Personal Experience as a Defeater of Biblical Claims

The following argument is meant to demonstrate that it is in principle possible to disconfirm the claims of Christianity, against the claims of those who hold Christianity to be fundamentally indefeasible. Moreover, it argues that the process by which Christianity may be disconfirmed is not one that is “out of bounds” for sincere or committed Christians – that, on the contrary, it is a process internal to genuine Christianity and therefore completely unavoidable if one is exercising faith in the appropriate, biblically-prescribed manner.

1.       God’s purpose in creating man was to fill the earth with his image[1] and thereby to establish a kingdom of worshippers. Accomplishing this purpose involves entering into relationship with mankind, which initiates a process of redemption through sanctification that ends by restoring in man the divine image.[2] It is the expression of this image that yields the distinct culture of the heavenly kingdom.[3]

2.       God receives glory via the instrument of mankind[4] through the process of self-revelation and the satisfaction of human desire (which are just two ways of saying the same thing).[5]

3.       However, man is morally and intellectually separated from God. The fundamental obstacle to God’s purpose is man’s sin and finite intellect;[6] or, what is practically equivalent, God’s transcendence, i.e., his moral perfection and intellectual infinitude.[7]

4.       The ability to understand one another is a necessary prerequisite of two persons forming a genuine relationship.[8] This requirement has both moral and intellectual dimensions (as well as others). For example, man qua moral being cannot be reconciled to something it perceives as ugly or morally abject;[9] man qua intellectual being cannot be reconciled to something it perceives as logically incoherent; etc.[10]

5.       Therefore, God’s purpose can be only accomplished via either of two strategies: the glorification of man or the condescension of God.[11] These strategies enable relationship by making functional equals of fundamental non-equals.[12]

6.       God makes provision for man’s lack primarily by acts of condescension, or accommodation, and thereby enables genuine relationship with him. The Bible tells the story of God’s various attempts to solve the problem of man’s moral and intellectual separation from God via acts of accommodation. Examples of such attempts include creating man in a state of innocence, authoring and freely entering into a series of covenants and contracts, providing mediation through the priesthood and communicating through the prophets, sending Jesus into the world as the perfect representation of himself, and finally through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. By these means as well as others, God has rendered himself more or less intelligible to mankind throughout history.[13]

7.       In order to preserve the non-triviality of the doctrine of God’s transcendence, however, we should understand God’s accommodation of man to be only partial, even in its most progressive expressions.[14] That is to say, of the full set of propositions true of God and his purposes, he has disclosed only a portion of them to mankind.

8.       It is this subset of propositions, which we will call the canonical set, that provides the exclusive grounds upon which we can engage God and rightfully expect intelligibility of interaction.[15] Within these boundaries, however, we have every right, and indeed are morally required, to make claims on God based on the content of the canonical propositions. God, therefore, has definite obligations to mankind, and mankind to God, which are defined by certain (still unspecified) propositions of scripture.[16]

Corollary 1: Therefore, to resign a claim on God on the grounds of his transcendence, or our own moral or intellectual imperfection, is only legitimate on the grounds that one has stepped outside the fair boundaries of intelligible interaction, i.e., is attempting to exercise faith toward objects (e.g., claims or promises) not included among the canonical set.[17]

Corollary 2: The resignation of claims within these fair boundaries, however, is tantamount to faithlessness insofar as we have been given no other ground to justify abandoning our claim. In fact, Christians have a positive obligation to God to uphold these claims, because it is only by them that Christians are enabled to further the divine kingdom and thus accomplish the purpose for which he created us.[18] The claims and promises of scripture are the primary, if not exclusive, resource for spiritual development and godly living. By abandoning these claims, therefore, one is essentially opting out of participation in these projects. As I see it, it is this opting out, and not the reverse, that requires justification.

