Some parts of this post have been adapted from my “A Second Conversion? Reflections on a Recent Experience,” Methodist Recorder (10 May 2024).
As a Pentecostal, with a specialism in Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies, I have long been familiar with the importance of experience, but my 12 years of working within the Wesleyan environment of Cliff College has further confirmed its importance to me. As all Methodists know, it makes up the fourth and vital element in the famous Wesleyan Quadrilateral.
Four years ago, after coming to the end of a three-book project examining the atonement I had emerged with a very strong participation-in-Christ theme, and I knew this needed exploring as I contemplated what to follow the atonement project with. I picked up the threads of a long fascination I already had with Paul’s concept of being ‘in Christ’ and published a popular book: One With Christ: 40 Biblical Meditations on Paul’s “In Christ” Idea. However, I wrote all that without as yet experiencing any of the ideas I was talking about. I was becoming conceptually clearer and clearer about something that experientially almost wholly eluded me. This pattern continued as I then became engrossed in the Eastern Orthodox doctrines of recapitulation and theosis. I also soon rediscovered the writings of the nineteenth century Higher Life movement, as well as Wesley himself. By the beginning of this year, I was focusing my attention on the theme of abiding in Christ in John’s Gospel, helped in my devotions by Andrew Murray’s classic Abide in Christ. In February I prepared a sermon on the Vine and Branches passage of John 15. Then, quite suddenly, something happened. On the morning of 2 March, the day before I was due to preach it, I had just returned home from a routine car trip dropping my 16-year-old daughter off at the café where she works on Saturdays. I sat down to write this in my journal:
He has always been there, of course, but now I know he’s always there: I always in him and he always in me. It’s like the release of dying and going to heaven, except I’m still here. I sat in the car for some time once I arrived back home, soaking up how good this was. It was like a safe haven I’ve been trying to reach all my life and now finally I’m here and I can know for sure that everything is always going to be alright because I will always be in him and he in me.
This experience turned out to be a lot more than just a passing moment of illumination. That evening, I found myself saying to my wife, ‘I feel like I’ve been born again, again.’ There was nothing special about that morning’s 5-minute trip out in the car – and definitely nothing special about the car – but something in me had changed.
I carried on feeling noticeably different. It was as though Christ had just moved deeper into my life. I had been taking medication for high blood pressure, but my blood pressure plummeted instantly. I was filled with peace, joy and a social confidence that was unusual for me. All forms of anxiety or stress were either gone altogether or very much reduced. I had been a devout Christian for 34 years, but this was like the ‘second conversion’ that William Boardman described. My experience also had some resonances with the experiences described in Wesley’s A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, which I then read with renewed interest. But the main way I would describe the experience is that I became happy. In the months that have elapsed, the great waves of emotion have settled down somewhat, but there is still a steady, unshakable happiness, like the ancient Epicurean aim of ataraxia or, imperturbableness.
I hesitate to define the experience as sanctification. In fact, there are some days when I am just as amazed by how little I’ve changed as I am on other days by how much I’ve changed. In fact, I have wondered whether the big mistake was that so many holiness teachers defined this deeper experience as ‘entire sanctification.’ The terminology was unpopular, of course, because it could generate either disappointment or dishonesty when it was found that the experience did not, after all, eventuate in perfection. Modern bloggers in the US who still object to such ideas object more on the basis that claiming such experiences can create two classes of Christian: the haves and the have-nots, the holy and the not-so-holy.
I find Boardman’s description hard to beat. He called it a ‘deeper work of grace, a fuller apprehension of Christ, a more complete and abiding union with him than at the first.’[2] I think this is potentially very good news in a world so lacking in real peace and joy, and I hope to find ways of bringing it. Maybe the mistake of our forebears was to view these ‘second’ blessings and deeper works as something reserved for those who are already Christians. Maybe this ‘more complete and abiding union’ is meant to be that complete and abiding from the very start.
