Religious Experience in Christianity and Islam

“I suspect that, save by God’s direct miracle, spiritual experience can never abide introspection.” 

(C. S. Lewis, "Transposition", The Weight of Glory, 82-83)

  This semester I've had the real pleasure of taking a course that has been insightful and refreshing in both the readings and the class time. As a class, we're being guided through Jonathan Edwards, al-Ghazali, and William James - a Puritan Christian, a Sufi Muslim, and a psychologist-philosopher from different centuries - all of whom are deeply concerned about the nature and reality of religious experience. These authors have been supplemented by many others from within those different traditions of thought, and it has been intellectually and spiritually enriching. The course name is "Religious Experience in Christianity and Islam", and it's the first offering from ISRME. 

 As is normal, a great part of the richness of the course is in the fellow students (including Bethany!) and the interaction with the teacher. With a breadth of experience spanning the continents and wide variety of backgrounds and expertises, the class discussion supplements the direct instruction fabulously. What I share below comes from all this richness. 

“That, without being discouraged on account of our sins, we should pray for His grace with a perfect confidence, as relying upon the infinite merits of our LORD JESUS CHRIST.” 

Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God (Kindle Locations 110-111).

Ingrid Mattson's talk on Islamic daily prayer is beautiful and far more relatable than what most Westerners or Protestants might expect of a 'ritual'. It's well worth watching. Personally, I imagine the closest thing many Protestants may have experienced would be congregational singing.

Speaking of singing...

“…the duty of singing praises to God seems to be appointed wholly to excite and express religious affections. No other reason can be assigned why we should express ourselves to God in verse, rather than in prose, and do it with music but only, that such is our nature and frame, that these things have a tendency to move our affections.” (Edwards, Religious Affections, Part 1)

 On the topic of the 'evil eye', compare 1 Samuel 18:8-9 in the NASB or HCSB’s footnotes, plus this link on Biblegateway with Schimmel's comments below about it being in the Kur'an and the hadith.

"The belief in the Evil Eye, which probably belongs among the most ancient concepts in human history, is based, among the Muslims, on Sura 68:51ff., [...] And Bukhari..."

 (Annemarie Schimmel, Deciphering the Signs of God, 91)

On the nature of true fellowship and the Lord's Supper...

And in this respect, the Eucharist is just a macrocosm of what the church is called to be as the new humanity: a community that gathers, irrespective of preferences, tastes, class, or ethnicity, in order to pursue a common good. I often tell my children that one of the reasons we go to church is to learn to love people we don’t really like that much—people we find irritating, odd, and who grate on our nerves (the feeling’s certainly mutual, I’m sure!) 

 

[7 pages later] 

 

"[With these friends] We commiserate with one another about the burdens of parenting and share the joys of the same. We’ve mourned together, been frustrated together, worked through tensions with each other, confided in one another. When we were going through struggles “at church,” in our community of gathered worship, this Wednesday night table was a refreshing and welcome “table in the wilderness.” It has been nothing short of a shadow Eucharist, a veritable extension of the Lord’s Supper. "

(James Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, ch 5, bold emphasis added)

 

On marriage and family...

“Thus Schmemann admonishes, “A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not ‘die to itself’ that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage. The real sin of marriage today is not adultery or lack of ‘adjustment’ or ‘mental cruelty.’ It is the idolization of the family itself, the refusal to understand marriage as directed toward the Kingdom of God”

As Schmemann laments, “It is not the lack of respect for the family, it is the idolization of the family that breaks the modern family so easily, making divorce its almost natural shadow. It is the identification of marriage with happiness and the refusal to accept the cross in it” (For the Life of the World, 90).” 

(James Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, ch 5, footnotes 71 & 73, bold emphasis added)

 “A Christian cannot do without the imagination because Scripture is full of things beyond our present experience.” 

(Midgley, "Meditating for a Change: Embracing a Lost Art," 27)

 The Bible Project's series on "Spiritual Beings" was really helpful in understanding a more integrated view of the biblical spiritual realm. Their presentation does not present opposing views, but it does a good job setting forth a particular view that is credible. (It also has supporting notes.)