The Importance of Religious Experience

By Harold Netland

Christians do not generally speak of having “religious experiences” but they do pray to God, meditate on Scripture, have feelings of  guilt due to sin and then experience God’s forgiveness upon repentance, worship God through song and liturgy, hear God’s voice of guidance in perplexing times, experience God’s special peace during trials, and so on. All  of this involves experience. Nor is this surprising, for the ongoing daily exercise of faith entails undergoing many kinds of experiences. Simeon Zahl observes that, “To a significant degree, the question of Christian experience of God is the question of God’s presence as it is perceived in human lives in various forms and under various conditions and with various effects.”

In addition to ordinary experiences, there are also the more unusual and dramatic experiences of those who have visions of  Jesus or dreams in which God is said to communicate directly to them. Scripture itself is full of examples of God or angelic beings appearing in dreams or visions to individuals or groups. The history of Christianity is replete with examples of those claiming to have directly encountered God, Jesus, or an angelic being in a vision, dream, or other perceptual experience. Many people around the world today report experiences in which Jesus appears to them.

A testimony—a personal account of how one’s conversion to Jesus Christ through the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit results in a dramatically changed life—gives voice to an especially important kind of experience. The narrative of personal transformation, expressed powerfully in the dramatic statement of the blind man in John 9:25—“One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!”—has always been significant for Christians. But it took on special meaning in the early modern era with the rise of the Puritans and Pietists. The testimony of a transformed life, accompanied by ongoing personal experiences of God’s presence, has become a central feature of modern Protestant, and especially evangelical, Christianity.

Moreover, for many Christians, it is precisely this personal experience of God that provides the grounds for confidence in the truth of the gospel and one’s acceptance by God. The conviction that comes from personal experience is captured nicely in this early twentieth-century hymn:

You ask me how I know He lives?

He lives within my heart.

Something very important is captured in this hymn. There is a sense in which Christians can legitimately claim to know the reality of God because of their experiences of God. Any biblically faithful perspective should acknowledge this. But, as we shall see, this affirmation must be qualified in certain ways and needs to be appreciated within a broader epistemic framework of beliefs that itself requires justification.

. . . When thinking of experiences of God, it is tempting to focus on the dramatic or “peak” experiences of the great spiritual giants and treat these as paradigmatic for what theistic experience is like. But this can be misleading. It is crucial that we are also attentive to the more ordinary and mundane experiences of life in which believers encounter God. In her excellent ethnographic study, When God Talks Back, anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann offers a rich exploration of ordinary American evangelicals’ understandings of their relationship with God. Based on sustained observation and extensive interviews with evangelicals in the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, Luhrmann elucidates the thinking of many Christians about a personal relationship with God: “Many Americans not only believe in God in some general way but experience God directly and report repeated contact  with  the  supernatural. Similarly, Dallas Willard, reflecting on typical experiences of ordinary Christians, says, “Many might be surprised to discover what a high percentage of serious Christians—and even non-Christians—can tell of specific experiences in which they are sure God spoke to them.” These experiences of ordinary people in the routine patterns of life, no less than the dramatic experiences of the great saints, constitute the raw data on which theoretical accounts of experiences of God should be constructed.

Experience plays a significant role in people coming to accept Christian commitments and to have confidence in the truth of the gospel. Religious experiences serve many different functions, both positive and negative, but an important one is helping to provide some justification for certain beliefs and practices. These experiences can take a bewildering variety of forms and come with varying degrees of clarity or intensity, but they provide some support for religious commitments. William Alston observes that for ordinary Christians,

somehow what goes on in the experience of leading the Christian life provides some ground for Christian belief, makes some contribution to the rationality of Christian belief. We sometimes feel the presence of God; we get glimpses, at least, of God’s will for us; we feel the Holy Spirit at work in our lives, guiding us, strengthening us, enabling us to love other people in a new way; we hear God speaking to us in the Bible, in preaching, or in the words and actions of our fellow Christians. Because of all this we are more justified in our Christian beliefs than we would have been otherwise.

Alston’s point is not that Christians consciously construct formal arguments for the rationality of Christian beliefs using aspects of their experience as premises; most Christians don’t do anything of the kind. But he is highlighting the fact that for many believers there is a relation between what they take to be experiences of God and their conviction that basic Christian teachings “make sense” or are “reasonable” and thus should be accepted. Moreover, there is an important sense in which this ought to be the case. Alston comments, “If I could not find any confirmation of the Christian message in my own experience, I would be less justified in accepting that message than I am in fact.” And surely Alston is correct in this.

— Harold A. Netland is professor of philosophy of religion and intercultural studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, where he has taught for more than twenty-five years. He previously served as a missionary in Japan and taught at Tokyo Christian University. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Christianity and Religious Diversity, Encountering Religious Pluralism, and Buddhism: A Christian Exploration and Appraisal. He is also the coeditor of Globalizing Theology and Handbook of Religion.

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Taken from Harold Netland, Religious Experience and the Knowledge of God: The Evidential Force of Divine Encounters (Baker Academic, 2022).

“In Religious Experience and the Knowledge of God, Netland provides a thorough and illuminating account of how religious experience can function as an important testimony for God. His reasoning is careful, and he deals thoughtfully with various objections along the way, alert not to overstate the degree of certainty afforded by experience or to isolate religious experience from other sources of the knowledge of God. The book is conversant with the best of recent philosophical literature while also including important historic testimonies like those of Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley. This is a robust, balanced, and compelling treatment of an important topic.”

— Gavin Ortlund, author of Why God Makes Sense in a World That Doesn't

See our interview with Harold Netland on religious experience here.

Find Religious Experience and the Knowledge of God at Amazon, Baker, and other major booksellers.

image: Moses Shown the Promised Land

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Wandering Toward God

Finding Faith amid Doubts and Big Questions

Is it wrong to doubt? Many Christians assume that doubt is faith’s opposite and that wandering among the hard questions of faith will lead us further and further away from God. True believers, the assumption goes, never waver in their confidence in the fundamental truths of the Christian faith.

Professor and philosopher Travis Dickinson disagrees. Instead, he says, our doubts and hard questions about the faith are actually an important way we can express our commitment and love to God. Doubt isn’t our destination but it’s an important step on the way. It’s possible to wander toward God as we ask our questions honestly, in faith and trust. As we do, we'll discover the truth, goodness, and beauty of God waiting for us.

“For a long time, we have needed an informed, fresh new guide in navigating through stormy waters of doubt. Careful to distinguish doubt from unbelief and offering an extremely helpful definition of faith (ventured trust), Dickinson’s book has it all. It begins with chapters that clarify doubt, faith, and related notions, along with locating the place of doubt in the process of spiritual growth. It moves on to discuss strategies for dealing with doubt, and it provides accessible answers to specific topics often involved in doubt. A truly wonderful book.”

— J. P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, and author of A Simple Guide to Experience Miracles

See our Worldview Bulletin excerpt from Wandering Toward God here.

Find Wandering Toward God: Finding Faith amid Doubts and Big Questions at Amazon, InterVarsity Press, and other major booksellers.

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