Personal Relationship or Faith in Christ?
6 April 2006 by Gil
I just came across an interesting article that deals with some of the questions that came up recently in the discussion on the possibility of a ‘personal relationship’ with God. The author, John Suk (a theologian at Asian Theological Seminary in Manila), makes an interesting connection between the language of ‘personal relationship with God’ and secularism. Secularism has taught us that the transcendent God who governs all of creation is instead a private deity that merely informs individual morals and values. The immanent God of ‘personal relationship’ is the only God that makes sense in a world that cannot conceive of religion as serving any other function.
Suk has some other really interesting points here. He says that, in a world wracked with evil and suffering, we should be speaking the language of lament rather than the language of personal relationship. “In such a world I think that rather than focusing on ‘personal relationships,’ we need to recover the Psalmist’s language of lament because it fairly represents how we ought to feel about Jesus’ absence until he returns to make all things new.”
So what should should this look like? At a practical level, Suk says that we should say, ‘I have faith in Christ,’ or ‘I believe in Christ,’ rather than ‘I have a personal relationship with Christ.’ He sees this as a far more honest way of talking about how it is that we ‘relate’ to Christ during the time of his absence.
“Where the language of personal relationship sounds implausible or perhaps even impossible, at least as far as the plain sense of such language goes, the language of faith serves as an invitation to ponder mystery and overcome unbelief.”
Do these ideas address some of the questions and issues that were raised in our earlier discussion? It seemed like some had wondered whether the language of ‘personal relationship’ advertised more than it could deliver. Is this a better way of talking about things like this?
i guess one of my problems with this is that a God who does not interact with us personally is much harder to believe in. we would have no experiential evidence on which to rely. then it just becomes some sort of game of who has the most plausible theory about what God is like and what he wants. what is the Holy Spirit then if not God’s way of interacting with us personally? -jc
JC,
I have a ‘personal relationship’ with reality, because my personal experience of it is all that I have to go on. If I believe that God is the ground of all reality then all of my life becomes a personal experience of God (even though it is difficult to see it that way at times). That is certainly a different kind of relationship than I’m used to talking about but I still think it’s a relationship. I’m not equating God with the world but I think that we often expect God to interact with us in a supernatural way that ignores the degree to which God reveals himself through his world.
I found myself wondering what you mean by ‘experiential evidence’. What would this look like if it happened? I think that the language of personal relationship needs clarification because it gives us expectations that may not be helpful.
This certainly doesn’t answer all of the questions but for me it’s a good starting point. This is why I like Suk’s article. He admits that our ‘experience’ of God, here and now, will always be an experience of absence at some level. Whether you maintain hope of a better future in that kind of environment is a personal decision, I suppose, but this way of looking at things seems more honest to me than the confidence of the language of ‘personal relationship’.
i really like your response here:
- an admission of sorts, of the subjective limitation that our own perceptions bring to the nature of any relationship. In some ways this make the relationship with God far more vulnerable and in my opinion far more intimate. intimate in the sense that i somehow have to acknowledge that God trusts my limited (often failing) perceptions to bring about some idea about truth - even if that is only very fuzzy. And i agree that the common understanding of personal relationship is not very helpful in describing a more accurate way of interacting with truth.
i wonder how much of this is tied up in our constant quest for certainty.
to answer the question of what experiential evidence would look like i guess i would point to william james four qualities of a ‘mystical experience.’
i am not really sure what i would expect from a personal relationship from jesus. i was kind of hoping to find that out. i was just thinking that a personal relationship with Jesus or mystical experiences with God would make it a lot easier to believe in Him.
otherwise, as far as i can see, we are just relying on philosophical arguments or that existential leap of faith. the philosophical arguments are depressing to me because the seem to just go in circles. you find philosophy that seems pretty good and bulletproof and then someone comes a long with a more bulletproof one. you can see this happening throughout history and just seems to be happening now about as fast as intel comes out with a new brand of pentium. the existential leap of faith doesn’t appeal because there is now way to say who is right. you just believe something of your choosing and run with it. just hope God honors your leap of faith.
you seem to start by taking God as the source and sustainer of all reality. i think that’s called reformed epistemology… could be wrong. and then from assuming that truth you say that by experiencing the reality that God sustains you in effect are experiencing God. the argument seems sort of circular to me. you don’t know if experiencing reality equals experiencing God unless you assume He is the creator and sustainer of reality. maybe i am not clear on the point you were making. i like your blog by the way. -jc
jc,
re: “the existential leap of faith doesn’t appeal because there is no way to say who is right. you just believe something of your choosing and run with it. just hope God honors your leap of faith.”
I think you’re absolutely right here, but there’s nothing else any of us can do. There’s no worldview that doesn’t require a leap of faith at some level. I’ve never received any sort of ‘mystical verification’ that I have made the correct decision re: faith in Christ. I’ve also desperately wished that God would give me ‘more to go on’ at times. I think it was Dostoevsky that said that his ‘hosanna’ was ‘born out of a furnace of doubt’ and I often feel the same way. Sometimes the whole Christian story just seems really implausible - as you say, there is no non-circular argument for faith.
