The Problem with Basing Faith on Feelings

All orthodox Christians recognize that our relationship ship vis-à-vis God is one of faith—i.e. we cannot know God apart from faith. 

Q.     1.  But the question remains: faith in what?  Well, faith in God, but faith in what sense?  Faith that He exists?  Faith that He loves us?  Faith in His death and resurrection? 

Q.     2.  And is this faith mere intellectual ascent?  Or is it something more?  If so, then what?  We are often told that our faith cannot just be in our ‘head’, it must also be in our ‘heart’.  But what is the ‘heart’?  The seat of our emotions?  The place wherein our will is grounded? 

Q.     3.  And say we can come to understand what faith is, on what do we ground our faith—i.e. how do we know God? 

A.      1.  Luther believed that faith consisted in believing the promises of God.  God promised to forgive our sins based on the atoning work of His Son—believing this promise is faith. 

A.      2.  What is more, belief in that promise will lead to a change of actions.  If faith does not lead to a change in actions, then one does not have faith.  Faith does not consist in believing a random fact, like the distance to the sun.  Faith is more like believing someone when they say jump I’ll catch you.  If you don’t jump, if you don’t act, you show thereby that you do not trust them. 

A.      3.  I think the above two questions and answers are pretty straight forward and are generally understood.  The last question was understood quite clearly in the past, but in recent times it has become quite muddled. 

Whether in practice, or in theory, or in both, most Christians ground their faith in their feelings.  That is, their base their relationship with God on what they find or perceive of God within themselves. 

Traditionally God has been seen as Transcendent, as the ultimate Other—as one far beyond our comprehension and knowledge—a Being so great that a full revelation of Him would destroy any mortal.  (Oddly enough, the Greeks recognized this truth apart from Divine Revelation—e.g. see Semele.)  Because God was outside of His creation and far above all His creatures, all we can know of Him is what He reveals of Himself to us. 

Now, that revelation has traditionally been understood in external terms.  God has revealed Himself in the Cosmos He has created and via the Holy Scriptures (His General and Specific Revelations, respectively).  There was and is good reason for giving an external and common revelation.  Think of what happens when one person says they have special access to a deity?  As that is a power and power corrupts, they exploit that power and use their special access to god as a means to gain control.  (For a modern example in popular entertainment, think of Ben in the series Lost.)  God, wanting to prevent a junta of priests from claiming special access to Him, gave His revelation commonly to all (and when priests did claim special insight, the Reformers pushed back hard on this).   

The second reason for making His revelation available in external forms is that it is much easier to comprehend.  You can return to the stars night after night just as you can return to a passage of Scripture over and over.  You may be feeling sick or angry one night and not be thinking clearly, so you can return to these things when you are feeling better and thinking clearer.  The same is not true of one’s internal emotions.  You can never return to a feeling.  You can never even remember it clearly.  If the basis of our faith is what we think God is saying to us individually at a given moment, or if it is grounded on some sort of internal leading, we can have no certitude whatsoever.  And without certitude, we can have no lasting faith.  Instead of certitude, we’ll always be thinking ‘did I really feel that’?  ‘Was that really God, or was that me or something else’? 

Now I should say here that I do believe God communicates to us individually.  I do believe we can hear from God and experience His presence, etc.  However, I do not think such internal, individual experiences can be the basis of faith.   I think that basing faith on feelings or experiences leads to three problems.

First, the exact same experiences that people claim to have with God are claimed by members of other sects and religions.  This is not to say that Christians don’t or can’t have real experiences, but that Satan can imitate those experiences and if all we have is experience it is impossible to differentiate the authenticity of an experience. 

I was talking with a pastor last summer who said he was excited about this certain prayer technique because when he did it he experienced the same feelings as his Buddhist friend did during meditation.  Now, all orthodox Christians have and must deny religious pluralism (the idea that all religions equally lead to God).  So if a non-Christian and a Christian are experiencing the same thing while doing the same thing and for one of them that thing purposefully excludes God, then it is hard if not impossible to believe that either are experiencing God. 

Second, if we think that God is found in our feelings or experiences, we will tend towards those activities wherein we experience or feel God.  There is nothing wrong with these activities, but it is a small step to take from, say, enjoying worship in a certain way, to needing to worship in a certain way.  And if we ‘need’ to worship in a certain way, then we have taken the infinite, uncreated, unfathomable God of the universe and reduced Him to a technique.  As if God is only present when the lights are dim.  As if God only shows up after the fourth song or when you are alone in your prayer closet.  If you only ‘experience’ God when everything is just right and you have taken all the right steps, then you are manufacturing an experience—you are creating the illusion of God’s presence within yourself via technique. 

Third, basing faith on an experience, no matter how profound or intense the experience, leads to doubt and an eventual loss of faith because we can never recreate the feelings we had originally during the experience. 

Think about it like this.  Let’s say I really, really, I mean really, experience God.  We’re talking bodily vision to the 7^th circle of Heaven stuff.  What happens six months or ten years from then?   What happens when I am experiencing not the presence of God, but rather the hiddenness of God (which is often wrongly confused with the absence of God!)  My current experience is telling me God is not here, but my prior experience told me that God was with me.  On what basis do I judge between these two experiences?  How do I know that the first was true and the second false if I have nothing but experience to guide me?  Is it not as likely that I was deceived, drugged, or hallucinating as that I went to Heaven?  Might it not be that now, and only now, I am seeing things clearly? 

I think this happens to countless Christians—in fact, I think it is the number one cause of loss of faith.  We expect to feel or experience God in a certain way, and when we don’t, we think He is gone—that though we may have felt Him once, we have just now realized the great and profound “truth” that He is not there. 

But this is false.  To paraphrase Luther, feelings are the Devil’s whore.  Allister McGrath, building off of Luther, writes the following.  Luther suggested that we attempt to imagine what it was like for the disciples of Jesus on the first Good Friday.  They had given up everything to follow Jesus.  Their whole reason for living centered on him.  He seemed to have the answer to all their questions.  Then, in front of their eyes, he was taken from them and publicly executed.  God was experienced as being absent.  There was no way in which anyone experienced God as being present on that occasion.  Even Jesus himself seems to have had a momentary sense of the absence of God—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mathew 27:46).  This way of thinking, according to Luther, demonstrates how unreliable experience and feelings can be as guides to the presence of God.  Those around the cross did not experience the presence of God—so they concluded that God was absent from the scene.  The resurrection overturns that judgment: God was present in a hidden manner, which experience mistook for absence.  Theology interprets our feelings, even to the point of contradicting them when they are misleading. 

All we can know of God is what God chooses to reveal of Himself to us.  He may do this individually, but without a general, objective, and external point of reference, we cannot know whether this revelation is from Him, from us, or from another.  We will always be wondering—was that me or was that God?  That is why He gave to us His written word.  Our faith must be grounded in what God has said about Himself in the Bible.  When we are grounded in this we are capable of discerning what other words spoken within us or to us from others are from Him, and what are not.  Without seeing a landscape in the noonday sun it is impossible to discern the truth of the objects that surround us on a starless light.