Truth is an experience, don't miss it!

A while back I was watching a YouTube video that popped up in my recommended feed. The video was about two orthodox evangelical theologians from America who discussed the longing for revival in the charismatic movement. Though I said to myself that I should stop watching because it would just irritate me or make me angry I somehow could not bring myself to click the little cross icon to close the tab, so the video kept playing and I got annoyed as I knew I would. The video was shot during what is known as the Asbury Revival and was a response to it of sorts. Both of the men talking hadn’t been to Asbury, nor did they display a great desire to go there, but they did feel the need to talk about what happened there and what revival would truly be in their opinion. Though they never condemned the event outright, they kept talking about what a revival should, and shouldn’t be, casting al kinds of doubt and shade on what for a lot of people was a live changing event. Both men said they both hadn’t seen a revival with their own eyes but would want to see one.

For some reason this video sticked with me. Not because of the annoyance I felt in their ignorance, in the years I have developed a filter for ignorant intellectuals and their desire to talk about what they don’t understand. The reason this video sticked with me is because both men lived a (long) car drive away from Asbury, they expressed a desire for revival, had all sorts of opinions on the matter based on historical and theological arguments, but they didn’t think to just go and see for themselves. For some reason this felt profoundly wrong to me. Both of them are full of passion about truth and have a job devoted to the Word of God, yet something happens and you stick to the knowledge from your books instead of experiencing it for yourself. It seemed like it didn’t even cross their minds that they could just go and experience this revival for themselves.

I often hear the saying, ‘truth is not understood before it is experienced’, and I couldn’t agree more. Sure, one can believe a statement to be true by just hearing it, but to truly understand it must be experienced. This doesn’t just work for the Kingdom of God, but it works for everything. Even the scientific method is based on observation, hypothesis, and experimenting before you analyze and form a conclusion. In theology, experience has been downplayed a lot in the recent centuries and this has had a profound impact on the way people experience faith. For example, one of the main criticisms from traditional theologians on modern worship music is the repetitiveness of words and melodies, which plays on people’s feelings instead of focusing them on Gods truth. For centuries experience was an essential part of theological truth, what we now would consider to be third wave Pentecostal weirdness would be quite normal and called mysticism, or mystical theology.  There is an irony in the fact that charismatics are often accused of pursuing the latest, newest experience over ancient truth. Experimental truth has, from the very early church until a few hundred years ago, always had its place in Christianity. The overemphasis on solemn ratio as basis for theological truth is what I would call a modern invention. And about repetitiveness in worship music, lets just say that contemporary worship artists weren’t the first who discovered the power of repetition in liturgy.

Solemnly following the ways and truth of the mind brings us all kinds of problems. Just take a brief look at Dutch church history and you can see how lack of experienced truth has led people astray. In 1926, the Dutch reformed churches had a church schism because one of their pastors in his lecture on Genesis 3 said that the snake in paradise didn’t actually use words to speak. There was a schism over the question whether the speech of the snake would be perceivable by human senses. You could ask, what does this have to do with anything? And my answer would be that this little anecdote is precisely the point I am trying to make. Truth, in this little story is not very hard to perceive. The truth is that the point of Genesis 3 is not about what factually happened in regards to the snake and the fact that he talked, but about good and evil. If you truly experienced evil, and have truly experienced good, this whole story sounds rather stupid because the whole discussion is meaningless. Instead of leading people into a revelation about sin, truth and lie, they were squabbling  over a trivial fact. So much so that it drove those people apart. This stupid discussion was so important to them that they went separate ways. The sad thing is, since the early 1800’s there have been countless of these little schisms in the Dutch church. A church focused on ratio is a church in permanent disagreement. And more, it’s a church that slowly loses its ability to distinguish truth from lie. Experienced truth is the best evidence of it’s truth claim, if truth can’t be experienced the question of its relevance should be asked.

I think, for me one of the great questions I often ask myself is, ‘when do I trust someone to teach me truth’. I have heard enough smart lies, and have seen goodhearted people lose their faith because they fell in ratio’s trap and couldn’t believe in the supernatural anymore. True knowledge comes from experience, thus I will trust those people that experience, to lead me into a place where I, also, experience. Do I trust two theologians to teach me about revival when they don’t even feel the need to experience said revival? No, thank you! I will trust those people that testify about God experienced, whether they are intellectuals or illiterate, not to feed my mind but to show me the way so I can experience God in the same way. I mean, if God is truth, truth experienced is God experienced.