The Dangers of Religious Experiences

Although religious experiences can be genuine encounters between people and God, it is dangerous to accept all religious experiences as valid. Both Shirley McLaine and Augustine had religious experiences, but obviously both can’t reflect true encounters with God. This would require God contradicting Himself—a theological and logical impossibility. As C.S. Lewis observes, “Religious experience can be made to yield almost any sort of God” (God in the Dock, 141). There are several reasons for critically examining all religious experiences, including Christian.

Counterfeit experiences

First, as indicated in a previous blog article, religious experiences are not restricted to Christians. Where there are counterfeit religions, there are counterfeit religious experiences. So having a religious experience does not automatically mean that it was a true encounter with God. Many religious experiences may be psychological in nature. Some people want to experience God so intensely that they actually imagine such an encounter. Worse yet, a supposed religious experience may be phony. Many so-called prophets are no more than the worst kind of charlatan—outright frauds. Claiming to speak for God, they pretend to have had religious experiences in order to give authenticity to their teachings while, in fact, their goal is to bilk people out of their money and to promote their own selfish ambitions for power and control over people’s lives.

Worse still, a religious experience may be the work of demons. Satan is described in the Bible as creating an image of himself as “an angle of light” (2 Cor. 11:14) while in reality he is the “father of lies” (John 8:44). It is not beyond his power to manufacture a phony religious environment that promotes a false religious experience. In short, a supposed religious experience may be an encounter with the devil rather than God!

Counter-conversions

A second danger inherent to religious experiences is what philosopher and psychologist William James referred to as “‘counter-conversions’ . . . the transition from orthodoxy to infidelity” (Varieties of Religious Experiences, 150) What James is saying is that a so-called religious experiences may not be religion at all in the sense of an encounter with God or being morally righteous. The same psychological transformation one observes in genuine religious experiences may result in totally irreligious behavior. What psychologically may qualify as a religious experience may lead away from truth rather than toward truth. It may lead to non-Christian religions or even to flagrantly immoral lifestyles. Again, this illustrates the need for an objective criterion to judge the authenticity and truthfulness of all religious experience.

Contrary to logic

There is a third danger inherent to religious experiences that needs to be recognized. James pointed out that religious experiences can be so powerful and so compelling that they can cause us to disregard logic. The experience itself becomes reality:

They [religious experiences] are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experience can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic are….[I]f you do have them, and have them at all strongly, the probability is that you cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality which no adverse argument, however unanswerable by you in words, can expel from your belief (73).

The danger here is obvious. If a religious experience does not have its source in God (truth), then its source is from something other than God. We saw previously that there are only two other possibilities: the experience is either wholly psychological in nature and has no bearing on reality at all, or it is demonic in origin. In either case, a religious experience can feel so real that one does not want to be “bothered with the facts,” that is, we refuse to judge the truth of the experience against common sense logic or contrary objective evidences (such as Scripture). This clearly leaves one wide open to any manner of bizarre and perverted beliefs.

Although religious experiences can be, and often are, direct means for apprehending insights into truth, they should never be considered the source of truth. Experiences affirm truth; they give powerful supporting evidence for truth. Yet in and of themselves they do not give truth. Religious experiences should correspond to reality but not create reality (which, incidentally, is exactly what some religions claim they do).

Christians claim that Jesus changes lives. If this is true, we should see innumerable examples of changed lives in those who have met the living Christ—which is exactly what we do see. But the historicity of Jesus and His claim to deity do not rest on personal experience alone but on concrete historical facts. This is quite different from what is found in other religions.

If the Bible is God’s word, it will be the qualifier of religious experiences—the standard or framework by which all religious experiences can be measured for truth. If a so-called religious experience is not in harmony with Scriptures, it must be rejected. God’s subjective revelation through the Holy Spirit will never contradict His objective written and recorded revelation in Scripture. ©