Episode 15: Dale C. Allison Jr. – Encountering Mystery

Jared  

You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Pete  

I’m Pete Enns.

Jared  

And I’m Jared Byas.

Intro  

Pete  

Hey folks, it’s me Pete. Before we get started with our episode today, I wanted to bug you with some info about our May class. Now I know you’ve been hearing a lot about our classes, but bear with me because this class is going to be the best yet—because I’m the one teaching it! It’s called “The History of Biblical Interpretation” and it’s happening live on May 31st from 8-9:30pm ET. And it’s a one night class surveying the seven stages of interpretation from Second Temple Judaism to post-modernity, which I am so excited to teach about.

So it’s pay what you can until the class ends and then it costs $25 to download. And if you want to access this class and future classes, yes, past and future, you can get that for $12/month through our community The Society of Normal People. And for more information and to sign up for the class, go to www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/interpretation.

Now getting into today’s episode, I’m talking about a great topic with a great guy. The topic is “Encountering Mystery” with Dale Allison Jr. Dale is the Richard J. Dearborn professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary—not too far from where I live—and his academic research and publications are all over the place: mainly like historical Jesus, he’s got a great Matthew commentary out there, Second Temple Judaism, and a bunch of other things. And his newest book, which is going to be the basis for this discussion, is called “Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age.” And don’t forget to stay tuned at the end of the episode for Quiet Time where Jared is going to jump back in with me, and we’re going to reflect on this conversation with Dale. All right, folks, let’s dive in.

Dale

Pete  

Alright, Dale, welcome to the podcast.

Dale  

Happy to be here!

Pete  

This is your second time!

Dale  

Yes, it is. First time went well.

Pete  

I’m guessing you don’t watch Saturday Night Live, but if you’ve been on that show hosting five times you get a jacket or something. So if we keep this up, we’ll be able to do this again.

Dale  

Okay, but I’ll talk to you anyway.

Pete  

Dale  

Well, first of all, just in general, I tend to write about anything that I’m really interested in, because I’m a writer, and it’s a vise, I don’t know how not to write. So when I get up in the morning, and I go through the day, and I don’t write, I feel terrible. So whenever I have a subject that I really care about, I write a book on it. And that’s why I wrote this book, I care about it. This subject, it seems to me, is intrinsically fascinating. That’s just the first thing. Reports of people’s religious experiences have always fascinated me. Secondly, I think they’re terribly important, because I don’t think they’re all simply to be dismissed as subjective projection, and hallucination, or the product of mental dysfunction. And the third reason I could write this book is that I don’t care what people think about me anymore. So when I was an assistant professor, and I wanted to be associate, I wouldn’t have published this book. And if I had been an associate looking to be full professor, I would not have published it. 

In fact, I wrote a book on this subject in the 1990s. But I was teaching as an adjunct. And I never published it, because I thought, I’ll never get a job if I do this. So that book never appeared. But the thing is, is that I’m in my- I’m 67 right now. And most of my career is behind me. I think I have three or four good books left in me, but I’ve got 20 behind me so I’ve already made my reputation and you know, for better or worse, and I really don’t care. So at this point, I feel I can be honest and that’s really what this book is about. This book is trying to be honest, this book is who I am. I think it is, by the way, what a lot of people would like to be or they would like to write a book like this, but they are afraid to. 

Sometimes I will give lectures on off beat subjects. And people I would never have suspected would have been interested or liked it came up afterwards and say, oh, yeah, I’m on board with that. And you couldn’t have guessed it from their scholarly publications at all. So I’m doing what a lot of people I think would like to do. But it’s also just, this subject really matters. So I wrote a book on George Harrison, and I love George, but this matters more than George Harrison, right? This is at the heart of my life.

Pete  

You wrote a book on George Harrison? 

Dale  

Sure, I did. “The Love There and That’s Sleeping.” 

Pete  

I love the Beatles!

Dale  

But look, if I’m looking at my life, and I’m being really honest, my whole career goes back to an experience I had when I was 16 years old. And it’s the experience I start this book, “Encountering Mystery,” with, and everything that I am professionally, and all my passion for religion, and my inability to live a normal life in the ordinary world, they all go back to this foundational event, or whatever you want to call it, trying to understand it. It changed my perception. It changed my priorities. You know, it’s like a conversion experience. 

Pete  

Would you mind relaying that story? 

Dale  

Okay, so I’m 16 years old, and I’m just an ordinary high school student getting ready for my senior year of high school. And I was in my parents’ backyard—and this is in Wichita, Kansas, this is in the 1970s and you could still see part of the night sky, it wasn’t totally occluded yet by all the artificial lights—so I was out there doing something. I wasn’t praying, I wasn’t meditating, I wasn’t thinking about God, I was just there, probably planning my summer. Then out of the blue something remarkable happened. I have no words for this—which is, of course, what the mystics always say, “I have no words,” but we’re gonna do it anyway. We pretend we have words. 