9.       God’s obligations to mankind are derivative, i.e., they are a radical expression of God’s freedom insofar as he can freely choose servitude as well as kingship.[19] God is bound to the terms of his contract with man in virtue of immutable facts about his nature.[20]

10.    Furthermore, God’s obligations come in both explicit and implicit varieties. God’s explicit obligations derive from the explicit content of the promises (especially if he himself defines the practical implications of the promise, as he does, e.g., in Deut. 28-30). God’s implicit obligations derive primarily from conventional norms of language use, especially conversational norms (e.g., those maxims that Grice derives from his Cooperation Principle).[21]

11.    The grounds upon which we (i.e., those of us living in the present) are invited to engage relationship with God are stated loosely in 2 Peter 1:3-4. Let us call this the presently standing offer. This verse states that there are promises by which man can define his expectations with respect to God, and that through such interactions, man can participate in the divine nature and guard himself from evil. It is exclusively within these boundaries that our exercise of faith is secure (faith always being faith in some particular object, e.g., a claim or promise).

12.    Roughly put, our interaction with God within this domain consists of various transactions in which we act in precursory belief that a particular outcome will result (our expectations being defined by the set of promises God has provided). Through a series of these transactions, we eventually acquire a general perception of God, either as faithful or faithless, loving or unloving, good or evil, etc. This perception of God that we acquire through the experience of seeking to engage him by these terms is the proper goal of the entire “faith-transaction” enterprise. It fulfills the purpose of self-revelation, which I ascribed to God in premise (2).

13.    Through our engagement in what I have called the “faith-transaction enterprise,” we will necessarily, as a matter of due course, determine whether or not the claims and promises of scripture are reliable and true. In fact, we are psychologically disposed (though perhaps not determined) to adapt our faith according to the quality of our experience in attempted engagement with God. This is because psychological habits, of which moral and religious habits are species, become reinforced or attenuated as a function of the associated impulses being rewarded (as by confirming experiences, which produce pleasure) or frustrated (as by disconfirming experiences, which produce pain).[22]

14.    Therefore, the exercise of faith has a retroactive potency to determine the reliability and (probable)[23] truth of scriptural promises and propositions. Although it is a sin to willfully “put God to the test,”[24] there is another sense in which to exercise faith just is to put God to the test.[25] What I mean by this is that the object of faith is to make divine revelation possible, i.e., to open oneself up to the possibility of knowing God[26], and one cannot possibly accomplish this goal without simultaneously ascertaining some information concerning the accurateness of the testimony one received of him compared to the perception one has acquired through experience.

15.    Therefore, Christianity is not only defeasible in theory, but the means to disconfirm it are means available even to sincere and committed Christians. In other words, the means that I propose make it possible to disconfirm Christianity are not means that it would be prohibited for the sincere Christian to employ (e.g., by such passages of scripture as Deut. 6:16) – on the contrary, it occurs via a process that is internal to sincere Christian practice itself, and so is completely unavoidable if one is exercising faith in the appropriate, biblically-prescribed manner.

---

[1] Gen. 1:27-28.

[2] See Rom. 8:10-11, 22-25; 2 Cor. 1:22; 2 Cor. 5:5; and 1 Pet. 1:3-7.

[3] See Ps. 34:8; Ps. 137; 2 Cor. 5:11-21; and Rom. 8:23.

[4] Is it morally and/or theologically problematic to cast God as creating mankind, and therefore valuing mankind, only for instrumental purposes? If so, is there any way around it? Consider, for example, the language of Romans 9:16-24? Consider also Isaiah 45:9-13 and Jeremiah 18. On the other hand, if we choose to affirm the contrary of this, i.e., that God values us intrinsically as ends in ourselves, this would seems to suggest that God has a lack that he needs us to fulfill. But this equally absurd.

[5] As John Piper writes, “God’s quest to be glorified and [man’s] quest to be satisfied reach their goal in this one experience: [man’s] delight in God which overflows in praise” (Desiring God, 53).

[6] “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant” (Col. 1:21-23). See also Rom. 5:10.

[7] “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Is. 55:8-9).

[8] As James writes, “[T]he only force of appeal to us, which either a living God or an abstract ideal order can wield, is found in the ‘everlasting ruby vaults’ of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive and not irresponsive to the claim. So far as they do feel it when made by a living consciousness, it is life answering to life” (The Will to Believe, 196; cf. Ps. 42:7). And also, “For a philosophy to succeed on a universal scale it must define the future congruously with our spontaneous powers. A philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but either of two defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance. First, its ultimate principle must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints our dearest desires and most cherished powers…[A] second and worse defect in a philosophy than that of contradicting our active propensities is to give them no object whatever to press against…Any philosophy which annihilates the validity of the reference by explaining away its object or translating them into terms of no emotional pertinency [sic], leaves the mind with little to care or act for” (The Will to Believe, 83).

