The Experience of Faith
“The faith which founds the Church and by which she lives is not a mere assent to a ‘doctrine,’ but her living relationship to certain events: the Life, Death, Resurrection and Glorification of Jesus Christ, his Ascension to heaven, the descent of the Holy Spirit on the ‘last and great day’ of Pentecost—a relationship which makes her a constant ‘witness’ and ‘participant’ of these events, of their saving, redeeming, life-giving and life-transfiguring reality. She has indeed no other experience but the experience of these events; no other life but the ‘new life’ they always generate and communicate. Her faith thus is not only not detachable from her experience, but is indeed that experience itself—the experience of that ‘which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands’ (I John 1:1). For none of these events can be known, in the rational meaning of that word, nor even believed in outside the experience which reveals their reality and makes us ‘witness to these things.’ But then theology cannot be anything else but the ‘description’ of that experience, its revelation in human words and concepts. The Church is not an institution that keeps certain divinely revealed ‘doctrines’ and ‘teachings’ about this or that event of the past, but the very epiphany of these events themselves. And she can teach about them, because, first of all, she knows them; because she is the experience of their reality. Her faith as teaching and theology is rooted in her faith as experience. Her lex credendi is revealed in her life.”
—Alexander Schmemann, “Liturgy and Theology”
17 January 2008 |
tags: Liturgy
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This is a truth I wish I knew deeply, that is, I wish I could say I held these epiphanies as the Church is said to above, rather than knowing them speculatively. It is easier to study theology than it is to insert one’s self in the narrative of the Church.
I guess this is something that is done through the Church, which is my first problem.
Yes, yes, you are certainly right. Part of the reason I appreciated this short article so much was that Schmemann really made clear how much of the church’s faith rests upon a real encounter with God, an encounter that one must wrestle with intellectually but which is also profoundly affective, profoundly a matter of experience. For we who so enjoy the life of the intellect, it can be much more difficult to nourish and treasure this affective part of faith—despite the fact that this part is very much required to make our own existence into a true epiphany of God’s saving acts. And I take it that a crucial bit of Schmemann’s argument here is that without the constant experience of the liturgy, theology will never really keep hold of human existence.