So, it was as though the stars came down somehow—I know that can’t happen—but it was as though the lights of the sky came down. They somehow surrounded me. And they announced the presence or the arrival of this mystery, this transcendent something. I had no word then, I have no word now, other than God, that’s just what this was experienced as. And this presence was exceedingly mysterious, was invisible but palpable, was affectionate and yet forbidding. It was an odd mixture of things. And I experienced this as something coming from outside myself, it did not feel as though I was projecting this. I wasn’t willing it. I wasn’t imagining this, it was some sort of event that came from the outside. 

And it didn’t last very long. I don’t know in retrospect, 10 to 20 seconds would be my guess, if I had to guess. And then when it was over with, my life was completely changed. And by the way, this is part of what’s so important to me—that these sort of events, even if they are brief, can completely remake or direct human lives. And it’s just a very important psychological fact, no matter who you are, you just need to take this into account. And so in my time and place, this is Wichita, Kansas, this is the 1970s. I’m a high school student, to whom do you speak about this? 

Well, I had friends, and some of them happened to be Evangelical Christians, and they are the only ones who wanted to talk about it. And of course, they interpreted it for me, they told me, I had just gotten saved, and that Jesus had come into my life. As I say in the book, there was in retrospect, no Christological element, if I’m being honest, there really wasn’t. But I ended up in an Evangelical church for a brief time because of this experience. I wasn’t happy there, didn’t last long, and I read myself out of it, and into modern philosophy and modern theology and modern Biblical Studies and all the rest. But that’s how the whole thing gets started. With this exceedingly mysterious thing. 

And it’s about a year later that I have a professor in college who assigns William James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” And I plugged into that book, I said, “Oh, okay, this guy knows who I am. He knows what happened to me. And there are other people like this, and comparable experiences, it is possible to think critically and rationally about these sorts of things.” By the way, I went back to William James—just a sidebar here—I went back to William James when I was writing the book on George Harrison. And there’s a chapter in there that perfectly describes George, absolutely perfectly, and I thought, “This is magic.” This is a guy who lived long before the Beatles, doesn’t know anything about George Harrison, and he just described this person in really accurate interesting ways. So that also sort of haunts me that you could pick out a religious type without knowing the individual, right? Anyway. 

So I’ve had several other experiences, I guess of a like nature, if you want to call them that. One of the things they have in common is that I didn’t seek them, they all were truly out of the blue, I mean, truly unprepared for. And actually, so I’m a Christian. And my vocabulary for that is, or the word is, “grace,” because these were experienced as gifts, not things that I earned or was looking for, they really were out of the blue. And I, again, I’ve had several of these, and they are like the enthusiastic convert, sometimes you’ll listen to a convert, and the convert will say, “God entered my life and changed everything and I didn’t do it. I was not the subject, I was the object of this activity.” And that’s how this felt. So there’s a doctrine of grace, at least for me in here, or at least these experiences illustrate this Christian notion of grace.

Pete  

Let me ask you, because you mentioned that you’ve had several such similar kinds of experience.

Dale  

Yeah, mhmm.

Pete  

And maybe different topics and whatnot, and others have too.

Dale  

Sure.

Pete  

Many others have not. So how—Why you? Why not me?

Dale  

Look, there’s no answer to this, right? Absolutely no answer at all. Now, I do have an un-theological conjecture about this, okay?

Pete  

Go ahead.

Dale  

But if I’m talking pastorally, it’s just, life happens. Things happen. You don’t pick your parents, nothing is fair. Things are random. So maybe you can stand back and develop some kind of doctrine of providence. As a Presbyterian I’m supposed to, but I don’t really work on it. Okay? Things just happen.

Ad Break  

Pete  

Well, your book is, I do love it and I recommend it to a lot of people, “Encountering Mystery,” and you cover so many topics in there. And we’re probably not going to get to all of them but one I would like you to touch on is things having to do with death, like they can be near death experiences, or, you know, I’ve read a lot on deathbed experiences that people have had and out of body consciousness—things in that sort of realm. Do you have any experiences with that? And maybe you could get us up to speed a little bit on maybe some of the scholarship, there are people who are actually looking into this kind of stuff? 

Dale  

Oh, yeah, there are. So, for example, there’s a professor at the University of Virginia in the department of Perceptual Studies named Bruce Grayson, who is an academic, and he’s not approaching this from a theological point of view. He is a scholar, and he spent his professional career—or most of it—interviewing people about their experiences in and around death. And, you know, if you want to learn something about the subject, his book on this—which came out last year, I think—is a really nice place to begin. But the point is—is that he’s not alone. 

