Abstract
This is a very readable and useful book for anyone interested in debates about the evidential force of claimed religious experiences. It is particularly good when analysing arguments for and against a particular position, employing plenty of scholarship and quotations that would be very helpful for anyone teaching this particular topic as part of a philosophy of religion course. It is particularly useful perhaps for people from an Evangelical background, as there is a whole chapter (chapter 4) on John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, reflecting the author’s role at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The reasoned approach of this book, however, places it firmly under philosophy and apologetics, and it is readily accessible to someone from any Christian tradition and beyond. It makes measured claims for the status of religious experiences, which place it firmly in the line of thought coming from Richard Swinburne, Caroline Franks Davis and William Alston: the ‘critical-trust approach’. The author is clearly not one to be swayed by ‘enthusiasm’ too much himself. The book is excellent in its summaries of the views of the great names in the panoply of the literature surrounding religious experiences: William James and Rudolf Otto are judiciously surveyed, along with nearly all the more recent commentators who address the place of religious experience in belief: Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Walter Stace, Steven Katz, John Hick and Keith Yandell, to whom the author is indebted. Again, it is also particularly good in examining the role of the Holy Spirit in the Evangelical tradition, to which the argument keeps returning.
A brief overview of the chapters, also usefully outlined in the introduction itself, shows the pattern of argument running through the book. Chapter 1 clarifies the notions of ‘religion’ and ‘experience’, and works with the view that ‘it will be adequate to think of religious experiences broadly as experiences that seem to the subject, and perhaps also to other observers, to have religious or spiritual significance’. The primary interest is with theistic experiences, and the consequent focus is on the monotheistic religions that have God as creator. There is however, little about Islam, and what there is mentions visions of Jesus in converts (p. 247), and Judaism only appears with regard to Old Testament examples, which shows that nearly everyone working on the philosophical problem of religious experiences is working within a broadly Christian framework. Chapter 2 examines the inevitable role of interpretation of experiences, ‘ascribing meaning and significance to something in light of what we already accept’ (p. 50) which clearly raises the issue of different background beliefs and different religions according to the detail or ‘ramification’. Netland carefully elaborates how essential the truth value of background beliefs are and goes on to discuss miracles, cognitive science, nature and ‘experiencing-as’ by John Hick, adapting Wittgenstein. These point to Chapter 7 and the role of epistemology and natural theology. Here, Netland clearly recognizes the value of natural theology and offers a very brief survey of one particular reading of Aquinas as suggesting a demonstrative deductive argument for God’s existence. Possibly Herbert McCabe’s updating of this in ‘God Matters’ would be more fruitful, in the light of the Russell-Copleston debate and the puzzle as to why there is anything at all, which is clearly a reasonable question posed for us by the existence of anything you care to name. Netland himself moves on to the consensus gentium and fulfilled expectations arguments, indicating a cumulative case for Christian theism, very much on the lines of Richard Swinburne or Caroline Franks Davis.
The final sentence in the previous chapter on mysticism (Chapter 6) points to, but does not execute, something that anyone who has engaged with the life and work of Teresa of Avila or Julian of Norwich or the Rhineland mystics might ask: what place do these remarkable visionary works play in the Christian life, ‘as though being a contemplative were also something to be attained’ as Thomas Merton once scathingly put it. But it is a pertinent question: if we read spiritual or mystical literature, what precisely is its part in the ordinary life of a Christian? For this is the greatest gap in all the philosophical work on the role of religious experience – they tend to deal with extraordinary, individual encounters beyond the sacramental experience of baptism, reconciliation, the Eucharist or anointing of the sick. Yet there are those who would perhaps find there the most moving encounters with the divine in the human. Furthermore, the Thomist tradition of ground-clearing rational argument among the preambula fidei, or the subtle thought of St John Henry Newman in the Grammar of Assent, are absent from many of the analyses of religious experience, yet these are still relevant for approaches to the divine based on ‘experience’ in the widest sense of the term. As has been mentioned there is a far too cursory sweep of natural theology in the final chapter of this book, particularly given the significance of the context in a ‘doxastic practice’ in which veridical experiences may arise. There is a strong teaching in the Catholic Catechism that the existence of God can indeed be shown through reason alone as St Paul seems to affirm in Romans. However much of this reasoning is based on what can be shown through sense observation and questioning of external reality, not an inward and largely individual perceptual experiencing, which remains a weaker form of argument, even if perfectly valid as part of the Christian life. This is in fact pretty much the conclusion of the book. Another point made in the conclusion of the book is that far more (empirical?) research needs to be done on experiences themselves rather than the philosophical problems associated with purported experiences. This book does indeed offer another overview of the literature associated with religious experiences, when there is need, as the book itself admits, for more painstaking work on experiences themselves, perhaps a bit like the detailed local historical work completed to great effect by revisionist historians of the Reformation period in England, for example, which has begun to completely undermine a particular narrative of the corruption of the late medieval Church. There is one spectacular example in the book of a particular experience of the congregation as a whole in a Pentecostal Church in Oakland California, in which a Mrs Lucero who was describing a vision of Jesus actually seems to have become Jesus in appearance to the 200 or so people, and this was filmed; ‘this remarkable event raises many issues that we cannot pursue here’ comments Netland (p.58). Extraordinary indeed, but I hoped for some analysis at least of this remarkable event, by an expert in religious experiences. This was the only point at which I felt something had been evaded, and there must be still a market for a book which really does analyse individual accounts in more detail.
For most people in the UK there have been centuries of life without all seven sacraments, and this has admittedly given rise to all kinds of forms of life many of which are now only loosely connected with a Christian inheritance. Within this number only a few perhaps now still engage wholeheartedly with the Evangelical approach very much rooted in sola scriptura and personal experience, half a millennium after Luther. Within and outside this number however it is very likely that experiences which could be called religious continue to take place. Both of these still have something to contribute to an understanding of the Christian life, as this book makes plain with a good degree of plausibility.