The Evangelical Universalist Forum

JRP interviews Joe Hinman on THE TRACE OF GOD

Hi Joe –

Nice to meet you :slight_smile: Well I’ve been called here by my friend Jason who is a complete gentleman. I’ve had my mind on other things but since he’s’ called me and I do possibly have something to contribute to your fascinating discussion here, I am here like the genie in the lamp.

First of all I’ve been a person on this site who has talked quite a lot about the Christian mystics – so it’s appropriate that I do try and give some thoughts.

ON a personal note I had lots of broadly mystical experiences in my adolescence at precisely the time when I was in a rather authoritarian fundamentalist charismatic mileu – and my peers did not help me in any way to cope with these. A canny spiritual director who knew something about the human heart and with some broader knowledge of medicine would have been able to help. I actually have temporal lobe epilepsy – and I’m very happy to take the medication that stops the visions and the involuntary emotional bombardments that are a part and parcel of temporal lobe complex partial seizures. So that’s me for you 

I’ve read and greatly enjoyed William James’s classic on mystical experience. Also in my late adolescence I read some of the countercultural stuff like Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception and the fraudulent books of Carlos Casteneda linking experimentation with drugs and mystical experiences (very uneasy :confused: ). I think these self validating experiences of oneness are perennial; perhaps they occur more in religious people but they are not confined to religious people (I remember the writings of an Atheist named Richard Jeffries often came up in studies of mystical states).

I remember profiting from reading R.C. Zahener’s book Mysticism Sacred and Profane which is an answer to Aldous Huxley. He helpfully surveys the mystical literature across religions and distinguishes an amoral perception of everything being one and of being one with everything, to other mystical states where the person having the experience is not sucked into an amorphous oneness but rather has a perception of the ‘personalising energy’ of universal compassion coursing through and sustaining all things (which is found across the religions and not confined to Christianity, Judaism and Islam). My reading in world religions – especially regarding religion and violence – has confirmed Zahener’s misgivings about the validity of ‘everything is one’ experiences – that he terms pan-en-henism. This for example is a state that is striven for with harsh and brutal discipline in the samurai Rinzai sect of Japanese Zen – and actually turns people into highly efficient amoral killers for whom life and dearth are one. I remember Zahener drawing parallels between Rinzai Zen writings and the ramblings of Charles Manson.

I feel a little unesay with identifying mysticism with Maslow type peak Julian of Norwich and William Law – my two favourites – are not focussed on this.

Julian had a series of near death experiences as a young woman which supplied her with a powerful fund of images and experiences to work with. I think the great women doctors of the spiritual life often work like this – they keep their roots in experience (often bodily experience) and work creatively with images and intuition rather than with purely rational categories (Catherine OF Genoa, Metchild of Magedeburg and Hildegard von Bingen also spring to mind). But what matters with Julian is her reflections upon her experiences over a life time as much as the experiences themselves. She enquires after them for greater and more compassionate understanding of the lot and the perplexities of her fellow ‘even Christians’. She is concerned that her experience should be interpreted in the language of Holy Church and not to contradict this – but she is able to come up with stunning insights into the reach of the love of God in Christ for us poor creatures. And her visions enabled her to reach out to her neighbours in their affliction with illness, war, famine with a message of comfort and edification.

William Law – although counted a mystic – is on record as saying that he never had any special experiences. His writings are to do with the inner work of trying from self to God over a life time. (He was almost certainly influenced by Mother Julian and in turn influenced George MacDonald). It’s interesting that he had so many run ins with his dear friend John Wesley who loved Law but did not comprehend him. Two points of contention were over Laws’ purgatorial universalism and his specific interpretation of God’s wrath – very different from Wesley’s. Btu another thing that affronted Wesley was Law’s stress that states of inner assurance were not to be idolised as fruits of the spirit. Wesley took great exception to this – which is surprising (or perhaps not so surprising ) because Wesley’s private correspondence reveals that he lacked the experience of settled assurance that he preached (Wesley was a depressive). I’m rambling but I think another emphasis of the mystics that I see as good sorts(including Catherine of Genoa who von Hugel majored on) is an understanding that peak experiences may come but they also go (and they are no mark of begin special) and that there will be a place and a time for lack of feeling, and for patience in dry prayer – sitting faithfully turning the will away from self towards Love especially when we fell nothing. I know that dry prayer in Quaker meetings saved my sanity and perhaps my life after too much high octane religion and too much confusion because of epileptic states when I was young. So I’m a fan of it :smiley:

