Experience

[Yeah, I know it has been a long time and here I jump right into inside minutia.  Well, what do you expect from a blogger?  BTW, if you haven't checked out Rethinking Economics in a while, I'm back to blogging there.  Also, take a look at Diary of a Disillusioned Voter if you're interested in politics but frustrated with the present political landscape.]

Something mentioned tonight at School of Community triggered me thinking about the role of experience.  Don't take the following to be a critique of tonight's School of Community, because it is not.   The one merely served as the trigger for the following.

In CL we make a great emphasis on the importance of experience and rightly so.  But I think sometimes we slip a bit when it comes to why it is important.  We are not looking to verify our experiences.  And, in particular, we are not looking to verify our feelings (which certainly is a dimension of experience, but often what we reduce all of an experience down to).  We are looking to verify truth.  In a very concrete way.  We are looking to verify, in our experiences, the truth.  What CL is saying is that experience is the place in which this becomes possible.  But let's not lose sight that it is truth that we are after.  Consider again the wonderful passage from St. John about the encounter of Andrew and John with Christ and how it beautifully opens with the Baptist's claim "Behold the Lamb of God!" and closes with Andrew's words to his brother "We have found the Messiah!"  Why was Andrew's experience of the encounter with Christ so vital?  Not because it verified his experiences.  But because it is in that powerful encounter he was able to verify the truth of the Baptist's claim and that fact took on concreteness for him and his life.  The face of Truth became known.

Okay, I'm done rambling.  Just felt the need to clarify on this.

Comments

[Freder1ck]

Great point! this one had me confused for a while.

[Stephen]

Jack,

I was just updating my blog and checked to see if you were still actively posting and I found this. Have you read the Religious Sense? I think you're right, but I don't think anyone is slipping up a bit in not emphasizing it. This is exactly what we mean by verification. Experience is that which I live, to verify this is to seek to find the truth of it. Simple.

[Stephen]

Sorry, I should have kept typing in that last comment. What I wanted to finish saying is as follows:

Andrew does verify his experience. He has this great expectation for a messiah, he has a heart which tells him that he can hope something great like this, he has the learned understanding of the scriptures which tells him what the messiah will be like, he has the experience of John and his followers, and he now has the experience of this man Jesus. For him to say "We have found the messiah." When he was never told this by Jesus, and Lamb of God and Messiah are never synonymous in the Hebrew scriptures, he is in fact affirming the reasonable truth of what he has met. This is a judgment, he makes the judgment that his heart and his experience have led him to. He then begins the work of verifying the whether his judgment is true or not. Will his experience of this man continue to indicate the judgment he has made.