EXPERIENTIALISM IN THE CHURCH --
MONSTERS SERIES, PART 7

Exodus 19:1-22, 32:1-8 (NASB)
David Bruce Linn, Pastor-Teacher
27 August 2006
All Rights Reserved

A few weeks ago I was doing some study on the place of culture and art in the church and I ran across a word I had not seen in many years. When was the last time you heard or read the term "neo-orthodoxy"? It was not very long ago that neo-orthodoxy was portrayed as a great monster which was like a camel intruding its nose into the tent of the church. Evangelical sermons, books, and Bible studies consistently warned that if we let this monster into the tent we would lose the foundation of the church.

As a matter of record neo-orthodoxy was a movement among theologians in the first half of the twentieth century. Its argument was that, on the one hand, Protestant liberalism was barren and could not be used to nourish the soul. This has proved true as all of the mainline denominations which adopted it are in precipitous decline. The neo-orthodox argued that, on the other hand, conservative Biblical Christianity was not acceptable to intellectuals so they rejected that also. One reason you have not heard the term lately is that the solution neo-orthodoxy provided did not seem to be much help to the church and the historical movement waned.

But what about the central concept of neo-orthodoxy? Why is it not mentioned from evangelical pulpits? There are two possibilities. Either the monster went away or we have let it into the tent and are refusing to talk about it. The monster which was represented for a time as neo-orthodoxy is alive and well because we have indeed welcomed it into the tent of God's church. It flies under a name you will not have heard because, like a bad rash we are covering with attractive clothes, we are trying not to speak of it. And how dangerous is a monster which is not only attacking us, but does so under cover? Nothing is more dangerous, like a cancer which grows silently and painlessly until it has taken over and kills the patient.

Neo-orthodox theologians such as Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Rudolph Bultmann, and others developed a way to affirm the Bible enough to use it in worship for their own purposes. Their favorite explanation was that the Bible is not itself the word of God but contains the word of God. They would say that they worshiped the person of Christ not the Bible. Both of these are clever propaganda presentations of a deadly shift in spiritual authority in the church and in the believer. What they were doing was rejecting the Bible as an external, objective, independent spiritual authority for Christian faith and practice. This group of free-thinking intellectuals thought the Bible was like a straight jacket from which they had to free themselves while still desiring to use it for spiritual encouragement.

What they substituted for the Bible as the final authority in the church was the believer's experience of God through the word. The source of authority shifted from external to internal, from objective to subjective. Most of all, spiritual authority changed from being totally in the hands of an unmanageable God to being in the hands of the individual believer. In practice this means that the believer is not under authority at all. If his or her experience contradicts what God's word plainly states then neo-orthodoxy affirms every believer's right to follow what they feel they know in their hearts. This is how the West gets an entire denomination built on the acceptance of homosexual practice called the Metropolitan Church. It is how we get home Bible studies where the Bible is never studied. It is how we get entertainment routinely substituted for worship in many of our numerically largest churches.

The correct name for this monster is experientialism. Evangelicals today have not only embraced this beast but have kissed it on the lips. The placing of our experience above the plain words of God is not new and goes back to our first father and mother, Adam and Eve. Experientialism is as old as Moses and has never been more popular than it is today. I have tried to talk Christians out of divorce, out of adultery, out of gambling, out of substance abuse, out of wild spending, out of aborting their babies, and out of all sorts of Godless lifestyle choices. I rarely succeed because the entire West is experientialist in a non-reflective way. We hardly realize our experientialism. Arguments for the truth found in the word of God fall on increasingly deaf ears in the world and also the church. Nothing anyone can say can overcome the inward conviction of a person who is judging everything based on his or her experience.

1. EXPERIENTIALISM PROVIDES A FALSE INTERPRETATION OF REALITY

God gave the people of Israel a series of the most intense personal and group experiences designed to reveal himself to them. When Israel was captive in Egypt the Lord sent the plagues upon the Egyptians. This was designed to impact the national policy of Egypt, but think of how much it would have impacted Israel! God revealed himself with hail, frogs, water turned to blood, and finally the slaying of the firstborn throughout the land.