Good stuff Dick.
I might add that in that part of my journey when I was studying/practicing Zen, I learned a good lesson: that is, that people tend to find what they are told they will find, when it comes to meditation or other consciousness-changing methodologies.
For instance, in sitting meditation, a beginner might be told that “as you become aware of sensations in your foot, or your abdomen, or neck, scalp, etc. - try to feel what the sensation is telling you about emotions you may have packed away, these emotions will block parts of your body” - well if you are told to look for it, you’ll interpret whatever sensation you come across, that might be just a random sensation, as something meaningful.

I think Hick, and perhaps Joe (?) would say that many ‘mystical’ experiences are somewhat like that - as water takes the shape of the bowl it is poured into, the same water will appear in different shapes. Likewise our experiences are formed and interpreted by the ‘vessel’ that ‘has’ them.

Well I’ll wait to read Joe’s book before I go further on that.

Yes Dave just because I slagged off the Rinazi sect of Zen above I don’t think that all types of Zen meditations lead down this road. In fact it is a Soto Zen priest that has blown the lid on just how much Rinzai Zen contributed to Japanese genocide in Manchuria during the second world war. One lesson here is that mystical experience divorced from moral discipline can result in evil (I understand that in Burmese Zen schools where Zen is gentle and pacific it is never taught outside of the Eightfold Path of moral discipline). I have found it ironic that so many of the Zen teachers snapped up by sixties hippies like Alan Watts have turned out to be Japanese War criminals in denial about Emperor worship.

A lesson that William Law always drove home is that if a person turns to God wihtout having first at least begun to turn away from self then they can become far worse than they were in their natural state.

Oops - I had missed your earlier reference to Zen. :blush: Thanks for clearing that up!

Right. Yes I am influenced by the theology of Paul and Hans Urs Von Balthasar, John Macquarrie, and others who say God is the ground of being. But that’s another book. I don’t go into that too much in the Trace of God. I agree with Balthasar and not Tillich that God is consciousness (except a certain reading of Tillich might imply that God is conscious. Tillich says God is “the ground of consciousness,” depending upon how one takes that…)

You are saying the argument for co-determinate is a soft ball? The first chapter is about why we have to have arguments and why we cannot just make observations directly of God at work. God is not given in sense data because he’s the foundation of sense data, of all there is, not a thing in creation to be given in sense data. If you think it has to be direct empirical knowledge to be “hard ball” whatever that analogy means in terms of philosophy, how are you going to get that in dealing with something that is not subject to empirical data? God is beyond our understanding. One might think to do “hard ball” one would need to understand. The God correlate as Tillich called it, co-determinate is associated with Schleiermacher, the best we will get. Is that soft ball?

The first thing you have to do is find a means of demonstrating what the co-determinate is, or could be. If you already know then you must already know God exists and you don’t need the argument. To see how I do that, you need to read the book. Chapters 1 and 2.

I’ll give you a hint, I make two major God arguments. (1) Co determinate and; (2) argument from epistemic judgement.

(1) says we have a set of criteria which we can take to be the trace of the divine, for historical and other reasons. Then these characteristics are found in mystical experience. The result of the experience is life transforming. I use this term to group all the different results into one label. That label is meant to imply positive dramatic long term changes. Your life changes for the better and that can be broken down into different categories distilled from the findings of two studies, Wuthnow and Nobel.

Wuthnow:

*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
•Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style

Noble:

*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion

That’s from that council on spiritual practices page that I already linked to.

