The God-centred life - Insights from Jonathan Edwards for today

Several times now I have come across people in a pastoral context whose perception of their experience of God has become dangerously skewed. Some have even thought he was telling them not to eat.

Granted, the Bible does encourage us to fast occasionally. Nonetheless, when the supposed command from God not to eat is taken to a dangerous medical extreme, it is not only legitimate to wonder whether the spiritual experience is genuine, but it is imperative to seek professional help. I have come across other even weirder messages purportedly received from God. The psychological difference between people who think God is telling them to cut their wrists and those who think they are Napoleon is not as great as we might wish.

Suffice it to say that Christian leaders do not always greet enthusiastically the claim ‘God is speaking to me’. Of course, people who feel they have a word from God do not necessarily need psychiatric care. Christians believe in a speaking God who has spoken and still speaks today. It is the idols that are dumb. But while it may be relatively easy to discern a mental imbalance camouflaged in religious language, other more mundane and subtle confusion can arise from high claims to spiritual experience. If someone says, ‘I feel the Spirit is leading us’, it could mean they are especially sensitive to God’s direction. It could also really mean they want something and are using religious jargon, perhaps unconsciously, to manipulate the situation to their own ends. Claims of spiritual experience can be profound, profoundly self-deceived or even profane, not to mention positively devilish, for Satan masks himself as an ‘angel of light’ (2 Corinthians 11.14).

How do you discern?

Examples of this kind of difficulty could be multiplied. The central issue is how to discern the reliability of personal spiritual experience of God. Christianity claims, if it claims anything at all, that those who are Christians have a personal relationship with God. But what does this mean? Does this mean God tells me which kind of lunch to eat? And if not, why not? Surely that would be useful information — might help me diet — and would certainly be at least a form of personal relationship? If God does not or cannot be frequently expected to speak in this kind of direct manner, what does it mean to have a personal relationship with him?

Are we talking about feelings? In what sense are those feelings different from sentimental emotions that may be evoked in others at the sight of a sunset or a beautiful building, or that seem in plentiful supply around a candlelit dinner? If these are the self-same emotions evoked by these alternative environments, should we be sceptical of the church’s use of, for instance, music, or architecture, or the language of ‘relationship’ as an attempt to produce emotions that make objective sense in those settings, but which are only superficially connected with religion? I take it that most of the readers of this chapter believe that in some sense we are expected to have a personal relationship with God, and for reasons too many to enumerate here. But if we are expected to have this connection with God, why at times do we feel like we do not? Are we fooling ourselves when at other times we feel like we do?

Perhaps ‘feelings’ of personal relationship with God are not so definitive. There are many psalms in the Bible in which the author clearly confesses his lack of a sense of feeling close to God. Psalm 43.5, for example, says:

Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Saviour and my God.

This suggests a strong personal relationship with God may exist not only without but despite feelings of intimacy. Why, then, should I expect profound experience of God to be marked by feeling close to God? Should I consider a personal relationship with God as like being in a permanent state of the early stages of a love affair? Is a personal relationship with God more like a 40-year-old marriage, in which the feelings are still there, but the flames burn lower? Or is a personal relationship with God similar to a friendship with your bank manager? There are limits to the closeness of the friendship, but you are glad you have such an important relationship with such a powerful person in your life — especially if you should need a loan. Is that what a friendship with God is like? Is he your ultimate boss, who remains relationally your boss but with whom you are glad you are sort of on the ‘inside track’?

These and other questions about spiritual experience all come back to the same point: the need to discern true from false spiritual experience. Ineptitude in this area has allowed crass manipulation to flourish in many a local church, hostage to the ‘God told me’ trump card. It has also led to confusion, uncertainty and a fear of spiritual experience like a fear of the unknown. Not a million miles away, heresies in the form of Mormonism, Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses have flourished in the experiential vacuum. Then there are the hosts of individual Christians who deny clear teaching in Scripture, because what the Bible says goes against what they feel — and, after all, they have a personal relationship with God.

The significance of Edwards’s approach

Edwards had two theological mechanisms for discernment. He had a ‘sense’ of true experience (which we will consider in this chapter) and ‘signs’ of true experience (which we will consider in the next). They belong together and inform one another as roots lead to fruits. The ‘sense’ of true experience is especially important because it gets to the ‘epistemological’ cause of all this confusion about experiencing God. Epistemology is the study of how we know things. When we say we have a personal relationship with God we are making an extraordinary epistemological claim, because we are saying we know God personally (‘epistemology’ is the theory of knowledge). Edwards’s ‘sense’ of true experience addresses the problem of how we can know we are experiencing God.

This problem has gained great historical momentum. Western society is reeling from an earthquake in our epistemological foundations that took place several centuries ago. The story is complex, but without too much distortion we may summarise it like this. Medieval society had an epistemology of authority. Modern society has an epistemology of science. ‘Postmodern’ or ‘emerging’ culture has an epistemology of relativism. The shift from medieval to modern ways of thinking occurred from the 16th-century Reformation to the 18th-century Enlightenment. After the Reformation regained a confidence in Scripture (the ‘Book of God’), the Enlightenment discovered a confidence in science and reason (the ‘Book of Nature’).

The change from modern to postmodern attitudes is still under way. It began with such seminal thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, sometimes called the ‘grandfather of postmodernism’. More recently, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida led the way towards a radical undermining of both Reformation and Enlightenment confidence in knowledge. But postmodernism is not really intellectual: it is a gut feeling of distrust of authoritative pronouncements and an assumption that society functions best by tolerance: to be tolerant of people of different faiths and cultures one must accept that there is no ‘truth’ about such matters.

There are lots of ironies in the story that may even be apparent from this brief synopsis. Modern attitudes to life were generated within religious frameworks, but became radically critical of religion.

Postmodern relativism frowns on all truth claims, yet is itself an absolute truth claim! But the historical narrative does more than contextualise Edwards’s contribution within a sea of epistemological confusion. It also indicates the precise significance of his view of ‘spiritual epistemology’. Edwards lived at the start of the Enlightenment. Yet he stood apart from it. He responded to the Enlightenment attitude to God and the possibility of spiritual experience. Edwards’s spiritual epistemology was ruggedly biblical, emotionally appealing and intellectually credible. As we are heirs to the Enlightenment’s epistemological fragmentation, Edwards’s approach clarifies what is and what is not true experience of God in our lives today.

His was a ‘sense’ of true experience. Edwards said the ‘sense of the heart’ was genuine spiritual experience. It is an evocative turn of phrase, suggestive of vaguely romantic or emotional connotations. Edwards, though, was drawing upon his Christian theology to respond to the Enlightenment. Experience of God was a ‘sense’ in touch with the sensibility of contemporary empirical science. Spiritual experience was ‘heart’ experience in counterbalance to the Enlightenment emphasis on the rational ‘head’, which Edwards wanted to both affirm and challenge. Each of these emphases emerged from a God-centred view of spiritual experience. His understanding of spiritual experience was not self-orientated but was God-focussed. His theology of salvation meant that personal relationship with God could not be based on how we felt; instead, it had to rely upon the objective work of Christ on the cross, revealed to us by the Spirit through the Bible. This Reformation theology and evangelical passion are the backbone of Edwards’s writings on personal experience, and apply acutely in a day when we tend to have a more self-orientated view of spiritual experience. It is this ‘sense of the heart’ that Edwards expresses in his regular preaching, published sermons, books and personal journals.

This extract, taken from The God-centred life: Insights from Jonathan Edwards for today by Josh Moody, is published by IVP at £8.99, and available from all good Christian bookshops or http://www.ivpbooks.com.