On the Difference Between Solid Theological Argument and The Witness of Experience

"What was from the start, what we had heard, what we had seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands felt about the Logos of Life ... what we had seen and had heard, we report also to you, so that you would also have communion with us. And the communion which is ours is with the Father and with His Son, Yeshua the Anointed." - 1 John 1:1, 3

     I recently bought a book from Amazon, "Patristic Universalism, 2nd Edition" (David Burnfield, 2016). In particular, I wanted it for the promised references and scholarship pointing towards eventual Universal Salvation (not excluding a corrective stint in torment if needs be) being a prominent view among the Church Fathers prior to the Church Councils and Augustine in particular. So far, as a work of theological scholarship it looks fairly promising. It was written by a man who had been, and by his own account remains, a conservative Southern Baptist, and largely to other Biblically literate conservative Christians from similar backgrounds. As a result, a lot of the writing is intensely technical, deeply rooted in Scripture, but also referring much to Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa.
      Yet as I began reading, while I appreciated his approach and understood the background he was coming from, I couldn't help but feel that it was all too scholastic or academic in nature. Granted, the material was written towards theological academics intending to make his argument as well as he could. But I suppose that was what struck me as being "off." Not that it is unique to this theological author in particular. The vast majority of theological authors bring arguments and evidence from Scripture and other sources to support their positions in order to sway and convince others of their viewpoints. I myself can do the very same thing, and have done so many times. Protestant and Reformation theologians tend to be the worst about it, relying solely on their arguments. But what struck me was that it was merely academic. It was all presented as theoretical. He had neither seen nor heard nor touched any of it himself any more than most other theological authors.
     What is going through my mind this morning is the opening lines from 1 John 1, "What we had heard, what we had seen, what our hands felt we are reporting to you..." John wasn't writing using technical arguments. The irony of John was that he wasn't a "theologian" as we now consider one. He wasn't an academic. He wrote what he (and presumably his amanuensis had he one) had personally experienced. It wasn't theory to John. It wasn't a matter of sound arguments or piling Scripture references on top of Scripture references. This is what he heard, saw, and touched with his own senses, and he didn't care to speculate on anything else. When he wrote about the life of Jesus Christ, he wrote from what he heard and saw. He wrote about the trial and crucifixion because he was standing there with Jesus' family. He wrote about the events of the Resurrection because he was there, he saw what happened or heard about it from others who were on site. He wanted people to know what he himself and those with him had personally encountered. Nothing else mattered but that. And it is this personal experience which truly makes him a "theologian" in the truest sense of the word, "one who studies God," because he directly observed and studied everything he wrote about. It wasn't theory. It was the facts as they stood in his experience.
      You can build a theology which is bullet proof in terms of evidence, Scripture, and argumentation, but if you have not directly observed or experienced the subject of your study what good is it? If your eyes have not seen, if your ears have not heard then why should anyone listen to you? You can't be a witness of something you haven't yourself experienced.
      A long time ago, a brilliant astronomer, who through his grasp of mathematics and physics had already discovered one very real planet in our solar system, believed he had discovered another which he had named "Vulcan." This planet was supposed to lie between Mercury and the Sun. He had nearly bulletproof mathematical evidence that this hellish world was there. He had convinced nearly the entire scientific community as well as the whole world that it was there for decades. Except it wasn't. This planet didn't transit in front of the sun when it was supposed to. No one has ever seen it no matter what telescope they used. Later on, Einstein's theories of General and Special Relativity were used to make the corrections in this Astronomer's mathematics which explained the planetary wobbles without the need for "Vulcan" to exist. But for decades, his rock solid math and evidence which had also been used to discover Neptune had told the world Vulcan existed. The argument was solid, but the reality was very different.
     As followers of Jesus Christ, we have to deal in experiential reality and not exclusively in theological constructs and arguments. We have to encounter that reality of interaction with the Spirit of Christ within us, or it is all just theoretical calculations but no substance, much like Vulcan. We have to witness, we have to hear, and see, and feel Jesus Christ with and through us, or else what we believe to be our faith can all blow away like smoke in the wind because there is no genuine foundation that we can point to and say "This is what I myself have experienced." We have to have that real, experiential relationship with Jesus Christ through His Spirit or we don't actually know Him, just our calculations about Him.