Experience as a component of theology is, I think, the grounding factor. The places, the spaces, the faces of any life, both as an individual or as a part of one’s total historicity will ultimately alter any source or tradition.
It has always been interesting to me to hear persons appeal to their experience in stating their point of view: “Live long enough and you will know!” “I’m not telling you what I read, I’m telling you what I know!” “I’ve been all over the world and I’ve seen it time and time again!” The appeals to… experience.
My mother’s sister, Mama Lodie, with only a junior high school level education to speak of, was one of the smartest and more rationally, logically knowledgeable women I have known in my lifetime. She called it ‘common sense’. My mother’s brother, Uncle Buddy taught me to play a card game called ‘Coon’ when I was very young. He said, among other things, “cooning and schooling”. Later in my life while riding Amtrak between New York and Atlanta, I met a man in the club car who will never forget that I ‘cooned him’ the entire trip while folks watched and marveled! Experience really is the best teacher.
The experience question must include the ‘human predicament’ which has as a vital part the fact of our experiencing the world from ‘inside out’. The individual, ‘I am’ IS the center of the universe —in that we are stuck in this body. We see ‘out’ of our eyes (at best those things in front of me, never behind my back). The event is real for me ONLY IF ‘I am’ PRESENT! It is no small thing that the very first criteria for faith, as Jesus puts it, “If anyone would come after me… deny self…” Critical to The Experience with God.
Experience is it’s own knowledge base. To be sure it is the PARTICIPATION in the event, the exposure, the involvement that determines the knowledge or skill gained in the experience. When you consider the fact that the African’s birthright as American was defined in a context where education was outlawed, the assimilation of culture was only by experience.
Psychology, as a discipline, determines that our earliest experiences of childhood has shaped our character in many ways. Hardships and trauma, adventures and adversity… whether meant for good or evil, become the ‘fabric of our lives’ that makes for the quilt of, not just what we think, and say, and do, but, WHO we are in thought and word and deed. As life progresses and traditional experiences known and unknown and paths followed from culture and society —education, love, marriage the binding together of two lives with yet unknown experience that has the ability to ‘hide experience’ until it boils to surface and demands a reconing with —experience.
The Academics of Theology; and Philosophy as “The Queen of Sciences”, pales against Life Experience. Religious and Cultural InDOCTRIN(e)NATION provides the ‘Gang mentality’ that challenges a mind dilemma: do we trust our own experience or exchange it for the mentality of our ‘gang’? The majority of White America has good and healthy relationships with Black Americans in their personal lives. But when the “Gangs all here”… Racism provides a whole other… Experience. We live in an America that has emerged GODLESS; in that the THE ONE, THE MOST HIGHest OF ALL gods) CANNOT BE SEEN because of the SWIFTLY Changing number of “gods”; even, the emergence of individuals who have, (as the Last Poets proclaimed) “A god Complex”.
Even with a separatism of ‘THEISM’ (church), and thoughts and allegiances for RULING SYSTEMS (state), there gives rise to the most Confused and Blurred Lines that exist in the American Psyche; in that the TRUE system of government is no longer definitive or identifiable. No better with each of the “-isms” that you experience, named as well as those unnamed (LGBTQism as it has such a fierce belief system operating as a FORCE against even the Nation’s “Value System”, which, in and of itself has drastically re-defined the “Moral System” or lack thereof; have a role “in the heads” of this ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’.
The value of experience is now being recognized by Colleges and Universities in their offering of credits and programs in Life Experience. We not only experience life mentally and physically, but also emotionally and spiritually.
No discussion of experience in the context of systematic theology could be complete without an introduction to the work of Paul Tillich. He identifies two poles which he sees that theology must move back and forth between: eternal truth and temporal situation. It is the creative interpretation of experience that is critical.
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