Perspectief 2016-34

Perspectief 22 Prof. dr. Gabriel Monet experience and as a story to be shared and lived together. Seeking to define the structural problem of experience, Gerhard Ebeling highlights some characteristics of experience in general 5 . He distinguishes four links that underlie all experience. First, the experience definitely includes the relationship to life. Moreover, even if the connection of experience to life tends to highlight this as an essential part of the experience, it cannot be done without its relation to history, the memory being a key element that helps make somebody “an experienced person”. Ebeling underlines as well that in its relation to reality, the experience did not capture “the general timelessness” but “knowledge of the particular”, and that it is important to be aware of the “fragmentary nature of all life experience”. Even if to a certain extent it may be possible to discern an anticipation of a more global sense. Finally, as soon as one seeks to rely on the experience as a criterion of truth, the fact that the experience is related to sensory perception induces the necessary distinction between inner experience and external experience, but above all, the fact that one cannot exist without impacting the other. So based on this fourfold relationship of experience to life, to history, to reality and to perception, Ebeling comes to question the religious experience. However, he refuses to consider the link to religious experience as an additional polarity that would be added to the other, and then seeks to deconstruct the opposition between religious and secular experience. All religious experience is related to life, history, reality and perception. Mutual recognition would benefit from being thought and lived under this perspective of experience in all its facets, and then to be told as a story. Doctrines, especially in today’s context, are somehow relativized 6 , and may even not be understood by many outside the churches. That’s why the church has the vocation to become the “hermeneutic of the Gospel”, as Lesslie Nebigin developed it 7 . This is true in the perspective of the missionary 5 Gerhard Ebeling, “La plainte au sujet du défaut d’expérience en théologie et la question de son objet”, Etudes théologiques et religieuses 81 (2006/1), p. 1-23. 6 I have considered and deepened this aspect in Gabriel Monet, L’Eglise émergente (Berlin: LIT, 2014), p. 85-87, 315-339. Orthodoxy (right beliefs) should usefully be balanced with orthopraxy (right practices) and orthopathy (a right heart). 7 Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), p. 227: “How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? I am suggesting that the only