All of that together I germ “life transforming.” That is what religion promises. That’s the nature of religion to offer life transformation and these experiences are religion delivering on that promise. Therefore we should be able to assume that this is the Trace, it’s the effect of God on human lives.

The second argument is epistemological. I set up a criteria through which we understand that our experiences are real. We understand the reality of our experiences according to a criteria that we employ naturally. That is:

regular
consistent
shared (inter-subjective)
enables navigation.

If the phenomena is regular, every time I try to walk through walls I bounce off, I always bounce off in the same way, the wall appears to be solid. I eventually learn “I can’t walk through walls.” I check my experience against that of others. no one I have ever met can walk through walls. Of course we don’t spend a great deal of time worrying about it. We conclude these things immediately but that’s basically the process we observe, and when a phenomena is regular and consistent and shared by others, we assume it’s real.

We also assume it’s real if the enables us to navigate in the world. We do what works. Think of Dr. Phil’s annoying and shallow little question “how’s that working for ya?” There is a point to it, if it’s not working why are you still doing it? Although I do want to punch him when I hear him say that.

So religious experience meets this criteria. I find that it’s regular and consistent and so many others. Every time I pray if I really seriously put attention into it I’m not dashing off “thanks for the food,” I feel a presence of holiness. I say that because it’s also the same kind of feeling. It’s both regular and consistent. Then, not that my very experience is shared, but I find other believers describing similar sounding feelings when they pray. So I assume it is a shared experience in kind.

That is borne out by these studies. They are not just anecdotal, they giving us quantitative analysis which establishes scientifically that these are the effects of religious experience. Something is being experienced it’s not a trick of the mind, and it fits the criteria we use to judge reality.

As for “navigation” the studies also show that the effect of the experience is enable one to navigate in live in the sense that one is able to cope with the vicissitudes of life. One is better able to make decisions in a clear headed mature way by having the mental capacity, wisdom and understanding of life to do so. These are the result of those experiences.

Since the experiences fit the criteria we use to decide reality, we should trust that they are indicative of a reality. We are not imposing wishful thinking. Since the experiences fit the criteria for epistemic judgement we should assume we are experiencing a realty beyond ourselves.

suggesting you get my book? so if I order you to get my book is that hard ball?

get my book, please. whatever sports analogies apply. I’m really more of a football fan. :smiley: :mrgreen:

ok

Good then you have a clear idea of what I’m taking about.

William James is a sort of hero for me. I read the Varieties way back, maybe as an undergrad. My early exposure to mystical experience was through Underhill’s major book, Mysticism and due to the influence of the woman who led me to the Lord I read some Madme Guyon.

I was attempting to do a William Barett type piece, what he did for existentialism in Irrational Man I was attempting to do for mystical experience. So my engagement with it in the book is not as nuanced as the writers we are talking about. It is nuanced and hopefully not ponderous but the nuances are about the studies not the classic writers.

I think the M scale studies establish that if it fits the Stace criteria it’s mystical. Anything else we might term “spiritual” or “religious” experience. The quantitative researchers are using the umbrella term: Spiritually Transformative Experiences (STE).

Maslow links Peak experience with religious experience although he also shows that’s not limited to religious people. He shows its related to the kinds of experiences of the mystics. There’s no reason to exclude it from the mystical category. It’s not part of mystical theology, because mystical theology seeks to explain mystical experience through a theological understanding, rather than a psychological one. That’s talk about the experience not the experience itself.

That’s really interesting. I say that sincerely not to brush it off. There was a time when I was really into studying those kinds of figures. Your level of knowledge is very impressive. I just don’t want people to buy The Trace of God expecting to find a lot of in depth of analysis of the writings of those people. I didn’t go into that aspect. The reason is because my mission was to popularize the body empirical work that demonstrates the goodness of religious experience.

I am not prescribing religious experience as a panacea to solve all problems. I’m not writing a spiritual hand book. I’m not trying to lead people into a deeper spiritual life. I think we can benefit from knowing about the validity of these experiences. My main purpose is apologetic and I want to make known the fact that there is a huge body of scientific work that shows us that religious experiences make your life better and refer to a reality that’s there. Although I do hope aspects of the book can suggest a deeper spiritual life.

