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Spiritual Experiences and Truth

Posted by Theresa on July 31st, 2006 filed in Believe It or Not, Sense and Goodness

I have a friend that has gone from being a “Jesus is the only way” Christian to being a bit more open. She would not tell this to anybody in her church, but she now says that maybe Jesus isn’t the only way to heaven, but He is my way.

One of the things that has her convinced that Christianity is indeed true is because of the spiritual experience she had when she accepted Jesus. How do you explain away something like that? Look at this from the book Sense and Goodness:

Spiritual Experiences

“Since any telltale sign of a spiritual experience can also be found in hallucinations and other mundane phenomena, the are useless by themselves for indicating whether an experience can rightly be regarded as granting access to a profound religious truth.

It is vain to appeal to how a spiritual experience transforms someone’s life as a ‘proof’ that religion is true. Life transformation results whenever anyone pays more attention to an ideal than they do to the details of life, it happens whenever anyone has a natural emotional experience - be it Taoist, Buddhist, Kamikaze pilots, Islamic suicide bombers, or Born Again Christians or Kabbalah Jews.

Thus, the transformational power of religion is no indication of its truth, but rather of a universal human longing for a loving society where we can experience happiness and purpose.”

The truth is that many, many religious people from many, many religions experience spiritual transformations. It is not unique to becoming a Christian. Does that mean her experience wasn’t real? No, I am sure it was, but it shouldn’t be used as a marker as to why she believes Christianity is true.

Here is something odd, but true. A few years ago we went to the 5th Avenue Theater to participate in the Sing-Along Sound of Music. The theater plays the movie with the song lyrics on the screen so everybody can sing along. Here we were in a theater with well over a thousand people singing The Sound of Music. It was great. And I experienced the same type of elation I used to experience during the worship part of our church service.

Emotions and emotional experiences do not make something true, otherwise I might be a Soundamusician . If emotional and spiritual experiences make something true, then all religions have the capacity to be true. If that is the case, then what is the Truth? Is it possible that there isn’t one?