There have been serious people looking at near death experiences in large numbers since the latter part of the 70s. So there was a book by a man named Raymond Moody that came out, “Life After Life,” and it was a bestseller, and it sort of begat this discipline. And I think at this point, we know several things. One is we know that there’s a collection of motifs that come up again and again, when people are talking about what they say happened to them when they were near death, or their heart had stopped, or they were on the operating table, that sort of thing. So we actually know a lot about the phenomenology of it, and everybody agrees it’s a real experience. So we’re past the point where a skeptic would say, “well, you’re just making this up, it doesn’t really happen.” 

The real questions now are, how do you explain it? Or, what does it mean? Or, how should you incorporate this experience into your therapy? If you’re a counselor. That sort of thing. But everybody admits, okay, this is a real thing, my own inclination—now, by the way, this book is not a book of apologetics. I’m not out to prove anything, but at points I will say, I think the data here suggests this or it opens this possibility, right? And so when it comes to near death experiences, the experiences themselves take place in a subjective world. 

However, once in a while, somebody will report seeing something or knowing something that they couldn’t see or know, given where they were physically and given the state of their body or their consciousness. There are several famous examples of this, somebody going up—apparently—above a hospital and seeing some tennis shoes, you know, red tennis shoes that are on the roof, and then going later and finding them there. Okay, so you can attack any particular incident because it’s always possible to be a doubter or a skeptic. But the thing that impresses me is that we’re now at the point where, where we have literally hundreds of testimonies from doctors, surgeons, nurses, ambulance personnel, who will say, “I was with so-and-so. So-and-so was completely knocked out. And then so-and-so later on told me things that were happening down the hall, or that were happening in the room above,” this sort of thing. And look, if you have one or two or three of these stories, okay, you could just say, “Probably not.” But if you have literally hundreds of them now, which we do, I think they are suggestive. 

So they don’t prove life after death. But they are suggesting that things are not exactly as I learned them in my college biology textbooks, right? In my college biology text, there was no place for perception, apart from, you know, my eyes and my ears and so on. There’s no way, if you’re unconscious, or under anesthesia, you can see what’s going on. In some other parts of the hospital, it’s not possible. So that means that our current models are constricted, they’re not taking in all the data, they can’t explain everything. 

There’s another part of this that you could say breaks the pure subjectivity. So there are reports of people who are at deathbeds, and they share the near death experience. Now, this is really odd, but people will say, you know, I went down the tunnel of light and there was, you know, an angel or my relatives or something at the end of the tunnel, that sort of thing. But we have some reports of people who said, you know, “So-and-so was dying, and I saw the vision too. That is, I was with this person, or seeing this person going down the tunnel of light.” I had a pastor—I just talked to him a few weeks ago—he was telling me about some recent event on a deathbed and he said, there were several of us there. And we saw some sort of weird light form emerging from the body when the person expired. 

Now, you know, I don’t know what to do with that, but I don’t want to be the sort of person who says, “Bah, can’t happen, you’re lying. Or all of you made it up, you all hallucinated.” So, if I get enough of these reports, if I get enough such reports of the same sort of phenomenon that I say, maybe we have a phenomenon here, and let’s think about it. And by the way, these things are just intrinsically fascinating, aren’t they? Who would say, “I don’t care if people see lights escaping from bodies when they die? That’s of no interest to anybody.”

Pete 

The thing is, Dale, I mean, you would think that, right? But I’ve been pondering, I guess, maybe over the last several, very few years, why this stuff isn’t a little more mainstream than it is? It’s still, you’re still looked at as a little bit kooky but why do you think—this is just like, if you bring this up at a dinner conversation, you could just freeze the room pretty quickly, and people don’t want to engage.

Dale  

So I think there’s a very long history of prejudice here that goes back centuries. Maybe it goes back before the Reformation but here’s how I think about it: The skepticism is both within the church and without the church. And I think that the skepticism outside the church actually comes from the skepticism within the church. So what I mean is, that when you have the Protestant Reformation, and when Martin Luther and John Calvin get things going, the Catholic apologists, among other things, are saying, “but look at all our miracles.” You know, people see Mary, and statues bleed, and they move, and we’re way better at casting out demons than you are, Protestants—which is still true today. I don’t know what that’s about, but Protestants are terrible at casting out demons!

Pete  

We’re too busy fighting doctrine. Anyway. 

Dale  

Oh, okay! Well, maybe so.

Pete  

Yeah.

Dale  

Anyway, the point is that very early on, many Protestants became cessationists. And they said, Okay, well, there were no miracles after Constantine, or there were no miracles after the New Testament appeared, that sort of thing. And so they explained them all away. And they typically—when they justified this—would say, “Well, if they’re not legends, then people were hallucinating or the devil was making them see things.” But these were not good explanations. They were just things they threw at stuff that they didn’t like. Alright? 

