a power over mid above the human.
I see nothing in most of this to which Christian Churches/Churches of Christ people would not give a hearty "Amen." It is possible that Christian Churches/Churches of Christ emphasizes conceptual study a tad more than the Church of God. We, too, judge God to be at work in ourselves individually mid through the Church, although we might be wary of saying "We sense Him at work," which seems to imply an immediate awareness of His working at the moment. We prefer to be less hasty mid more retrospective, waiting to see whether present experiences really deliver what we hope.
Kenneth Jones responded to my inquiry in a letter dated June 25, 1994. He confessed that he experienced frustration in trying to explain what a religious experience is in itself, since he and a few others with whom he had shared my questions found it incomprehensible that a Christian could be converted without experiencing it. He was careful to point out that what the Church of God teaches is not a form of mysticism,39 that religious experiences of whatever sort are not "a source of truth or knowledge," and that Scripture is the only guide to knowing if one is saved: "Experience must always be tested by the Word." There might be other confιrmatory sources of truth like tradition, reason, and experience, but they are secondary, according to Jones. The Church of God, he says, rejects both Schleiermacher mid Pentecostalism. Too much can be read into Wesley's phrase that "experience is self-authenticating," he continues; the "experience" is entirely fictitious if obedience and holiness of life do not follow it. "Being saved" means that God has accepted that person into the church.
There is very little in the above that sounds contrary to the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ understanding of Scripture. But, of course, these are not the only things said in the letter, mid it is the language, or the angle of vision reflected in that language, that alerts a Restorationist. When Dr. Jones says, "the Spirit leads us to Christ, and works within us a desire to know God," Christian Churches/Churches of Christ people could agree if it means the effect of God's Word upon us and our experience of that effect intellectually and emotionally as it moves us to obey it.
When Jones asks, "Faith itself, whether it is a gift of God (Eph. 2:8) or not, is experienced, is it not?", one can only answer "yes"; except that it seems a strange way of saying one has faith. Ι have never thought of saying to anyone, "I have experienced having faith." When he writes, "We experience the Holy Spirit's assurance of his work," in this case in sanctification, Christian Churches/Churches of Christ folk would agree if it means that we can see that the Holy Spirit has been at work in this or that case by how things have turned out (in our best judgment), and if it means that we enjoy the confidence such evidence instills in us as a result. Is it the faith which is the value? Or is it experiencing the faith that has the value? This probably is a false dichotomy, because both church bodies would say it is the faith itself which is of chief value; mid both would ask how one could have faith without at the same time enjoying it mid being aware of all the benefits it confers. The range of difference is quite narrow.
Dr. Jones adds that all individual experience "must be tested and understood in the context of the church, of other Christians." The fellowship provides "the norm," he says. He has never heard of a standard of experience by which to test the fitness of a person for membership in the church and cannot imagine how such a standard could be devised, since everyone experiences salvation and sanctification differently. Believers experience the same salvation differently. What Christian Churches/ Churches of Christ ask is that there be a greater focus on those Scriptural, transpersonal statements than on the subjective enjoyments of those commands and promises.
Dr. Jones closed his letter to me warmly but with perplexity: "I am certain that you have experienced conversion and that the Holy Spirit works in your heart and life. How can you wonder what we mean by experiencing the work of the Holy Spirit?" I suppose my only answer can be, "But that isn't the way we put it." I can remember how I felt when I came to Christ as a boy, what I experienced in my confession mid baptism, how I had to choke back my tears; I can still remember the "floating" experience when I was immersed and how it was not what I thought it was going to be like to be put under water. But it is an effort to bring all this back. What I value is that I did what the Bible requires, not what I experienced in doing so.
As for the Holy Spirit in my life, I trust He has kept His promise to be with me and that I am whatever I am because of His work in me; but I cannot say that at any special moment "I now experience Him"; I can only affirm that if I have grown in Christ, He has worked with me to make it so and that at certain times, from the perspective of distance, it has to have been the case He was guiding me. It seems to me that the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ and Church of God speak to each other from different worlds of discourse while affirming mid enjoying the same faith.
Closing Thoughts
The value of this investigation may simply be that of calling attention to those factors that govern the somewhat differing ways that the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ and the Church of God movement have looked at Christian unity, thus showing that presuppositional or world-view theology may have more to do with barriers to our overt unity in Christ than any doctrines we espouse in our more visible teaching agenda. It is important that we reexamine those presuppositions controlling our Christian perspectives.