I don’t deal with a level of personal meditation or “inner life.” I do have a chapter on placebos. It’s on both placebo and drugs. I think in a general sense I establish that mystical experience is not a self fulfilling prophesy or the result of placebo. That’s not exactly what you are saying. It’s true in cultivating “inner life”, one must learn to focus upon the source of the life not the epiphenomena.

Good analogy, water conforming to the shape of a basin. Lots mystical author use that in various ways. I think about in relation to culture, mystical experience adapting to the various forms of culture in being a universe experience.

Joe,

I think you and Sobor (real name Dick) will get along famously. :smiley: Thanks for the comments, Sobor!

Re: softball, the analogy is about pitching easy or hard questions for the ‘batter’ to hit. Dave was joking about pitching the softest possible question (do you suggest he should buy the book). I was joking in return about what I consider to be an easy set-up question for you to reply to (because even what I consider my softball questions are detailed, i.e. I was poking fun at myself). That’s all.

Let’s talk about Kuhn’s paradigm theory for a while. You write in some detail about this early in the book, when discussing rational warrant for belief. I expect at least some forum readers won’t be familiar with it, but I also expect a lot of members (and guests) will be VERY familiar with what the theory describes, having gone through it themselves on some important topics (which may or may not be related to the forum’s reason for existence. :wink: ) In fact anyone converting from one belief to another will likely have gone through this, depending on how strongly they held the initial belief.

Would you introduce the idea for us?

(Obviously other developing discussions can continue, too.)

I know. I was trying to be funny. My brother always warned me not to try that. :mrgreen:

Kuhn based his theory upon the works of Swiss child psychologist named Jean Piaget (pee-air-jjjjay) (with that grating French sound you can’t write). That theory says children learn by setting up models of how they think things work, “paradigms”. Then these paradigms get worn down as they are contradicted by reality over time. As long as they can absorb the contradictions or “anomalies” into a paradigm they will keep it. When they can no longer do it, there are too many contradictions, they have set up a new paradigm.

Here’s a link to my page on my first website (Doxa) that explains Kuhn. This is one of the first pages I put up on the web. It was written while I was still in doctoral work. Although it’s not on a level I would have written for a professor. I was trying to be a popularizer for my website. I think it hits most of the highlights: In the section on Science and religious belief: Kuhn. Please read the link to gain some understanding of Kuhn.

But why does he come up in The Trace of God? In chapter 1 I’m explainingwhy we need to make arguments for God rather than just go out and get scientific “proof” of God. I explain why the atheist demand for scientific proof of God is really an unfair demand. In so doing I present Kuhn as a means of understanding the limitations in science. The atheist is expecting this relative construct of human thought to give us definitive information about the basis of reality (God).

Kuhn shows us that all of those things that atheists take as “facts” will be seen as anomalies in another generation.

Hi Joe –

That makes sense. I really wasn’t trying to derail you conversation with my bonnet full of wild bees.

Yes of course I agree with your broad aim entirely. And I have to apologise if I came over as a spanner in the works man – it’s just me being an Englishman :laughing: .

Obviously you and Jason have an apologetic purpose in your discussion here to find a middle space between Jason’s metaphysical apologetic and your work which is based on sifting subjective data for the same purpose. Atheists – well not all Atheists but certainly the Dennet and Dawkins crowd – want to dismiss all religious experience as a form of mental illness, as a malignant meme. Freud said something similar – but his methodology had less claims to objectivity. I personally think the whole New Atheist project is absolute tosh and certainly in the UK it seems to be pretty widely derided now even by atheists and agnostics. There was a hilarious article by an agnostic comedian in a UK paper imagining Richard Dawkins grabbing the microphone from Martin Luther King when he was making his famous ‘I have a dream speech’ and shouting testily at the crowd, ‘Stop listening to this rubbish. What you really need to do is read a good biology text book (and I’d recommend one of my own of course)’.:smiley:

We all come from different perspectives at things. And I appreciate the Wuthnow and Noble indicators of religious experience you’ve cited. Yes I’d agree that these are excellent criteria for evaluating healthy religious experience that is life transforming in a most excellent way. It may be because of early experience – but not just this – but I guess I come at this from a slightly different perspective of being aware of varieties of religious experience not all of which are healthy and some of which can destroy people. And I think my main concern in life has not been so much an apologetic one but a pastoral one of discernment in these matters.