Pete  

Yeah. 

Dale  

Now, that continues on with the mainstream churches who don’t like the Methodists when they show up. It continues with the mainstream churches and the Pentecostals, we don’t—

Pete  

This is all political, is what you’re saying- [Chuckling]

Dale  

Well! But you see, the skepticism also derives from the Enlightenment, the Deists in the Enlightenment. And these Deists—actually, I think you can draw genealogy, you could show Hume as reading Locke, and Locke as reading the Cessationists. I mean, modern skepticism comes straight out, I think, of the Reformation—And then that feeds 19th century, especially German, materialism. And, you know, we get the sort of skepticism that then becomes the default position for our society, both in our general education—there were no miracles, there was nothing strange or odd in my public education, kindergarten through college, just nothing. Everything, everything was explained, and plain, and straightforward and maybe we needed to learn a few more things about electrons or DNA. But you know, we pretty much had it all down, right. 

And that then envelops us, and it still is here. Now, I think I can tell from opinion polls, that things are a little better now than they were 50 years ago. Actually, the drug culture changed some things in the 60s and weirdly enough “The X-Files” and strange things like that got people to thinking unconventional thoughts, and then cable TV, and whatever people watch now, you know, with all their shows about mediums, and so on. Those things actually impact the culture. So people are more open minded than they used to be, it’s still the case that I can lecture to a class of students and talk about a particular offbeat subject. And then everybody leaves except one student, and a student comes up and, of course, it’s always the same thing: “This happened to me, you’re the first person I told” or “I’ve only told my, my wife, or you know, whatever, my best friend,” but it’s a secret. It’s a secret. And that’s another reason I wrote this book. I don’t want people to feel they have to keep secrets about really important things that happen to them. Right?

Pete  

Right, right. 

Dale  

But also, I know that—so I don’t just speak about positive experiences in this book, I also speak of negative experiences, and there are negative spiritual experiences. And I know more than one person because of my work, who has said, “You know, such-and-such has happened to me several times, I didn’t know what to make of it, now I know that this is a recognizable syndrome. I now can explain part of it. I’m not alone.” There’s a handle for this, right? It’s not just some, “I’m alone in the universe and something weird is happening to me.” And so, that’s really important to me, that people—again, it’s just being honest. Look, I think this book is just reporting what goes on in the world. 

Pete  

Yeah.

Dale  

That’s it. I’m just being honest!

Pete  

Can I just, I mean, to whet people’s appetite for the book, I do have a brief quote here from page 153, which I think restates what we’ve been talking about. You say, “My conviction is this: if enough people independently report the same sort of experience, that is reason to take note. Similar firsthand accounts suggest similar real events. The issue of what accounts for those events may remain in the air, yet if patterns exist, they constitute data.” So you have these patterns and people’s experiences that they report. 

Dale  

Mhmm.

Pete  

And that’s something worth taking seriously.

Dale  

Yes. So, one of the things I do in this book is I don’t give you a particular story and say, “Wow, that settles this.” I never do that. What I do from beginning to end is say, look at all these stories, which are saying the same sort of thing. Actually, I think I’m a sort of naturalist here. I think it’s like walking around in the world and noticing that a number of trees have the same sort of leaves, and that at some point, you say, “Oh, we’re gonna call them elm trees.” And now we have a species, and we can study the species, right? That’s what I’m doing. I’m taking human testimony and I’m putting it into piles. I’m saying, okay, that goes into this pile that goes into that pile. 

There are also reports that don’t go into any pile. You know, that’s just eccentric, odd, weird, I don’t know what to do with it. The world is a weird place and human beings are really weird. But that’s all I think I’m doing. Now again, I think that’s William James. And it’s also picking up on the work of Aleister Hardy who was a famous scientist who taught at Oxford for many years and got interested in religion at one point and just started collecting testimony from modern individuals, Christian, secular, everybody, and this started in the 60s and the 70s. 

So back then, you know, people would write in little letters—and you know, today you would email everything—but what he did is he started collecting these and as he began to get more and more, he realized that he had categories. You know, here’s a bunch of stories, and they’re pretty much the same thing. Or, here are stories, and they’re very closely related. So that’s what we’ve done with near death experiences now. We now have an experience, it’s messy, not everybody reports the same thing, and so on, and so on. But roughly speaking, there’s a species here, right? Maybe there are subspecies and so on. But there’s a thing here, and it’s real and we can talk about it. And we can debate whether oxygen deprivation is what’s causing it [Chuckle]. We can wonder what it has to do with God, we can ask all these questions, but it’s real.

Pete  

Right.

Dale  

So again, one testimony isn’t data, but it’s the old analogy; So if you have a twig, you can break it. But if you have enough thin sticks, and you put them together you can’t break it, they actually constitute something that has force. And that’s what William James was doing and that’s what I think I’m doing in the book. So if you look at it correctly, testimony in the aggregate, if critically sifted and sorted, can show you something. Again, I should stress that, when we’re doing this, I think we should look everywhere. 

