There is a very human function that says, "What I experience determines fact." We read, for instance, "There is none who seeks for God" (Rom. 3:11) and think, "Wait, I know people who have sought for God." You may even have been one of those people. So we question the passage. Our experience tells us that it is false. Maybe we read something and come to conclusions based on our experience. John writes, for instance, "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God" (1 John 4:7). Interesting. So what can we conclude? Well, from our experience, everyone loves to some degree. Every mother loves her child. Everyone has something or someone they love. Some more than others, sure, but everyone loves. Our experience tells us so. It must be, then, that everyone is born of God ... right? Your brain might scream at you, "No!", but your experience would suggest this is true, wouldn't it?
I wonder sometimes about our common use of experience to determine truth. Look at this simple, well-known example. When I was a kid, life was dramatically different. We didn't wear helmets or seat belts. Hey, cars didn't even come with them! We didn't ban tag from school. I would tell Mom, "We're going for ride" and she'd say, "Be back by dinner" and off we'd go. Where? To far away, dangerous places! We'd ride in the hills miles from home, chase down snakes, see if we could catch rabbits -- all sorts of dangerous or "evil" things. If a kid in your class died, there wasn't a "grief counselor" to help you through the pain. Mom and Dad were the ones who did that. The goal of school wasn't to teach you self-esteem; it was to educate you. We didn't have modern medicine, free condoms, or gay rights. Every boy in the neighborhood met to play "war" or "Cowboys and Indians" which always included "shooting" and "killing" and all sorts of violent imaginations. Odd ... how is it that so none that I know of became hardened criminals? Hmmm.
Somehow, in spite of all that foolish nonsense, we survived. Our experience would suggest that the truth is that not all that we do today is reasonable or necessary. But we have jettisoned our experience as a truth-determiner and choose instead to side with ... what, modern psychology? I don't really know for sure. I do know that what we accept today as "true" is often in direct contradiction to our own experiences.
So ... why is it that when it comes to biblical claims that violate our experiences, our experiences trump God, but when it comes to psychology's claims that violate our experiences, we acquiesce? Does anyone see a problem here?
1 comment:
In my Intercultural Communication class, we were taught that communication was through a cycle of experience, belief, feeling, behavior. An experience shaped our belief, our belief about that experience gave us a feeling, our feeling produced a behavior, our behavior led to another experience. I think early in life, this is true, our experiences shape our beliefs, but I think at some point our beliefs color our experiences, so that no one experience is experienced the same way by two people. Our society has thrown out its beliefs for its experiences. Instead of interpreting our experiences by our beliefs, we make our experiences our beliefs.
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