[9] “Love can forbear, and Love can forgive…but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object…He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored” (Traherne, Centuries of Meditation, II, 30 quoted in The Problem of Pain, 28). See also Mill’s response to the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton in “An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy” (1865).

[10] That understanding God is not an entirely fantastic notion is evidenced by several passages of scripture, including Jeremiah 9:23-24, which reads, “This is what the Lord says: ‘Let not the wise boast of their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, 
that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,’ declares the Lord.” See also 1 Cor. 13:9-12.

[11] See John 3:16; Rom. 8:30 (“those he called he also glorified”); and Ps. 18:32-36 (“He stoops down to make me great”).

[12] Philip Yancey holds that love similarly, and perhaps in more perfect fashion, accomplishes this same result (see Disappointment with God, 103-104). Kierkegaard writes in this vein, “I am satisfied with a left-handed marriage in this life; faith is humble enough to insist on the right hand, for I do not deny that this is humility and will never deny it” (Fear and Trembling, 34).

[13] I think that we may apply a model of progressive revelation to the interpretation of these various events, understanding the events earlier in the series to be the least perfect and those later in the series to be the most perfect revelations of God’s nature and purposes. I think we should resist the temptation, however, to conclude that the incarnation, or even the subsequent sending of the Holy Spirit, is the most perfect revelation possible, despite certain passages of scripture that seem to affirm this (see, e.g., Heb. 1:1-3 and 1 Cor. 2:6-16). Adopting such a stance, however, fails to accommodate other passages, e.g., 1 Cor. 13:9-12, in which Paul explicitly states that our present knowledge is less perfect than it will be.

[14] “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13:9-12).

[15] “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom. 1:18-20).

“When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power. We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written: ‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, 
and what no human mind has conceived’ the things God has prepared for those who love him—these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:1-16).

[16] As Mill writes, “When a person, either by express promise or by conduct, has encouraged another to rely on his continuing to act in a certain way – to build expectations and calculations, and stake any part of his plan of life upon that supposition – a new series of moral obligations arises on his part towards that person, which may possibly be overruled, but cannot be ignored” (Mill 1859, 104; quoted in The Moral Animal, 360).

[17] I think Kierkegaard’s phrase “reckoning without a host” is apt to describe this type of behavior (see Training in Christianity, 172). An example of this behavior is found in Numbers 14 in which the Israelites are described as scorning God’s delimitation of the actions he will support by leading an attack on the inhabitants of the Promised Land, an attack in which they suffered a disastrous defeat.

[18] E.g., “I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night. You who call on the Lord, give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem and makes her the praise of the earth” (Is. 62:6-7; italics mine). See also Luke 18:1-8 and Matt 15:21-28.

[19] “[W]hoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:27-28; cf. Mark 10:43-44). See also John 13:1-17. Kierkegaard comments on these texts, “[S]urely Christ’s humiliation was not something which merely happened to Him (even though it was the sin of that generation that they crucified Him), something which happened to Him and perhaps would not have happened to Him in a better age. Christ Himself willed to be the humiliated and lowly one. Humiliation (the fact that it pleased God, to be the lowly man) is therefore something He Himself has joined together, something He wills to have knit together, a dialectical knot which no one shall presume to untie, which indeed no one can unite before He Himself has united it by coming again in glory…history must not incommode itself to do Him justice, nor must we with impious heedlessness fancy presumptuously that we know as a matter of course who He was…Woe to the generation that dared to say, Let now all the injustice He suffered by forgotten, history has now made manifest who He was and reinstated Him in His rights. By assuming that history is capable of doing this we put Christ’s humiliation in an accidental relation to Him….But if such is His royal will, and if only at His return will He show Himself in glory, and if He has not yet returned; and if no generation can contemplate without the compunction of repentance what that generation did to Him, with a sense of guilty participation - then woe to him who presumes to take His lowliness from Him, or to let it be forgot what injustice He suffered, decking Him fabulously in the human glory of the historical consequences, which is neither one thing nor the other.” (Training in Christianity, 29-30)

[20] “When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself, saying, ‘I will surely bless you and give you many descendants.’ And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised. People swear by someone greater than themselves, and the oath confirms what is said and puts an end to all argument. Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek” (Heb. 6:13-20).