Then the Israelites fled, and as they got jammed between the Red Sea and the pursuing army of Egypt they saw the unthinkable miracle of the Lord creating a dry channel in the water through which they all passed. Then the Lord let the water return to its place just as the Egyptians were crossing the bottom of the sea in pursuit. Thus they found themselves en route to the promised land through the desert.

Immediately they were out of water, and the Lord turned bitter waters sweet for them to drink at Marah. They needed bread and the Lord provided manna. They needed meat and the Lord gave them quail. They grew thirsty again and the Lord provided water by having Moses strike a rock with a stick. They were attacked by the Amalekites and the Lord gave them victory as Moses held up his hands in supplication.

Some have said that experience itself is dangerous and so we should all simply live by our knowledge of sound doctrine. It is obvious by these examples from Israel's history that God is highly in favor of powerful experiences of his reality! He wants to give life-changing experiences to every believer. It is the wrong use of experience which gets us into trouble.

Then Israel came to the mountain at Sinai: "The LORD said to Moses, 'Behold, I will come to you in a thick cloud, so that the people may hear when I speak with you and may also believe in you forever.' Then Moses told the words of the people to the LORD. The LORD also said to Moses, 'Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments; and let them be ready for the third day, for on the third day the LORD will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. You shall set bounds for the people all around, saying, 'Beware that you do not go up on the mountain or touch the border of it; whoever touches the mountain shall surely be put to death. No hand shall touch him, but he shall surely be stoned or shot through; whether beast or man, he shall not live.' When the ram's horn sounds a long blast, they shall come up to the mountain.' So Moses went down from the mountain to the people and consecrated the people, and they washed their garments. He said to the people, 'Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman.' So it came about on the third day, when it was morning, that there were thunder and lightning flashes and a thick cloud upon the mountain and a very loud trumpet sound, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled. And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke because the LORD descended upon it in fire; and its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked violently. When the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and God answered him with thunder. The LORD came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain; and the LORD called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. Then the LORD spoke to Moses, 'Go down, warn the people, so that they do not break through to the LORD to gaze, and many of them perish. Also let the priests who come near to the LORD consecrate themselves, or else the LORD will break out against them'" (Exodus 19:9-22).

The whole point of this event was to give the Israelites a direct experience of God's holiness. He would reveal himself to Moses and speak to him in a cloud. The people were commanded to perform ritual purification which included washing their garments and abstaining from marital relations. The Lord descended on the top of Mount Sinai in fire and smoke, thunder and lightning flashes, and a loud trumpet. The people were strictly prohibited from even touching the mountain when the Lord came down upon it on pain of death. All this was to impress upon them the holiness of the Lord by immediate experience.

Most of us have the impression that if we were to have experiences like this that our commitment to Christ would skyrocket. We've been told by a number of influential books that people who do not yet believe in Christ would do so if they were able to have a powerful experience of God's reality. But the story of how all these remarkable experiences impacted the people of Israel is very different. In a short period of time, while Moses was still up on Mount Sinai receiving the Law, these same people made an idol for themselves in the shape of a calf and began worshiping it.

How was it possible for them go from one extreme to another, especially with so many confirming experiences? We see similar things in the church today. A large proportion of kids who grow up in evangelical churches have sex before they graduate high school. Divorce is becoming a plague among us. The reason that people with strong experiences of God can flip flop on their commitments is that reality is not self-interpreting. We do not necessarily get the truth even when we have had direct experience of true things. For example, mere observation of creation could lead one to make a valid yet contradictory deductions of theism, pantheism, or panentheism. That is why we need to be taught the truth by the Lord about what we are experiencing so that we do not come to false conclusions.

The insidiousness of experientialism is that two people could be worshiping God side by side, doing and saying all the same things, yet one of them is responding to the objective truth of God as revealed in the word and the other is responding to their experience of the word. The first one will stand and the second will fall, though it may take some time. Experience, when it is made the authority rather than God and his word becomes experientialism. This is the predominant authority structure of Western society today, and probably the average Christian.

2. EXPERIENTIALISM DIMINISHES THE WORD OF GOD

Israel is a prime example of how experientialism diminishes the word of God among God's people. If our experience is going well we will affirm what God is saying and if it is not we are very likely to jettison his word. The beginning of Exodus 19 shows Israel feeling pretty good about being delivered from slavery and fed by God in the desert, so they are amenable to the word: "In the third month after the sons of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that very day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. When they set out from Rephidim, they came to the wilderness of Sinai and camped in the wilderness; and there Israel camped in front of the mountain. Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain, saying, 'Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the sons of Israel: 'You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings, and brought you to Myself. Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine; and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' These are the words that you shall speak to the sons of Israel.' So Moses came and called the elders of the people, and set before them all these words which the LORD had commanded him. All the people answered together and said, 'All that the LORD has spoken we will do!' And Moses brought back the words of the people to the LORD" (Exodus 19:1-8).

The reason I see Israel's excellent expression of faithfulness as evidence of experientialism is that they had no history of acting this way in the past. Its sheer overstatement is a warning sign, and as we shall see it took about a month for this same group of people to plunge back into idolatry.

We need to remember that reality and truth are two different things. Reality is the beingness of things, or ontology. Truth is a function of our understanding of things, or epistemology. Truth must be expressed in propositions or statements using language. Reality, on the other hand, just exists. Reality is not self-interpreting. That is why billions of people can observe themselves and others and fail to conclude that all human beings are sinners. We need to be told that we are sinners by an objective source of truth which is outside us.

Experientialism comes in when someone says: "I'll accept the idea that I'm a sinner as long as my association with Christ seems to be working out for me." That is a person who has not accepted the authority of God's word, but only his or her experience of the word. That person is effectively neo-orthodox. Experientialism also feeds pragmatism. If the plain truth of God's word will not fill churches then we must cover it up, delete some of it, or pretend it is not there. We then invite people to connect with the church based on experiences we have crafted for them, and we have effectively cut the power of God's truth to their souls. Nobody overcomes sin based upon their subjective experiences of anything. This should be a sobering word to all those who are engaged in shaping the church for ministry to postmodern people.

3. EXPERIENTIALISM IS A MISLEADING GUIDE TO BEHAVIOR

Finally, we left Israel promising to follow the word of God to the letter and receiving a powerful experience of God's holiness as his smoke and fire came down upon Mount Sinai. Here's what happened next: "Now when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people assembled about Aaron and said to him, 'Come, make us a god who will go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.' Aaron said to them, 'Tear off the gold rings which are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.' Then all the people tore off the gold rings which were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. He took this from their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool and made it into a molten calf; and they said, 'This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.' Now when Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made a proclamation and said, 'Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD.' So the next day they rose early and offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play" (Exodus 32:1-6).

Experientialism is a misleading guide to behavior, like a map with the roads wrongly placed upon it. Forgetting all that God had already done for them, Israel's immediate experience told them that Moses was taking too long, that life was not fulfilling following this God of Abraham, and that they could enjoy all sorts of pleasures if they turned to idol worship. So they built a golden calf, they feasted, and they got drunk. The Hebrew for "rose up to play" has a connotation of sexual immorality used for entertainment in this context.

They turned immediately to idolatry because experience, when disconnected from thoughtful faith, is mercurial, shifty, and unreliable. The greatest experience of God cannot instill faith in an idle mind. Jesus said that even if someone rises from the dead people will not believe him about the truth of the afterlife. He insisted that the word of God as represented in the teaching of Moses was adequate to bring any person to faith and salvation (see Luke 16:30-31).

Every church must use methods of ministry, pictures, stories, events, and writings to help people understand and receive the word of God. But for many churches today, those helps have become the point rather than the word. We have appealed to people by manipulating their experiences, and when they make poor choices based on their experience we wonder why.

I invite every one of us to dethrone our experiences and to embrace the pure word of God as the sole standard of our faith and practice. Ask God to show you where you are being tempted to make your experience your authority. Every desire to override or bypass the straightforward guidance of the word of God is the monster of experientialism calling your name. The monster waits just over the line from creative use of culture in the church. Let the church repent of manipulating people by experiences. On a personal level, I invite you to take a sheet of paper and list the opinions where you just know you are right, no matter what anyone says--even God! Then repent of them all, and decide that you are going to accept what the Bible says. If you do not yet trust in Christ, know that only the word of God found in the Bible can tell you how to be saved.

[clip from 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, 0:36:32 to 0:44:35]