So there are people now who’ve thought, “Okay, if near death experiences are truly cross cultural and cross temporal, if they’re part of the human experience, do you think we could find—what would happen if we read missionary accounts of indigenous peoples? You know, when they showed up? Are there these sorts of reports? Or when you know, the colonizers first went to, you know, here and introduced their religion? Do we have any reports from what the natives thought and so on?” And we do have these books now. We do have these people who’ve gone through this stuff and say, “Oh, sure enough, we can find this there, too, we can find this there.” 

So there’s enough to say that while culture shapes these things, and informs these things, and so on, and so on, there’s something here behind near death experiences, which is more than just culture. It’s more than the projection of individuals influenced by culture. And that’s what I’m trying to do with all of these experiences, is just make the same sort of move. I’m trying to say three things, alright? First, I’m trying to say this exists. Secondly, it is really important to the people who have this experience. And thirdly, maybe it’s suggestive of something that doesn’t fit my secular education or your secular education.

Ad Break  

Pete  

You have another quote that I love on page 171, this is shorter, but, “We should not shrink experience to fit our understanding, but enlarge our understanding to take on experience,” and I’m very much drawn to that personally. But I do know quite a few theological traditions that would take issue with a claim like this, because who cares about your experience, you’re a sinful worm, and you have nothing to add to this beyond the objective word of God and the tradition. But you’re saying that our experience matters, in I think understanding reality, and maybe even the next step, understanding God?

Dale  

Okay, so first of all, I don’t think that there is anybody who doesn’t pay attention to experience, even the people who say they’re not, they are. So this for me, this actually goes back to the so-called “Methodist Quadrilateral.” And the idea that theology has four sources, right? Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Now, that’s usually thought of as a sort of prescriptive program. “This is what we should do.” My own view, is that it’s not prescriptive, because it’s descriptive. This is what we are all doing. We are all reading, interpreting, thinking, doing theology, within our traditions, we’re always using reason, we’re appealing to experience consciously or unconsciously, whether we knew it or not, when we’re reading the Bible. So that’s the first thing. 

And if then I’m going to draw a box, let’s say with, you know, scripture, reason, tradition, experience around it, then theology in the middle, what you produce, the lines around the box are going to be dotted. In fact, for me, there’s going to be more space than there is ink. And it’s the same thing for me with a worldview. Worldviews are helpful, worldviews are instructive. But the lines that formed the box need to be broken lines, they need to be open. Because again, you don’t want to do what the early Protestants did, which is say, “That doesn’t fit my theology, therefore, it didn’t happen. Or if it happened, it was a demon,” right? That’s just wrong. 

It’s the same thing with a dogmatic secular materialist, who wants to explain away everything, right? And who knows ahead of time, what can and can’t happen in the world. I am more open minded, in part because of things that have happened to me and because of the people I’ve spoken with, and people I trust, and so on. I think the world is a really weird place. And I don’t think it’s the place that I was taught it was in high school, and college—by the way, just popped into my head here. But you asked, why do these things happen to some people and not others?

Pete  

Asking for a friend. 

Dale  

So here we go. I am a modern person, [Laughs] right? I may sometimes sound like I’m not, but I’m a modern critical person. So I think about genetics. So here’s the thing, I have had any number of odd experiences. My wife has had several odd experiences. All of my children are mystics, and visionaries, and have really unbelievable stories to tell. And my father and his family had these stories. Whether my mother’s family did, I don’t know. But almost everything has a genetic component. And I’m simply wondering if there’s a genetic component to this? So the way to conceptualize this vaguely for me is: Celtic Christianity has the notion of a thin place, that is, there are these places where you’re more likely to run into God, right? Or have a transcendent or mystical experience. 

Okay, well, I think some people are thinner than others. You know, however, that works, neuroscientifically, of course, I would have no idea and I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I like the image of some people who are thinner than others. I think I know some people who are so thin, it’s bad and dangerous and terrible, and you don’t want to be in their world. And then I know other people who just have completely, [Laughing] I don’t know, secular lives. I don’t know what the word I’m looking for is, but they can’t even imagine that there are families like mine, where, you know, perfectly healthy people make claims that would seem outrageous to them. So, maybe there’s a genetic component.

Pete  

Yeah, maybe, I mean… There’s a genetic component for most anything, in a sense, right? 

Dale  

Yeah.

Pete  

I mean, because that’s, you know, we’re… That is the code of life. And, you know, there are probably things in there that would help explain this. And I do think that, you know, getting back to Protestants and cessationism, and how that has influenced—I mean, that was my education, it was very clear, like, this stuff doesn’t have any…

Dale  

Oh wow, really?