All I can really do is return to the basic existential questions that every human being must face. What’s wrong with the world? Why do I have the capacity to recognize it as less than it should be? What would be adequate to fix it? Something has to account for the dissonance that most (all?) people experience between expectation (what we think the world ought to be like) and reality. The Christian message provides enough answers to these questions for me to trust the one to whom it points. This may not exactly be a ringing endorsement of faith, much less a description of a vibrant personal relationship, but as you alluded to, I hope God will honour what faith I can muster.
Thanks for the good questions - they’re really making me think…
I think the notion of “personal relationship” refers to the form of response to our comprehension of God. If someone considers God to be distant, impersonal and demanding, it’s easy to act in a detached, cynical, uninvolving type of compliance. However, the evangelical emphasis on an individualistic, emotional bond tended to make faith more specific and less general so that it was more engaging, but also unfortunately easy to get self-absorbed and overly sentimental about God and the world.
What we seem to want to discover is something that resonates with us both experientally and independently. That’s where Christ is a good template from which to draw. Jesus’ correspondence with God was both “dry” enough for distinction but “wet” enough for participation.
Essentially we seem to need the integration of the two.
How is Christ absent? If we consider the Trinity as equal in diety than is not the Holy Spirit always with us? Part of our problem with experience is we think that in order to experience something it must happen in the physical human realm. I personally believe that we are called to a higher level of existence than our carnal beings. We are called to live and experience life on earth in the spiritual realm. This is how many of our forefathers/mothers endured persecution without pain or death. This is how miracles happen. This is the realm in which acts of love towards strangers are acts of love towards Christ. This is the realm in which we are to worship - “in spirit and in truth”.
I also believe that we’ve never been called to a ‘personal relationship with Jesus Christ’ but to a relationship with Christ as a body of believers - as his bride - a ‘personal relationship’ means that every single last one of us are his intimate partner - in a sense Christ is a polygamist I suppose if we keep up this notion of ‘personal relationship’. Our relationship should be as a body of believers with the most holy God, with Christ as our mediator, and the Holy Spirit as our lover.
I hope I’m not going off topic here. Charlie Brown made me wonder about how we relate with God when she mentioned the “spiritual realm”.
What is a “spiritual realm”? Where does the material realm end and the spiritual realm start? Can both fill the same space? What does the spiritual realm contain? Does it contain thoughts, feelings, force? Can the material realm be influenced by the spiritual realm? If yes, how does it make the material realm move or change?
How does God relate with us spiritually or from the spiritual realm?
If I don’t have a personal relationship with you, how can I know you?
If I don’t know you, how can I love you?
If I don’t love you, what will sustain us when our troubles come?
Faith without love, is philosophy. Faith as reason is wholly relative.
Love sustained is an impenatrible force, Satan is powerless against it.
Human reason, apart from love, is a shallow grave of self interest and deception.
Human reason as faith, IS the fall.
Please forgive the seeming pretentiousness of my “bullet points”. I think I have a lot to add to this dialogue but I must confess that I have a hard time keeping up with the intracacies being expressed.
Peace
I think a key component to addressing the question about a “personal relationship with God” is first determining how this phrase came about. I gues that’s really what Suk is writing about. The phrase’s origin in evangelicalism is central. The questions we need to ask are why did evangelicalism arise in the first place? And what theological need did the phrase “personal relationship with God” fill?
I think the theological need served by the language of ‘personal relationship’ was the need to make room for God in a world that was rapidly crowding God out. All of the things that God had historically seen to be involved in were being explained in the language of science so the transcendent God who ran the whole show gave way to the personal Jesus who lived in the hearts of individuals. If I read Suk right, that’s why ‘personal relationship’ language is evidence of secularism, it accommodates God to the only realm that’s left in a secular world, private individual religious preferences.
On the one hand I am sympathetic to the phrase because Jesus did reveal God as friend. “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” There is an approachable-ness here, a warmth, which is very easy to understand in terms of a ‘personal relationship.’
On the other hand, the part that I agree most with Suk is how we have used this to separate “my” relationship with God apart from “yours.” To know God more fully, is to know the God my brother and sister know.
I heard something else in explaination of the theological need for this statement… As evangelicalism was taking its first steps in North America, it struggled to challenge the people flocking to North America to unity and spiritual maturity. Most immigrants tended to define themselves not as “having faith in Christ” but by ethno-religious labels such as Ukrainian Orthodox or Dutch Reform. In evangelicalism’s charateristic way of using binaries to define and catagorize the saved and unsaved, ethno-religious labels just didn’t cut it. Along with the secularization trend in the West, they struggled for a way to cross these cultural and ethnic barriers. The way that came about was to call people to a personal relationship with God. This mandated that one had to make an individualistic decision that existed outside their cultural and familial contexts. I think this phrase says a lot about the historical roots of evangelicalism.