Quote Originally Posted by Jet View Post
Hi everyone. I'm new to the forum, and hope that I'm able to articulate my words adequately.

I'd like to focus on the pillar of Experience, since it's apparently the least popular...

We cannot exist outside of our experiences. The way we see the world is tinted by the experiences we've had (this is called bias). When we swear our allegiance to Christ, he does not magically take away our biases. Through intentional practice, we can lessen our biases, but we'll never completely be free of them.

Therefore we ascribe to some sort of Christian lifestyle because we've experienced it to be good and true. Hopefully none of us are Christians merely because our father and his father were Christians, but because we've experienced God directly or indirectly.

I'm claiming that experience is the beginning of our faith, and continues to build our faith.

Sometimes how we interpret scripture does not match our experience of life, of reality. This is where most of us would chime in to say, "we must regard scripture's version as more authoritative, and submit our experience."

But it is not that simple. It is common practice to confuse "what God said" with how we interpret "what God said." And we interpret "what God said" using the lens of our experiences. That is, we're biased in how we read scripture. So those of us who say, "well I just believe what the Bible says," seem to be in denial that they have the propensity to read their own biases into scripture. ...in fact, it would take an act of God for them to be mistaken ("The ONLY way that you can have legitimate authority to mitigate what God stated is to find a direct statement when [God] said 'Oopsie! I really did not mean that.'".

Back to Experience not matching Interpretation of Scripture... luckily we have Tradition to help us. Often our experience does not match our interpretation of scripture until we see how this person or that church lived out the scripture, and then our experiences allow for the interpretation. But this is a beautiful picture of the Quadrilateral balancing itself.

Without a balance, people will claim the Bible means something it doesn't, and then even if it defies our experiences, there's no check for the claim. It is common throughout history for widely-accepted interpretation of scripture to change because so many's experience with reality did not match the interpretation (for instance, the issue of slavery).

Another reason I hold Experience so dear is that Biblical characters commonly base their lifestyles of faith on it. From Abraham to John, it is their experience of the living God that shapes their life (and no doubt their interpretation of scripture). Jesus says, "blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God." A heart is purified through experiences of conviction, practice, patience, repentance, earnestness, sincerity, diligence... If closeness to God is closeness to truth, we cannot discount the pillar of Experience, for it is a vital means of pursuing truth.
This is a very interesting post. There is some gems.

I agree with you that the cognitive experience, the culture, nationality, ethnicity, genealogy, political and sociological environment, and our own structured philosophy of life can distort our perception.

Truly, Christians living in United States, or in Canada, or in India, or in China, or in Japan, or in Ethiopia are not the same. Christians living in the modern time are not even alike to those who were living in the Middle Ages, or during the Renaissance. There is even generational distinctions throughout the centuries.

Trinity