Pete  

We have the Bible, these things don’t happen. There’s no healings or things like that. I was a little bit uncomfortable with sort of putting God in a box like that. But I can also understand how the attraction of that is to give some stability and some predictability to existence. And you have the box with the lines and it’s, it’s more space than dots, right? But again, just that’s mystery, right? You’re saying that what we have to deal with the mystery part of it. We don’t know everything. 

Dale  

Yeah.

Dale  

But the other thing is, I think, religion and faith and the Bible and theology are part of life, and if I look at life, [Chuckles] life is hard, and life is messy, and life is confusing. And I think what we sometimes want the Bible to be or theology to be is the one safe place where things are no longer messy, or everything is clear, everything is easy and I just don’t find that anywhere. I find difficulty and confusion and mess absolutely everywhere, including in the scriptures.

Pete  

Mhmm.

Dale  

So I don’t have a place I can go where everything makes sense and is in perfect order. But I think people want that.

Pete  

I mean, you know, not to throw terms around. But I think those who struggle with OCD, for example, there’s a lot of comfort in familiarity and predictability and many of us crave that. And it’s understandable, but I think it’s hard to live that way, in my opinion, because, like you said, it’s so messy and unpredictable and things happen one year that 10 years earlier, you said would never possibly be on the radar screen, and there it is. 

Dale  

Uh-huh.

Pete  

So maybe we need to get used to this whole idea of not knowing.

Dale  

So, I am fine with that. But… I’ve sometimes wondered, why are some people okay with doubt? Why are some people looking for certainty? And I suppose at the end of the day, I do have a sort of—I don’t think I would ever use the word certainty—but I have this foundational conviction and I really believe it. So maybe I’m deluded, but I really think that there is a God and I really think that the divinity loves us and I think that divinity, in the end, will win. 

Now, for me, I actually don’t need a whole lot more in order in order to feel safe. That is, if I have these things, which are consistent with my experience and I’d like to think consistent with some rational reflection. If I have these things, then I’m free to, you know, wonder about this, that and the other thing, because at the end of the day, I do have some sort of—I don’t know, if you want to call it foundational conviction—but yeah, at the end of the day, I think there is a God and that God is love, even though I can’t always harmonize that with the world I see. But when I have those two things, that gives me a freedom.

Pete  

Right. Is it fair to say that your Christian faith is very much informed by this embrace and encounter with mystery? 

Dale  

Yes. Yes, it… It’s… I think, with these experiences, okay? I think with them, so they have made me think a lot about the natural world, because the three experiences that I begin the book with, all involve the natural world in one way or another, the first experience which I talked about earlier, having to do with the stars, that was an experience under the night sky. And my second experience—which I won’t talk about here—was of a cemetery landscape being transformed before my eyes and becoming this incredible transfigured scene. And the third one was some kind of visionary thing. I don’t even know how to conceptualize it. Sometimes I think about Paul, in the body or out of the body, he couldn’t even figure it out, right?

Pete  

I don’t know, yeah [Chuckles].

Dale  

Okay, my experience is kind of like that. But whatever it is, it’s a vision of some place that was like a nature landscape, it was some sort of beautiful, unbelievable, incredible, natural landscape. So these experiences make me want to connect God and nature in some way, they moved me to think that the natural world can be a vehicle for encountering the divine. And…

Pete  

Mhmm.

Dale  

So, that’s one instance of these things… Well, let me give you one more example. And this one is really hard, because I know how people feel. But this this visionary thing I had, where I said, I don’t know if I was in-body or out-of-body—I was in a place. I was in a magical, mysterious place, and it was kind of like leaving the Kansas Dust Bowl and going to Oz. Alright, I mean, it’s the same thought sort of thing. Except I wasn’t- It was not a dream. I was in this land of Oz and when I was in it, I remember thinking, if all the pain and agony, the injustice, and the hatred, and the crimes, and the screaming, throughout all of history, if it were all to be poured into this place, it would just dissipate in an instant. 

Pete  

Mhmm.

Dale  

Now, I can’t say that to somebody who’s been in the Holocaust, right? 

Pete  

Right.

Dale  

I can’t say, you know, “I’ve been to a place where your experience doesn’t matter.” But for myself, thinking to myself, I think, “You know what, it’s actually possible, I think, to be in a place where all of this is overcome.” And maybe that’s what the end is, or maybe that’s what God’s victory is at the end or something like that. So, you know, even my thinking about eschatology can be informed by an experience. 

Dale  

So that’s what I meant by “I think with these things.” 

Pete  

Yeah. 

Dale  

And they’re always there. They don’t go. I don’t have them and forget them.