[21] See H. P. Grice’s “Logic and Conversation” and Kent Bach’s “Conventional Implicature.” As Paul Ricouer of the University of Paris explains, “How can I speak of a lie without contrasting it with a true statement? And what about reality? How can I speak of an illusion without starting out from that? That means you have to start out from the basis of a true statement - make sure people can rely on your words. I think Derrida somewhere calls it the religious act par excellence: believing someone else’s word. And that’s the basis of all interaction. It’s the basis of a promise. Because a promise is not just any old act; it’s a fundamental act, because it’s based on three things: first, I am bound with respect to myself; second, I am bound with respect to the other person who is relying on me to keep my promise; and third, I am protecting the language as an institution and using it honestly. There are three partners in the promise: there’s me, there’s the other person, and there’s the language itself. So that, I would say, is the basis for trust” (quote taken from The Examined Life Introduction to Philosophy DVD Series).

An example of this principle in practice: Jesus can say amongst his disciples (assuming they are all in good health), “I am the great physician” without implicating anything about his present intentions to heal any of them (see John 11:21-27). However, if he were to speak the very same message in a room full of invalids (and especially if rumors of his healing powers preceded him), these words would necessarily imply that he had present intentions to heal, i.e., as a function of the needs and occurrent psychological biases of the audience, which determine their interpretation of his words. That audience would be justified in forming expectations of impending miracles (and therefore God would be genuinely obliged to perform them) in virtue of his responsibility to adhere to our conversational norms (see 2 Kings 4:8-37).

[22] Psychologist John Atkinson (1982) describes the mechanism at work here in the following manner: “If a certain kind of activity has been intrinsically satisfying or rewarded… , there will be an instigating force (F) for that activity. This will cause a more or less rapid increase in the strength of an inclination to engage in that activity, an action tendency (T), depending on the magnitude of the force. If a certain kind of activity has been frustrated or punished in the past, there will be an inhibitory force (I) and a more or less rapid growth in the strength of a disinclination to act or negaction tendency (N). This is a tendency not to do it. The duration of exposure to these forces…will determine how strong the action or negaction tendency becomes. The latter, the tendency not to do something, will produce resistance to the activity. It opposes, blocks, dampens, the action tendency. That is, it subtracts from the action tendency to determine the resultant action tendency… . The resultant action tendency competes with resultant action tendencies for other incompatible activities. The strongest of them is expressed in behavior” (quoted in Mele 1998, 26-27).

This principle also finds support in scripture (see, e.g., John 6:53-58, John 15:1-6) and is a necessary presupposition if we are to make tenable the claim that man can learn to discriminate truth about God from falsehood (cf. Matt. 13:11-12). To deny this premise is to affirm the claim that man can sustain genuine faith (faith, moreover that is spiritually and practically effectual) both in the complete absence of God (as in the case of God’s non-existence) as well as in the absence of God’s sustained provision (as in the case of God’s inactivity). If these are the only two options, I would argue that the burden of truth lies with those who deny this premise.

[23] It is true that no amount of experience is sufficient to guarantee the conclusion that scripture is true. The only kind of argument supported by empirical evidence – e.g., this present argument, which relies on our personal experience in attempted engagement with God by the terms defined in scripture – are inductive arguments. The conclusions they deliver, therefore, are at best probably true.

[24] See Deut. 6:16, Ps. 78:18, Matt. 4:7, etc.

[25] That these two claims are not necessarily incompatible is supported by such passages as Malachi 3:10-11 in which God tells the Israelites with regard to the practice of tithing, “Test me in this…and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.”

[26] It does this by providing markers to guide in the interpretation of one’s experiences, such that one can discriminate those genuine experiences of God from the “noise” of merely natural processes. This principle underlies the chronos/kairos distinction recognized by early Christians (as well as Christ, himself), chronos referring to the merely mechanical passage of time, kairos referring to providential events.