However, my main point in writing this is just to confirm again for us all something that I trust we all agree on: the vital importance of experience in our ongoing task of thinking theologically.
[1] Some parts of this post have been adapted from my “A Second Conversion? Reflections on a Recent Experience,” Methodist Recorder (10 May 2024).
[2] William Boardman, The Higher Christian Life (New York: Appleton, 1859), 48.
Theology Everywhere 
Our induction into faith is often at an early age through family, school or festivals. At this level faith is a matter of form, of tradition and of socialization. Faith moves beyond a cultural context or measure of self-identity to become part of what we are as individuals through a personal religious experience, an encounter with God (or the Creative Spirit). This leads to our individual experience of adventuring with God and results in an inner transformation – turning our back on the past and starting a new kind of life – and the commitment to a continuing relationship of love, trust and faithfulness. It is this dimension of faith that causes a Muslim to speak of sensing Allah closer than breath itself, makes a Christian talk of having Jesus in his heart, and brings a Buddhist to feel at one with the universe. This personal experience is as unique as we are as individuals. It may have the intensity of a call from a burning bush or be a sudden heart-warming experience, but it might equally be a gradual awakening. Such an encounter is not a one-off event, although there may be one or more specific events that have a profound effect on one’s spiritual development; it is a journeying together with God in a developing relationship. As is the case with journeys and with relationships, we go through highs and lows and we gain different perspectives as we find ourselves in new situations. We change and our relationships change as well. If our relationship is firmly based, it will deepen and broaden as it is tested by the challenges we go through in his presence.
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Professor James Fowler postulated1 that there are stages in faith development that reflect the long-recognized stages in intellectual, social and personal development. He suggested that the final stage in faith development is a universalizing faith that transcends the limitations and conceptions of one’s own tradition and culture and is ready for fellowship and co-operation across faiths. The few who achieve this stage are “grounded in a oneness with the power of being or God” and their visions seem to free them from the paradoxes and polarities for a passionate spending of the self in love and a commitment to overcoming division and oppression that anticipate an in-breaking of God’s commonwealth of love and justice. Challenging existing power bases is never easy. Since such people work beyond existing religious traditions, they can be seen as subversive of those structures which promise the security of salvation and God’s protection and may suffer the consequences.
What these people have realized is that faith is about far more than assuring one’s own survival and salvation and gaining God’s favour during this life; that in a true relationship of love, one is more concerned about what one gives than what one receives. They have recognized that it is more important that someone’s beliefs are inclusive, life-affirming and healing and that they live these out and allow God to work through them than that they share our beliefs. We face a range of evils within our world, including serious political, ecological, humanitarian, and economic crises; and religious fundamentalism is one of the problems. It is important to appreciate that all those whose lives are contributing to the furtherance of the realm of God and to the defeat of evil – even if they don’t understand it in those terms – are our allies.
1James Fowler – Stages of Faith. (Harper & Row, 1981)
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Thank you for sharing your experience with us, Ben.
If we think of the four corners of the quadrilateral as gateways into the faith, I definitely entered by the Experience gate. I encountered God in my life before I learnt all the doctrine, dogma, creeds and theories that come with the Christian faith. I then spent many years grappling with Scripture and Reason before fully embracing Tradition. Your books on the atonement theory helped enormously in my endeavours. My initial euphoria on discovering that ‘Christ in me and I in him’ universal love, has subsided into a state of peace, contentment, acceptance and serenity. I no longer need to struggle for understanding, argue with those who don’t agree with me, or attempt to convince others that they are trying to find what they already have. I can just be, and afford others the same dignity.
At a creative retreat I once attended, I wrote a short poem about a tree in winter, standing naked and alone, having shed all its leaves and awaiting its new Spring greenery. I wrote it as an observer of the tree. When the retreat leader read it he said ‘I’d like you to write that again as if you are the tree, not merely looking at the tree.’ So I did.
WOW!!! What a moment of insight that was.
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