Pete  

Yeah. Well, I’m hoping that people listening to this will—and many of our listeners are Christian, even if deconstructing or not entirely comfortable with their inherited faith and many others who aren’t Christian at all—but I hope that they, maybe have had that crack opening a bit to look at reality maybe a little bit differently and to, I guess, to question things, to be curious, right? You’re a curious guy, to be curious…

Dale  

Mhmm. Yeah.

Pete  

…to be questioning, to not jump to conclusions, but to accept things that you’re perceiving and experiencing and try to work with them. And to me, it sounds like a pretty good plan. I mean, again, speaking as a Christian myself, I can wake up into that in the morning and say, “Because I’m Christian, I want to be open and I want to think and I want to try to understand,” knowing that I won’t understand fully. 

Dale  

Uh-huh.

Pete  

That’s a serene place to be almost, in thinking through these things. There’s no pressure of getting it all right. We’re just investigating the mystery we can’t understand. And that’s okay. It could be worse, right? I mean…

Dale  

Pete

Well, Dale, listen, we can go on like this for days and I would love to, but I do want to thank you for being on this podcast and taking some time to speak with us.

Dale  

Well, I’m delighted to be here. I enjoyed the discussion. 

Pete  

Yeah. Always fun to talk with you. Thank you, Dale.

Dale  

Thank you very much.

Ad Break  

Jared  

And now for Quiet Time…

Pete  

…with Pete and Jared.

Jared  

Alright, Pete, I’m gonna give you a chance here at the beginning of this quiet time to redeem yourself. 

Pete  

Okay.

Jared  

When Dale described his mysterious experience, you asked, you know, “Why have you had these but others haven’t? Why not me?” But with more time, can you think of any experiences along these lines where you’ve encountered mystery in some unexplainable way?

Pete  

That’s—It’s tough for me, because I’m sort of not sure. Right. 

Jared  

Mhmm.

Pete  

I know, for example, I have relatives who are—to use Dale’s language—thin people. They’ve sensed and experienced things, some rather dramatically including visual things. Like my mother, who had died recently and you know, both in dreams but also not in dreams just like in a room or something. 

Jared  

You’re saying you had those experiences? 

Pete  

I had not. They did. That’s why- I mean, I’m getting these second-hand-

Jared  

Oh, people in your family had experiences of your mother. 

Pete  

Yeah, a couple of my nieces, right? 

Jared  

Oh, okay. 

Pete  

So maybe thin people runs in our family. 

Jared  

Yeah.

Pete  

Just skipped my generation, apparently—but so I think, you know, I can probably relay one thing—which I’ll say very briefly and I talked about in “Curveball”—of our pullout sofa that was pulled-out in the morning when we woke up and nobody did it. Like, we don’t know who did it. Like my mom said, “Did you sleep on the couch?” “No.” My dad didn’t, she didn’t, my sister and I didn’t. But it was completely undone. And my grandfather had died probably—my mother’s father—had died like a few weeks before that. And my mother, who was not bashful about this stuff, she just immediately concluded it was dad, her dad, telling her that she’s okay. We don’t know that. I mean, obviously, but it’s like, “Oh, wow, that’s interesting.” And that’s stuck with me, and not in a frightening way. But more like that’s interesting how that kind of stuff happens, but not too much. And a lot of what I’ve gotten is from reading the experiences of other people, and taking them seriously, even if I can’t share in those experiences. 

Jared  

It’s interesting you say that—and I’m gonna pick up on what you said about it not being a frightening way—because I think for me, when we talk about “thin people.” I grew up charismatic, and so we were taught to like, look for those experiences. And they were always terrifying to me as a kid, the idea that there wasn’t a difference between something like that, in a non-frightening way, and these charismatic experiences, and things you would like, see in “The Exorcist,” or something.

Pete  

Oh, right, right. Yeah.

Jared  

Like the demonic. It was very tied to the demonic. Like, usually, if things like that happened, it was demons…

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

…That needed to be exorcised. It wasn’t like a comforting thing. So, when I think about “thin,” it’s like, well, I think I’ve thickened myself over the years of like, “I don’t want to experience that” because it’s still terrifying.

Pete  

Yeah, I’m not really interested, either, to be honest with you, and it’s like-

Jared  

Yeah.

Pete  

You’re gonna have to surprise me or get me full of bourbon [Laughing] or something before that kind of stuff happens. 

Jared  

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

And I don’t want to be surprised in that way. Like, for me, I think something about intellectualizing my faith…

Pete  

Jared  

Intellectualizing my faith was a way to be a defense. It’s a way to sort of be distanced from that scary stuff.

Pete  

But I think a lot of us do that. Maybe, not for that reason, but other reasons, too. We just use the intellect to shield us from stuff. But I mean, speaking of scary, I do—again, in “Curveball”—I do talk about briefly an incident where my parents… They would like go to seances.

Jared  

Really?

