Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor

© 2020, Dr. Tamilio

One day when George W. Bush was President, Air Force One was flying over a desert.  They saw a man with a staff dressed in a robe below — literally in the middle of nowhere.  The plane landed and the President gave orders to retrieve the man.  The President’s men found out that this man was Moses himself — and they gave him a seat of honor in the front of the plane.  President Bush was sitting in the back of the plane, and wanted to meet with their new, biblical guest.  His men approached Moses with the President’s order, but he ignored them.  “What?” replied President Bush when they told him Moses’ response.  “Go up there again and tell him that I want to talk to him!” W. sternly ordered his attendants.  The results were the same, and the President’s attendants gave him the same report.  The President was incensed and marched to the front of the plane.  “Excuse me, Moses,” he began, “but I am the President of the United States of America and I demand that you talk to me.”  Without looking at the President, Moses simply said, “No.”  The President asked why, to which Moses said, “Because the last time I talked to a bush, I wandered in the desert for forty years!”

Being a big fan of Bushisms — blunders that George W. Bush uttered, such as “I believe that human beings and fish can coexist peacefully” — you can almost see this happening.  I love George W. Bush!

I do not think that too many of us have had a burning bush experience, one in which we saw the actual presence of God and heard his voice.  I am sure that it has happened for some, but not for the majority of believers.  And yet, if you believe in God, it is as if you have met him.  If it wasn’t through a burning bush experience, then how?

There are some that say they can see God in nature.  I agree.  Nature is so beautiful and so complex that it has to be the result of an intelligent, divine being.  How can it possibly simply be a mistake — the rest of an explosion that occurred 13.7 billion years ago?  The same is true when you examine the complexity of the human body and mind.  Such probing into existence reveals a great deal about God.  Some say his fingerprints are seen in creation.

Others say that they see God in their relationships with others.  “God is love,” and so whenever we love we are in the presence of God.  Also, each of us has the divine spark within us.  God’s fingerprints are on us as well.  As we read in the Book of Job, “In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”  Even though we are broken, sinful creatures, the light of God shines through us as well.

But neither nature nor human beings are God.  If we see God in nature or in others, we see only a fragment, a reflection.  It is, as Paul says, as if “we are looking into a mirror dimly.”  How then do we explain religious experience as an encounter with the divine?

Experience itself is a tricky word.  What you experience is different from what I experience, and neither of us can know or feel what the other knows or feels.  Experience is unique.  Yet, at the same time, experience is a universal phenomenon.  All of humanity knows experiences of joy, sadness, and anger, for example.  Different things make people happy, sad, and mad, certainly, but the feelings are universal.

What about religious experience?  Clearly, people throughout history in different parts of the world have had the experience that this is something more than themselves, their communities, or the earth itself.  Something within tugs at their souls, pointing them to the heavens.  Granted, some of those experiences are profound, like visions and near death experiences, but I am talking about your average person who did not see a burning bush or a light at the end of a tunnel.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher.  You don’t get a more German sounding name than Schleiermacher, do you?  This late eighteenth/early nineteenth theologian had a lot to say about religious experience.  Schleiermacher is by no means an easy read, but if you work with him you will find his work inspiring.  Schleiermacher claims that “religion” has a lot to do with “feelings.”  Religious feelings are an interior, personal experience that people have.  Yet these feelings are not abstract, nor are they divorced from knowing God and doing what God wants us to do.  He claims that these feelings of knowing and doing exist together and form our God consciousness.  This consciousness creates a feeling of absolute dependence on God.  In his book The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher writes, “The feeling of absolute dependence…is not to be explained as an awareness of the world’s existence, but only as an awareness of the existence of God, as the absolute undivided unity.”[1]  Makes sense, huh?

What Schleiermacher is saying, basically, is that religious experience is a pointer to the existence of God.  We all know the feeling of being dependent upon another person.  I am not just referring to our needing one another for emotional support.  It’s much more basic than that.  We were all babies at one point.  We needed our mothers, fathers, caregivers, whomever to feed us, change us, bathe us, and care for all our needs.  There was no way that we could have taken care of ourselves.  We were absolutely dependent upon someone else.

We are dependent on nature to provide us with nutritious food and clean water — and just the right climate for us to survive.  We depend on that paycheck so that we can pay the bills, put clothes on our backs, and a roof above our heads.

Most importantly, we are utterly dependent on God for our very existence.  If there was no God, there would be no us.  And deep inside, we know that.

There is many a theologian who has reflected on religious experience as a pointer to God’s existence.  While many people are quick to dismiss emotion and feeling as one of the many pointers to God, there is something to be said about this.

A few years ago, Elizabeth King wrote a piece for The Washington Post entitled, “I’m An Atheist — So Why Can’t I Shake God?”  In it, she states, “Although I’ve been a content atheist for a decade, somehow God has found a way to stick around in my mind.  Not the God of the Bible who created heaven and Earth — the God that lingers with me is harder to explain.  The best way I can think of to describe it is like a character from a movie that I’ve seen over and over, or like the memory of my first friends.  He’s not real, but He’s present.”[2]  The dichotomy she raises is interesting, but I want to comment on the feeling she has, like the memory of a friend.

Unlike the God that King doesn’t believe in, friends that we are member are real or they were real.  God is real — and is ever present with us, my friends.  He is closer than the memory of the greatest friend you’ve ever had.  Religious experience says quite a bit.  Hold fast to it.  Amen.

[1] Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (published in 1821/1822), 132.

[2] Elizabeth King, “I’m An Atheist — So Why Can’t I Shake God?” from The Washington Post, February 4, 2016 (online).