So we're left with an apparent detachment, which makes it easier to analyze all the various accounts of God's activity in people's lives, comparing and contrasting their confessions with those of others, which might lead us to any number of interesting conclusions about the nature of religion and belief. But what seems to be left out (conveniently?) is the voice of God speaking directly to us. Presenting us with the choice: believe or reject, act or do not act. The “voice of God” becomes an object of detached study, never the prophet Nathan standing before us saying, “You are the man!”

And doesn't that easily turn us into consumers as well? Eagerly devouring and digesting all the various religious confessions and theological viewpoints, churning out our educated theories, without ever having to face the choice, the demand, God's voice speaking directly and clearly to us, his eyes on us waiting for our answer?

Maybe that guy that asked about “theoblogs” had a point…

So we're left with an apparent detachment, which makes it easier to analyze all the various accounts of God's activity in people's lives, comparing and contrasting their confessions with those of others, which might lead us to any number of interesting conclusions about the nature of religion and belief. But what seems to be left out (conveniently?) is the voice of God speaking directly to us. Presenting us with the choice: believe or reject, act or do not act. The “voice of God” becomes an object of detached study, never the prophet Nathan standing before us saying, “You are the man!”

And doesn't that easily turn us into consumers as well? Eagerly devouring and digesting all the various religious confessions and theological viewpoints, churning out our educated theories, without ever having to face the choice, the demand, God's voice speaking directly and clearly to us, his eyes on us waiting for our answer?

Maybe that guy that asked about “theoblogs” had a point…

Don't you trust that the almighty God can get past screwed up filters and limited interpreting abilities (or even use them effectively) to actually meet and communicate with you in a clear and trustworthy way?

God is not my experience of God, and to place value on that experience is itself an act of faith and not an ontological claim.

That may or may not be satisfying. It may be a bunch of hooey. Heck — it might just be my interpretation. :)

A mother picks up her baby and moves it and feeds it and puts it to bed and the child doesn't know what to make of all that (having no framework yet to interpret it). Yet it's still real and the child is actually moved and cared for, and experiences that in some way. A good analogy, I think, for how God often interacts with us, even before we perceive or understand what is going on.

I'll be satisfied, Ted, if we can agree about the reality and trustworthiness of “an encounter with God,” God's Spirit working within us. It sounds to me like you don't trust it, since it's always filtered through so much of me and my culture, which seems to undermine the whole thing, making us dependent not on God but primarily on the tradition and community that shapes our filters (which are often screwed up). That's what seems to me to be rather “unedifying.”

But please correct me if I'm reading you wrong.

Okay, sorry. I took the DISQUS link…

“But that doesn't mean the actual experience itself must be interpreted (or mediated), does it?”

Actually, yes. But it might be more helpful to speak of contingency. I don't mean that a given experience comes to us in raw form but we can't do anything with it until it is interpreted (and thus are aware of the interpretive process). I mean that the experience never actually comes to us in raw form — it doesn't exist as such — because having a certain kind of experience is contingent upon our already having been formed and shaped as a particular kind of person, whether this formation is something we have cultivated actively or is merely a product of being born in a particular time and place.

The contemplative experience (and I'll stick with that, which could be a discrete event or a constellation of experiences that help to shape our perception of the world) is contingent in this way. Before we ever approach the cloud of unknowing, before we engage in centering prayer, before the Jesus Prayer leaves our lips, before we take up and read in lectio divina, before we pick up that first straw for the love of God, we have been formed as the kind of person who would do such a thing.

The contemplative experience is contingent upon those practices we engage in as a means of cultivating such experience, and contingent upon being the kind of person who places value on such an experience in the first place. How we understand the experiences that come out of those practices is formed and shaped by the contemplative tradition itself, which provides a frame within which we can understand the experience and without which such an experience might not come to us at all.

This formation, which can happen in a variety of ways but does not happen apart from the practices, habits, and modes of discourse that characterize the tradition, is why we understand this experience to be an experience of God — and not just God in the abstract, but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as revealed through Jesus Christ. We could narrate this experience differently, and even the fact that we might not think to do so is determined by our formation.

Contemplatives and mystics in other traditions have similar experiences that they interpret in light of their own traditions. We may or may not consider this to be the same as our experience, but we will do so on the basis of our relationship with our tradition.

If we conclude that this is irrelevant, that this experience only comes to the believer, then we are saying that it is contingent on our faithfulness and obedience, and what we consider faithfulness and obedience to be is formed and shaped by the particular way in which we relate to our tradition.

Our decision to use a particular theological language to narrate this experience, or to avoid language, is likewise shaped in this way.

I will go this far: I think there are experiences available to us that we would both narrate as an encounter with the living God, which you would understand as unmediated and I would not. 99 times out of 100, however, the conversation doesn't need to go there; I suspect most people would not find it edifying.

I'm not sure how you would understand my position. For me, the fact that you see the experience as unmediated is already an interpretation.