Pete  

Which totally freaked my sister and I out, right. Well, sort of, like—for my mother’s benefit, I think largely—but they brought home once a book of spirit photography, right? Photography of apparitions, right, which like, absolutely made me not want to go into the house again. I was like, 10. But you know, I’ve watched things and I’ve read things and how that’s part of the history of the investigation of the—what we call the paranormal, right. And so now I find that interesting, but back then, it was a frightening thing. I mean, I was sometimes afraid to go into my own house. Because we were latchkey kids, like, “I’m not… No, I’m not- No. [Laughing] I’m gonna stay outside in the freezing weather ’til mom comes home.” So yeah, there was something about…there’s, there was a fearful dimension to it. It’s just that one incident with the sofa for some reason I didn’t, you know, it didn’t freak me out. I’m sort of surprised now in retrospect.

Jared  

So if we broaden that out, how does this interplay with just the idea—we’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast over the years—of the role that experience plays in faith, so tie that together with, you know, the conversation with Dale and sort of how does it shape how you think about experience and faith?

Pete  

Yeah, I think, you know, I’d be channeling Dale, and I certainly think this way myself, that experience is just indispensable to just how we understand our faith. I mean, how can it not be? You know. 

Jared  

Mhmm.

Pete  

Even though, you know, we’ve talked before about how we were taught your experience doesn’t really matter, unless it’s the right kind of doctrinal experience or something like that. But anything that sort of blows your categories out of the water is not accepted. And for me, that, I think, is denying, first of all, our own humanity, which just can’t be about that, I think. But also, I think it’s just making God small, like—and who needs that?

Jared  

Pete  

You know, a god that always fits in our pocket, maybe just the universe is weird, maybe things are weirder than we understand. And so experience for me, definitely supports that notion, as does the other—that’s a very meaningful word for me. And also, you know, mystery is a very meaningful word. It’s not just a throwaway thing, when you give up and don’t want to think anymore, it’s just, I thought a lot, and there’s no way I can understand stuff like this. So mystery is always going to be, for me, a part of—so both mystery and experience are, I think, two of the more central words for me in my entire life of faith. And in looking at my entire life of faith, I didn’t feel that way in my 20s or 30s. You know, seminary and things like that, you can conquer the world by going to school for four years, and… It doesn’t work that way.

Jared  

Yeah, what I think of is, “mystery,” when we think of mystery, we might think of it as not instead of thinking, but beyond thinking.

Pete  

Right, right.

Jared  

Because, again, what I think of is that people who want to downplay experience often do so because they still have this enlightenment idea that we can get to this objectivity that we will all share and it’s unquestioned. And if it’s not that, the problem is it can be manipulated and—but the thing is, is that’s true! Our experiences can be wrong. 

Pete  

Right, right.

Jared  

And we can be taken advantage of and they can be manipulated. All that’s true, but that doesn’t make it less valuable.

Pete  

Right, right. 

Jared  

And I think that’s important, because what makes it less valuable is this priviledging of the only thing that really matters, is the common denominator that all rational beings can think of in the same way. And while that’s helpful for things like science and technology…

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

-Like you said, it can cheapen the human experience-

Pete  

Mhmm.

Jared  

If we get rid of everything except that. And that’s not how experience works.

Pete  

Right, and I think, what isn’t an experience, anyway?

Jared  

I mean, what is it even in science?

Pete  

Right, that’s what I mean.

Jared  

What is it other than experiencing things, right?

Pete  

So it’s… In recent years, it hasn’t made much sense to me. To think along- there’s a demarcating and sort of bifurcating this stuff. And yeah, so it’s been very liberating and not because, “Oh, now you get to say whatever you want, you have to stand on the Word of God.” I’m saying your reading of scripture has…Is subjective. You don’t know the languages. What English Bible are you reading? You know, all that kind of stuff. And that doesn’t minimize the importance, let’s say, of being familiar with scripture, but it’s not that thing that transcends our subjectivity. 

And that’s what I mean—Richard Rohr used the word and I didn’t realize it, and I used it in the “Sin of Certainty.” I should have cited him. I don’t even know he said it—it’s transrational. It’s not arational. It’s just our reasoning—which is beautiful and amazing and it’s figured out how old the universe is—it’s still not adequate for grasping the creator of that cosmos. That’s what I believe. And so I have to connect with my experience, and I have to embrace the notion of mystery. I don’t know how else to do this. And I think it’s a good way to go about it.

Jared  

Alright. Well, thanks everyone for hanging in and hanging around. 

Pete  

Bye, folks.

Outro  

Jared  

Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to www.TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give.   

Pete  

And, if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to www.TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/join.   

Jared  

And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show.   

Outro  

Thanks for listening to Faith for Normal People! Don’t forget, you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, The Bible for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Stephanie Speight, Natalie Weyand, Steven Henning, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao.