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Below is a dialogue from a class on Spiritual Formation that I'm taking online for school. At the heart of the discussion is the important of grace on our spiritual lives. At the root of this dialogue is whether its more important to know about grace or experience grace. I'm going to post the dialogue below just so you guys can see the frustrations that I experience at school on a regular basis. What is quoted in this section is the dialogue between my classmates and I. It is a response (and essentially a critique) of my original writing in the class. Its kind of long, but I have to share it. Alot of my discussion, I robbed from Robert Webber's book, The Younger Evangelicals. Jerry Coleman writes: If experincing grace was the key, there would be no "great Commision" Can I exept Christ before I know of Him? If grace is revealed without knowledge, why have missionaries? Does not the bible teach, how shall they know unless, unless what? A preacher tells them!Then they can make a choice to recieve God's grace......I do not say you have to understand every jot and title, but if you do not know its there how in the world can you accept it? The going to an ocean and jumping in, is not a very good example here, as I see the ocean before I jump in, Gods grace is not visable, I therefore must know its there to experence it.....now if what you are saying is that the experiencing of His grace is better than the knowledge of it. I would agree with you. It is sweeter. But I tell you this,WITH OUT KNOWLEDGE, YOU WOULD NOT EXPEREINCE IT. That is this side of a 5 point Calvinst. Me: Up until the Reformation, spiritual formation was based on experience. Experience with life, experience with our communities, experience with our world. In this interaction (I'll use the word interaction interchangeably with experience) the emphasis in learning was not placed solely on knowledge of grace, but on experience and interaction with grace. With the Reformation and the invention of the Gutenberg Press spiritual formation shifted from participating in the community - to learning doctrine from printed material that could be examined and affirmed intellectually. With Luther's 95 Theses faith moved from experiencing grace through works of art, conversations, friendships, communities, architecture, and images and instead it moved toward confessions, hymns, and sermons - words to be studied, analyzed, believed, and confessed. Our spiritual formation became more about the knowledge of grace than the experience of grace. Now obviously at the eve of the Reformation there was a great abuse of certain powers. However, from Moses until circa 1400 AD, spiritual formation was based highly on this interaction with grace. THE CONTENT (THE KNOWLEDGE) OF GRACE IS MUCH MORE THAN AN INTELLECTUAL APPREHENSION. IT IS AN EXPERIENCE OF GRACE THAT HAS TAKEN UP RESIDENCE WITHIN A PERSON AND TRANSFORMED THAT PERSON INTO THE IMAGE OF THE CONTENT (THE KNOWLEDGE). In this way, it is much more than a person understanding and accepting the knowledge of grace. It is about an interaction with grace that is grounded in knowledge. For me my experience illuminates my knowledge. The more I experience God's grace, the more I understand it. I'm 22 years old though. The younger generation thinks more like people did before the Enlightenment. We care less about rational, defendable knowledge and more about our interaction with God and His grace. For some of you on here, I'm sure your knowledge illuminates your experience. The more you know about God, the more you experience Him. That's not wrong. It's just the lens with which you see God. The problem with us is that we have a cultural lens that is so engrained in modern (by modern, I mean the way of seeing the world since the Enlightenment period until present) thinking. We grew up after the Enlightenment. We see rational knowledge as the chief end. If God doesn't make sense, we come up with some theology that will make it all make sense. If we don't understand something, we make up something that makes it understandable. We're really, really uncomfortable with not knowing everything and not understanding all the "ins and outs" of how God works. We have such perfect, closed doctrine that elevates us out of our fallible, ignorant state to the platform of all-knowing humans (or at least we think). We rob God of all mystery. Of all experience. We see the world through this lens. Because of this, any type of thinking that goes back to a premodern or postmodern way of thinking is seen as heresy, when in reality it may be a little closer to the truth that we seek after. I do not reject the Word. I do not reject the knowledge of it. I do however reject the knowledge of it without an interaction with it. Just as experience is void without knowledge, so knowledge is void without an experience. If I don't keep this in mind, I'll have a full mind and an empty heart. Plato once wrote, and granted he's not a great Southern Baptist evangelist, preacher, or expositor, but he wrote something that I think fits in perfectly with what we're discussing. He said . . . "Experience makes truth splendid." And to me, that makes perfect sense. Chris Fleming wrote: ...you're on to something many of our "Southern Baptist evangelists and preachers" overlook. I think it's absolutely tragic that so many of our Church leaders today try so hard to "make God make sense." Consequently they create all kinds of non-Scriptural doctrine to support their "opinions" (the way thay think things should be done; i.e. Worship, Order of Service, etc.). They almost totally deny the Holy Spirit room to operate. Well said. Chris Me {quote} "Consequently they create all kinds of non-Scriptural doctrine to support their "opinions" (the way thay think things should be done; i.e. Worship, Order of Service, etc.). They almost totally deny the Holy Spirit room to operate." Exactly! And in doing so they set up their doctrine in an almost idolatrous way. If you took some of the core doctrines that we believed and took them away from us, our whole faith would fall into shambles. I'm scared to death to see what some pastors are going to do in heaven when the God that they created in their minds with their doctrine and explanations doesn't turn out to be the same way that they defined Him. What if God really does operate the way a Calvinist thinks He does? Would an Armenian still have faith in God? Or vice versa. What if God is really a Pentecostal Protestant who speaks in tongues? Would a good Southern Baptist preacher sitll have faith in God? This could be said of any denomination. We have God so "pegged" as to who He is and how He acts that we leave no room for error. And if there is an error in our theology, then the chairs our kicked out from under