Certainly Christian Churches/Church of Christ have some listening to do when it comes to the Church of God teaching on the Holy Spirit. We have not brought our thinking up to date with the actual language of the New Testament when it comes to the indwelling of the Spirit. It is encouraging to see Restorationists take more interest in pneumatology, in the topic of baptism with the Holy Spirit, and with empowerment doctrines contained in neglected Scriptures like Acts 4:31 (where the whole assembly was "filled" with the Holy Spirit after receiving the "gift" in Acts 2:38), Rom. 8:9-11, 16 (the Spirit lives in ordinary Christians and "testifies" inwardly), I Cor. 2:12 (the Spirit is given to us so "that we may understand what God has freely given us"), Gal. 4:6 (it is the Spirit who calls out, "Abba," in our hearts), Col. 1:27 (Christ in us is the hope of glory), all of this over and above letting the word of Christ dwell in us as we teach mid sing to each other (Col. 3:16), I John 3:24b (where we know Christ lives in us "by the Spirit he gave us"), and other like passages.
Whether Christian Churches/Churches of Christ will ever accept the Wesleyan formula of conversion mid sanctification is highly improbable, but if the Church of God movement can make us stay open to those opaque and mysterious Scriptures which speak of the vital presence of the Holy Spirit in our personal lives and in the counsel of the gathered faithful, we shall be far ahead of where we are now mid might possibly understand where we have failed in our restorative mission to the Church.
In the same way, by remaining open to their principle of listening to the voice of the Spirit in the Church as they seek to understand Scripture, the Church of God may find that the mystical attaches to more than the psychological, that there is more to "spirit" than just mental factors, mid that there are profoundly non-cognitive elements at work in the first (mid second) century "whole person" understanding of salvation. I speak here of the sacramental aspects of prime Christianity, misunderstood by both Christian Churches/Churches of Christ and the Church of God as either legal or optional attachments to faith. The more I investigate early Christian thinking about the relation between body and spirit, the material and the volitional, the corporate mid the individual, the more convinced I am that we have never entered into the world-view of the first church and understood its notion of whole-universe redemption.40 I think we are more prisoners of the Cartesian universe than we have realized.
Both movements, in their divergent empiricisms, are nevertheless pervasively ahistorical. Both miss what is instructive in church tradition. They find it difficult to account for the church between A.D. 100 and either 1812 (the Brush Run Church) or 1881 (D. S. Warner and the Gospel Trumpet) and experience a deep disconnection with historical Christendom. Being anti-creedal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-liturgical, both movements have all the difficulties associated with starting over again, with its cost in theological naivety and ecclesiastical bumbling (the Church of God far less so in this latter respect). The Christian Churches/Churches of Christ have the great added cost of their recent separation from the Disciples, with the loss of most of those institutions ante-dating the division.
I confess to a certain joyful mystification over the results of independent missions around the world and church planting at home, in which God has worked through the massive incohesiveness of so much that we do. Still, our hyper-congregationalism and whimsical individualism keep us from having much of a "presence" vis-a-vis the world we're trying to save and the Church we are trying to unite.
Notes
1Jοhn Locke (1632-1704). Empiricism, it must be noted, goes much further back in philosophy, through Aquinas to Aristotle.
2Geοrge Berkeley (1685-1753); David Hume (1711-1776).
3There is a possible study in the history of ideas arguing that Greeks saw sensation as happening inside the subject and the Latin word indicating that sensation happens to the subject from the outside in.
4William James (1842-1910). See Dagobert D. Runes, ed., Dictionary of Philosophy (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1981), 90.
5Gοοd, but brief discussions of the Lockeanism of Campbell and Wesley can be found in Leroy Garrett, The Stone-Campbell Movement: An Anecdotal History of Three Churches (Joplin, MO: College Press Pub. Co., 1981), 29-35, and Colin W. Williams, John Wesley's Theology Today (New York: Abingdon Press, 1960), 31. Some Christian Churches/Churches of Christ leaders like Dean Ε. Walker, however, believe Campbell was more in the tradition of Thomas Reid (17 10-1796) and Common Sense philosophy. See Walker, Adventuring for Christian Unity and Other Essays, collected and arranged by Thomas Foust and edited by William Richardson (Johnson City, TN: Emmanuel School of Religion, 1992), 446. Walker's revisionism may stem from his opposition to the Lockeanism of liberals in the Disciples movement like Edward Scribner Ames (1870-1958). For a discussion of Ames, see D. Newell Williams, ed., A Case Study of Mainstream Protestantism: the Disciples' Relation to American Culture, 1880-1989 (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans and St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1991), 120-125.
6Τhe Reasonableness of Christianity was published in London in 1695. Defenses of the book followed in 1695 and 1697. A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul to the Galatians [etc.] was published in London in 1705.
7I take the phrase "the vanity of dogmatizing" from the title of a book by another typical seventeenth century rationalist, Joseph Glanville (1636-1680), who wrote The Vanity of Dogmatizing in 1661. Note: "For our initial age is like the melted wax to the prepared seal, capable of any impression from the documents of our Teachers. The half-moon or Cross are indifferent to its reception; and we may with equal facility write on this rasa Tabula, Turk, or Christian." This quotation is from the 1661 edition, found in Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry (Doubleday Anchor Book, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Dec., 1953), 175.