So I’ll just outline some stuff and then I’ll let you proceed apace (Jason can tag me if he thinks I might have something useful to say).

This definition of the mystical as a state of experience of undifferentiated unity – it sounds very much akin to the via negative mysticism that we find in the tradition of Dionysus the Areopagite though the Cloud of Unknowing. This is certainly one form of religious experience. But there are others which are to do with sensual visionary experiences – via positiva ones of seeing the world in a grain of sand a heaven in a wild flower for example.

And something that’s always interested me is the fit between the type of person having the experience and the type of experience itself. William James’ chapters on the experiences of those who are ‘Sick Souls’ and the experience of those who are Healthy Minded in their appropriation of religious experience are wonderful on this score.

Atheists may say that religious experience is the result of mental illness. That’s really overstating the case. But people of different temperaments – some of which can become pathological if taken to extremes – have slightly different types of religious experience. So sometime the two can be linked. I’m thinking of George Fox and his terrible struggles with scrupulosity– a condition that a number of lovely people here struggle with. And the basic sanity of his conclusions from his struggles with scrupulosity and all of the temptations to blaspheme and utter profanities that seemed to assail him. He didn’t; accuse himself in the end – He cried to God ‘Lord why is it that I am assailed by these when I have nothing but love for thee, And was given the reply so that you may have a sense of all conditions and be able to minister unto all conditions’. That’s a healthy response. But I also remember many examples of pathological masochism detailed by James in his chapter on saintliness for example.

I note also – of interest to many people here – that Jonathan Edwards actually wrote some very beautiful stuff on his own via positive mystical experiences of apprehending God in nature – and these experiences built him up. However, the work that he is most known for here is Sinners in the hands of an Angry God. Delivered in a monotone to a congregation in this men got down on all ground and barked like animals and woman and children screamed in terror. Since his revivals seemed to lead to burn out in the areas of his visitation I see this as purely negative emotional stimulation. I’m well acquainted with the Calvinist literature of seventeenth century England and how total depravity teaching often completely undermined people and induced pathological states from which some recovered, some went mad beyond retrieval and some killed themselves. That’s one example of negative religious experience and I often worry about Calvinist sermons with dreary and threatening musical back tracks on the internet today. MY experience is that they often have a devastating effect on people.

That’s just one example of religious experience or experience induced in the name of religion actually being, at least for some (and not just a few), a cul de sac of destruction (although for a few it might be the door to transformation. I’ve used it because lots of people here have issues with it. I would always want to draw a distinction between good and bad religious experiences – and what is purely emotional stimulation leading to unhealthy states of consciousness and what actually leads to the love that builds up

Joe,

I just wanted to tell you that I received my copy of your book. Looks like it’s going to be good. Thanks! :smiley:

I don’t want to derail the thread, but Joe I was tooling around your site a little bit. Your article on kephale as source is exactly how I see it, and just to tie into this thread, was revealed to me in a vision, and has become a defining point for my theology. Its very exciting for me to see some historical backing for this.

Also your models of revelation article is wonderful, and very much how I view these things, as far as I’ve skimmed the article. ( I have my first book by Keryni sitting on my counter, waiting for some vacation time to dig in. )

This is the article for other readers on revelation
doxa.ws/Bible/Models_rev.html

Jason thanks for bringing Joe here, the timing of me coming back on this site after almost a year, and being introduced to Joe’s work is serendipitous for me.

great. glad you like it. thanks for buying it. At least that’s one. A small step for Joe, let’s hope not the only step for Joe.

that’s cool. do you know about the egalitarian movement? It’s mostly evangelicals women and men, they seek to uphold an evangelical framework but view the teachings of the bible in a more fair less gender biased light. They have a big movement. There are a lot scholars that support it.

