Speaking about Jesus and Religious Experience
As a Christian, it can be disconcerting to hear people of other faiths recount their experiences of God: miracles, dreams, visions, a voice, his presence, ... Shouldn’t our experiences of the Holy Spirit be unique? Are all these other people experiencing demonic counterfeits? Or am I myself being fooled through psychological phenomena?
The dialogue of religious experience invites us not to shy away from these hard questions, and to encounter people of other religions in order to wrestle with their religious experiences. This may not only help us better understand the nature of such experiences, but it should also be an occasion for us to testify to our own experiences of Jesus, who we believe is the ultimate revelation of God.
Many Protestants and Catholics believe that both dialogue and a proclamation of Jesus and his good news are of the utmost importance in the mission he gave to his followers. Dialogue as a means to foster the peaceful coexistence of different communities; proclamation in order to share what we believe is the full revelation of God in Jesus, as an invitation to follow him. Practicing both is crucial. To paraphrase the Catholic Church: “dialogue should be carried out with a desire to make Jesus known and loved, while proclamation should be done in the spirit of dialogue.”[1]
Successfully practicing both is a challenge though, especially in the case of the dialogue of religious experience. Whereas a lot of interreligous dialogue centers around more intellectual questions, the dialogue of religious experience forces the participants to discuss personal, emotional experiences of God. The pitfalls of syncretism — saying that all religions are basically the same and thus refraining from a proclamation — and demonization — rejecting the other as being deceived and thus failing to really engage in dialogue — loom all the larger as the discussion touches upon very personal aspects of our lives, foundational to our worldview.
We can effectively engage in such proclamatory dialogue of religious experience only if we can both believe that God is potentially at work in people of other religions, while at the same time holding on to Jesus as the full revelation of God, who is worth proclaiming even if the other might already have certain experiences or right beliefs about God.
In practice though, we find Protestants mainly shying away from such dialogue, while the Catholics who have engaged in it seem to have neglected a proclamation of Jesus. For example, a Catholic monk called Thomas Merton had a longstanding correspondence with a Pakistani Muslim on their mystical experiences, in which he professed the belief that devout Muslims are saved and in touch with God through their experiences, but that “in matters where dogmatic beliefs differ, I think that controversy is of little value because it takes us away from the spiritual realities into the realm of words and ideas.”[2] Similarly, Christian de Chergé, a Catholic monk who held regular prayer meetings with Muslim mystics in Algeria, wrote that “we avoid theological discussions, because they lead to intellectual sparring that gets in the way of getting to know one another.”[3]
These Catholics believed the religious other to already be in contact with God in such a way that they did not see the need to invite these people into a relationship with Jesus. Yet the Catholic church emphasizes that Jesus truly is the full revelation of God and thus an enrichment to the religious other and necessary to proclaim.[4] Protestants on the other hand, and especially Evangelicals, seem to be hesitant in believing that God may be at work in other religions, let alone that people of other religions may have experiences of him. This may be the reason that Protestants have largely ignored this category of dialogue.
In order to move towards a more fruitful practice of the dialogue of religious experience, we need to hold in tension the following two beliefs that can arguably be grounded in the Bible: the belief that God may be at work in people of other religions, and the belief that Jesus is the full revelation of God. As Paul could say to the Athenians that “what therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23), we need to allow that the religious other truly may be pursuing and worshipping God, and proclaim that they can find his exact representation in Jesus (John 14:9; Hebrews 1:3).
Notes
[1] Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue and the Congregation for Evangelization of Peoples, Dialogue and Proclamation: Reflections and Orientations on Interreligious Dialogue and the Proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (Vatican, 1991). http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/interelg/documents/rc_pc_interelg_doc_19051991_dialogue-and-proclamatio_en.html
[2] Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love - The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns, ed. William Henry Shannon (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985).
[3] John W. Kiser, The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002).
[4] See [1].