8Walter Scott (1796-1861), early Christian Churches leader, whose The
Messiahship: or, Great Demonstration, Written for the Union of Christians, on
Christian Principles as Plead [sic] for in the Current Reformation (Cincinnati:
H.S. Bosworth 1859), went through several editions.
9George Fisher, History of the Christian Church (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1893), 516.
10Colin Williams, John Wesley's Theology Today, cited in note 5 supra,103.Hereafter, Williams, JWT.
11Ιbid., 33, 104, 110.
12Ibid., 31. The quotation in Williams is taken from Thomas Jackson's edition, The Works of John Wesley, Α.Μ., 14 vols., third edition, London: John Mason, 1829, vol. 8, 13.
13D. D. Raphael, "Moral Sense," in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. Philip Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), vol. 3, 231.
14Ibid. 231-232.
15Ηarald Lindstrom, Wesley and Sanctification: A Study in the Doctrine of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Francis Asbury Press of Zondervan, 1980), 116. Hereafter, Lindstrom.
l6J. Kenneth Grider, Entire Sanctification: The Distinctive Doctrine of Wesleyanism (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1980), 91-94, 13, for the respective quotations.
17Lindstrom, ix. See also Maximum Piette, John Wesley in the Evolution of Protestantism, trans. J. B. Howard (London: Sheed and Ward, 1938), 442-443. Hereafter, Piette. Other books that would be helpful: Robert Tuttle, Mysticism in the Wesleyan Tradition (Grand Rapids, F. Asbury Press, 1989); Randy Maddox, ed., Aldersgate Reconsidered (Kingswood Books, Nashville, TN, 1990); and Τ. Chrichton Mitchell, Charles Wesley: Man with the Dancing Heart (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1994). Tuttle's book shows how Wesley went through three devotional stages, from reading the traditional Christian mystics, to reading Scripture alone, to a final return to mysticism, this time "anchored in Scripture."
18Ρiette, 475.
19D. Newell Williams, "The Gospel as the Power of God to Salvation: Alexander Campbell and Experimental Religion," lecture 7 in Lectures in Honor of the Alexander Campbell Bicentennial, 1788-1988 (Disciples of Christ Historical Society, Nashville, TN, 1988), 130-131.
20Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, vol. 2, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern. Harper Torchbook ΤΒ39 (New York: Harper and Bros., 1958), 466-467. Hereafter, Windelband.
21Piette, 440.
22Windelband, 468.
23Μerle D. Strege, "Defining the Vision: A Heritage to Cherish," address to the annual meeting of the Indiana Ministries of the Church of God, Sept. 23, 1993, 16.
24Ibid., 17.
25Αrlo F. Newell, "A Serious Call...," Vital Christianity, June, 1993, 10-11.
26Κenneth Ε. Jones, "What the Church of God Understands about Conversion," Dialogue on Doctrine, August, 1991, 16-17.
27Ιbid., 14.
28Ibid., 12-13.
29Κenneth Ε. Jones, "Authority of the Bible in the Church of God," Open Forum I, Traders Point Christian Church, Indianapolis, March, 1989, 11.
30Larry C. Taylor, "My Vision for Christian Unity," presentation to Open Forum II, Park Place Church of God, Anderson, IN, March, 1990, 2-3.
31Αs quoted by Taylor, op. cit., 4.
32Charles H. Alford, "A Comparison of the Doctrine of Christian Unity in the Church of God and in the Disciples of Christ," masters (B. D.) thesis, School of Theology, Anderson University, 1953, 20.
33Ιbid., 21.
34Ιbid., 115.
35Ιbid., 115, 126.
36L. Spencer Spaulding, "Some Observations on Sanctification in the Church of God," paper for Dialogue on Doctrine, Cincinnati, May, 1993, 9. Spaulding teaches Biblical studies at Anderson University.
37Ιbid., 9, 1.
38Daνid Lawson is Associate General Secretary of the Leadership Council of the Church of God movement in North America.
39Ρersοnal letter, Kenneth Jones to Byron Lambert, June 25, 1994. Jones is retired dean of Warner Pacific College and Mid-America Bible College.
40I would invite attention to my unpublished paper for the North American Christian Convention's Theological Forum, July, 1993, on "What Happens in the Lord's Supper?" This paper provides perspective on early Christian mystical somaticism.
Edited by Michael Mattei for the
Wesley Center for Applied Theology
at Northwest Nazarene University
© Copyright 2000 by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology
Text may be freely used for personal or scholarly purposes, provided the notice below the horizontal line is left intact. Any use of this material for commercial purposes of any kind is strictly forbidden without the express permission of the Wesley Center at Northwest Nazarene University, Nampa, ID 83686. Contact the webmaster for permission or to report errors.