our faith. Because God isn't the way I want Him to be. Idolatrous. Thats all it is. Setting up God in our image. William Herndon writes: It is true that we should not put God into our own little boxes to fit what we believe. God is greater than our finite minds can comprehend. However, the illustration of what we will do when we get to heaven is not a good one. When we get to heaven none of the arguments we get into here on earth will matter. There will not be teachers of the Word, because we will be with God who knows all, and he will reveal the mysteries to us. I understand that was just an illustration to help make your point and I am not trying to jump in the middle of all this back and forth, in fact I have purposely avoided it. God is far greater beyond our imagination and understanding. God Bless. William Jerry Coleman writes: I did not mean to be offensive in my last reply to you Josh. I was trying to make a point, that the difference between us, is that if you put expereince before knowledge, you bring in outside revelation. I have never heard of anyone being saved that had never heard the gospel....If you have please tell me about it. Before the full cannon of the bible, Yes God did work that way, but after He does not. We have all the knowledge and revelation we need in the bible..So in reformation times you are correct, but we are not in that same time, nor can we be, we have the Bible. Now if you want to believe that God is still in the revelation business, that your perogitive, it just that I dont believe that He is. So if I experience God's grace with out knowledge of it, I got it without choice, because I did not know it was there. Then Yes you are leaving my doctrines, but yes that still is your perogitive to believe so. But this is true if it is today, yesterday or tomorrow. It's not going to change, if I did not have knowledge of it, then I did not choose to recieve it. Can the experience of God's grace make me want to know Him in a deeper relationship? Yes it can. All I am trying to show you is that knowledge comes first. Or should I say the knowledge either comes first....or my experience is not by my choice. I believe that man has a free will to choose. Me: I wasn't offended by your comment Mr. Coleman. I was just saying that the comment could have come off offensive to those who are more Reformed in thinking. And I agree with Eli that this conversation is monotonous considering all the progress we've made in one direction or the other the last few days (sarcastic). :) We can say its about God choosing us or us choosing Him. You can boil it down to alot of different things. But I believe, that at the core of our different beliefs on this subject is an issue of age. We think differently because of our different generations. I don't think your approach is wrong. You think about and view God from a modern lens. I don't think my approach is wrong. I think about and view God from a postmodern lens. Augustine and Thomas Aquanis thought about and viewed God from a medieval lens. The early apostles and the early church fathers viewed God from an ancient/premodern lens. We've all grown up in different cultures, different time periods that shape our way of thinking. The point is to connect with God on a plain that supercedes are ways of thinking, whether ancient, medieval, modern, or postmodern. The problem with us is that we think like Western, white, middle-class, suburban, democratic, modern, individualistic, and consumeristic people. Well amazingly this way of thinking has only been around for about 300 years. And in only a couple of countries on the Earth. Everybody else throughout time and even in the present in countries that aren't permeated by Western thought, don't think like this and approach God like this. And I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but there are alot of us "younger evangelicals" out here, attempting to deconstruct that mode of thinking. Only up until the last 300 years or so have we tried to reduce God to rational, explainable, propositional truth. The gospel of grace is the story of God told from His perspective, to His glory. Only God is bigger than the Gospel. At first it sounds like a foolish paradoxical mystery. And so we try to make it sound more believeable and sane. It is not. The Gospel is neither rational or irrational, but it supercedes those generic categories. I say all of that to say that God is interested in extending grace and peace to our lives. For you, God is going to extend His grace and peace to your life which is grounded in modern thought, that has been around since the Enlightenment. For me, God is going to extend His grace and peace to my life which is grounded in postmodern thought, that has only been around for the past 30 years. For Augustine and the church fathers, God extended his grace and peace to their life which was grounded in premodern or ancient thought, that was around for 1500 years. For me, God chose me. I didn't choose Him. He initiated it all and offered me free will in the process. But He initiated it. For 16 years of my life, I grew up in church and had knowledge about grace. Not once during this period did I ever experience grace. Then at the age of 16, God initiated contact with me and opened my eyes. For the first time I experienced grace. That illuminated all of my knowledge. Thats a part of my journey. Its not outside revelation. I'm not Mormon or in some type of cult. I just encountered God in a different way than You. Jerry Coleman writes: I think what we need to do here is just agree to disagree, and go on. It's not that important how we see this issue, salvation is the important matter. But I would just like to say to you that God is God, I cant agree with your view of History, Grace is extended to all men, and yes He came to me first, but I had to come to the knowledge of it before I could except it. But I am going to give you some verses to think about, and this will be my last post on the subject. Remember its not important what I think, and its not important what you think, what is important is what the Word of God "Says" Romans 10:14,15 How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? 15 And how shall they preach except the be sent? Me: thank you for the verses but i will respectively agree to disagree with you. and just for laughs sake, it is extremely funny to me that you used the text from Romans 10 which is dead smack in the middle of romans 9 and 11 where Paul is discussing some very Reformed theology. but i do agree with you. this is a trivial issue that is no longer worth discussing in this forum. thank you very much for the dialogue that we have shared though over the past few days. it has been very beneficial to me and i hope to you all as well. grace and peace from your brother in Christ. THE END