I have a whole section on Doxa (my web site) defending the egal position:

This section contains lots of articles

No no I didn’t take it that way. I just thought some readers “out there” might think it’s about the mystics if I followed my inclination and began talking about them.

ahhahaah he probably would too. I’ve been saying this for years, let’s see Dawkins ride the bus with the freedom riders.

That was my perspective too. I only discovered these studies doing apologetic. The book should be of interest to more than just the apologetics crowd.

Have you read Stace? Hood et al don’t rule out a person as a mystic merely because they have sensual oriented phenomena. They tend to assign that to the larger umbrella of STE. James talks about people with physical phenomena. For Hood it’s based upon validating Stace. I’m not sure of all of Stace’s reasons for limiting it to that, but I think was part of the literature for a lot longer, even Underhill uses that same criteria.

Those are great comments. I wont add anything and I don’t disagree with anything. I appreciate your contribution.

I will say this about the definition of “beyond word, thought, or image.” Stace uses that and Underhill before him (he may have gotten it from her). I talk about this in the book, really it does need to be overhauled. For example there two kinds of experience, introvertive and extroversion. The intro is without words thought or image, can’t be described. The extra is usually keyed through nature and is triggered by scenes of nature.

Pretty much all the examples one finds are extrovertive since introvertive can’t be described. Then there’s the sense of the numinous which usually accompanies the undifferentiated sense of unity, that is the sense of the holy, a special nature to things. That is keyed through visual sense too.

Then the noetic aspects, when one feels that one has gained from the experience a rational knowledge, such as “God is love.” All of these are exceptions to the definition and they illustrate its inadequacy. But that is part and parcel of the experience as a whole, describing it is always problematic. The nature of mysticism is always bound up with language problems.

I’m busy at ‘work’ work today (and probably tomorrow, too), so I’m only passing through today – I may not be able to continue the interview until Friday. Hopefully people will be comfortable continuing to ask Joe questions about the work in his book.

As a quick sidequestion meanwhile, are there more direct connections between mystical experience and Kuhn’s paradigm shifting?

Also, the whole topic of paradigm shifting is, I think, super-important not only for minority beliefs (such as ourselves, or for that matter Christians of any kind in other cultures around the world), but also for understanding and working through apologetics and evangelism – and for understanding how people deconvert out of Christianity, too! (Generally more people leave Christianity than are born out of it in the Western world.)

So I wouldn’t mind if someone started a new thread on that soon before I get around to doing so :wink: , and if Joe guest-contributed to that discussion that would be nifty.

(Not even kidding guys, Joe has access to a lot of material I think would be interesting to a wide variety of people here, even if maybe for different types of person. I know several people here who would love to hear about his work with Mexican social revolutionaries, just to give one example! :laughing: If you wanted to start a thread a week on various topics here, which of course just happened to promote the book along the way :mrgreen: , I think you’d enjoy the audience, Joe.)

Joe,

I’ve been reading some and scanning some here, and I’m wondering . . . some of the language is a bit over my head I’m afraid . . . what exactly IS a mystic? How do you define it? Sometimes people tell me I am one, but I never thought so. I’d be curious to know more about the definitions of mysticism.

Thanks! Cindy

I really answered that above. A mystic is one who has mystical experiences. I think in the traditional sense you have to have them for at least 30 minutes and more than once (they usually last 30 minutes if it’s the Undifferentiated unity). But the modern researchers in social science call all their respondents who have such experiences mystics weather they have more than once or not.

Mystical experience is an experience of the undifferentiated unity of all things, it’s one, accompanied by the sense of the numinous (the sense of the Holy–special quality to the experience that gives it an aspect of the sublime). It can be either beyond words, thoughts, or images, or it can be keyed to experience of nature. A lot of people experience such things when out in nature or looking at the stars at night.

It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that woolgathering or being amazed by beauty or experiencing the sublime is mystical.