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Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity: A Missing Dimension in New Testament Study

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I am fortunate to have been able to have Luke Timothy Johnson as one of my professors when I was studying religious studies at Indiana University in the early 1980s. He has since moved on to Emory University, which is definitely I.U.'s loss. Johnson has been one of the more prolific and studied historian/theologians of this generation. This recent book, 'Religious Experience in Early Christianity: A Missing Dimension in New Testament Studies', shows much of the way he thinks and some of what he considers important in Christianity. 'Combining trenchant criticism with careful analysis, Luke Johnson calls for a radically new direction in New Testament studies, one that can change the way we view the entire phenomenon of early Christianity.'

Johnson explores three main topics: baptism (ritual imprinting), glossolalia (speaking in tongues) and eucharist (communal meals). This book grew out of the 1997 Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, and argues the need for a phenomenological approach to the examination of religious experience. 'This is neither history in the strict sense of the term, nor is it theology. That's the whole point: we need a new way of looking in order to see what we can't otherwise see.'

Johnson argues that there has been a comfortable agreement between scholars and clerics toward a more sanitary, orderly, control-able way of examining religious phenomena, which is only natural considering, particularly in Western society, medieval and modern scholarship grew out of the clerical ranks. The 'history' of early Christianity has thus been a history primarily built of ideas and institutions rather than experiences, which tend to be too subjective.

Perhaps the most remarkable chapter in this text is the one on Glossolalia and the Embarrassments of Experience. Speaking in tongues is something that fringe groups do, most scholars, clerics, and lay Christians believe (except for those in denominations which still regard this as a valid practise). Johnson, coming out of a Roman Catholic background, would be one of the last people one would expect to deal with this subject.

Even at Pentecost, speaking in tongues divided the crowd. Since then, glossolalia has been singled out as either the supreme criterion for the direct action of the Holy Spirit in Christian lives or the supreme example of how enthusiasm is a bad thing for Christian piety.

Part of the problem with analyzing this phenomenon is that there is no consistent form, either physically, psychologically, and gets into areas that certainly go against modern, more 'scientific and objective' ideas. Johnson does not try, with this topic or with baptism and eucharistic experiences, to formulate a definitive, 'this-must-be-it' way of thinking or viewing these phenomena, but rather strives to show the real experience in the real lives of early Christians as best as can be reconstructed. This is a fascinating text.

Do you want your own faith to reflect New Testament Christianity? This book considers baptism, communion and speaking in tongues and considers what was happening in the lives of the earliest believers. If you are a conservative believer in the mainline denominations (or Roman Catholic as Johnson is) this book offers a solid viewpoint and takes on some of the current revisionist thinking. He constantly reminds that our "a priori" judgements lead to inevitable conclusions. This book is a vibrant look at Christian community and its impact on those who are shaped by that community.

A clear, concise, much-needed perspective on the beginnings of Christianity. Critiques the limitations of the Theology perspective and the Historical Sociopolitical perspective, and explains why scholars are averse to looking at the origins of Christianity from the point of view of religious experiencing.

Central chapters cover glossalia and especially sacred meals, looking for the kind of experiencing that was common to the Mystery Religions and Jewish initiation. The convenient footnotes have valuable references to the books he praises and critiques. Ends with a call to start looking for religious experiencing as the main cause of Christianity.

In this compact essay, Luke Timothy Johnson argues that a phenomenological approach to the history of earliest Christianity, taking note of the religious experience of its adherents, can offer new insights to complement, and in some cases challenge, those of the historical-critical approach that has dominated New Testament studies for the last century. Taking issue with many of the presuppositions of historical-critical method--especially its tendency to limit historical reality to textuality and its penchant for a "divide and conquer" mentality with regard to the diversity of earliest Christian movements--Johnson suggests a fresh view based on the insights of religious studies scholarship in what is often called the "phenomenology of religions" (loosely, the old Chicago School, as opposed to the various social-scientifically oriented approaches that have been in the ascendancy more recently). However, Johnson is not prepared to grant this methodology carte-blanche, either--much of the book is taken up with his criticism of Chicago's Jonathan Z. Smith, who, while emerging from a Chicago-style phenomenological background, has (in Johnson's view) used his prodigious learning in the history of religions to question the authenticity of religious experience itself. Johnson, by contrast, wishes to steer a middle path--avoiding both the "crypto-theological" approach of an Eliade, which seems to predicate that the religious experience was necessarily the experience of real "something" outside of human subjectivity, and the reductionist approaches of both Smith and the historical-critical scholars, who in their eagerness to remain scientific and historical refuse even to acknowledge the experience of human subjects as a legitimate concern for religion scholarship.

It must be said that Johnson's essay is only partially successful. The first two chapters, in which he lays out the contours of his theoretical stance, are frequently riveting, and should expand the audience for this book well beyond those whose interests are in early Christianity to anyone with an interest in religious studies methodology and theory.

The chapter "Ritual Imprinting and the Politics of Perfection," dealing with the experience of primitive Christian baptism and initiation, brilliantly situates it in the context of late Roman religiosity--the conflicts dealt with in the letters to the Galatians and to the Colossians are fruitfully interpreted in light of cultural expectations as to initiation through various "levels" of enlightenment and mystagogy, expectations which may have run afoul of Pauline Christianity and its emphasis on being baptized once for all into the death of Christ Jesus. The next chapter, "Glossolalia and the Embarrassments of Experience," includes a very good overview of the confused nature of the New Testament sources on primitive Christian glossolalia, and comparisons to recent psychological studies on the experience in modern contexts. However, some of Johnson's conclusions here seem much more speculative--his linking of Paul's ambivalence toward glossolalia and toward women speaking in the assembly with concerns about sexuality and gender politics in the Hellenistic world draws substantially on the work of contemporary feminist theologians and on studies (like Lewis's Ecstatic Religion) that are only tangentially related to Christian glossolalia, and for that reason is less persuasive than much of what Johnson has to say in the previous chapter, where the sources are more grounded in scholarship specifically about the cultural milieu.

Ironically, the chapter which ought to have been the centerpiece of the book, "Meals are Where the Magic Is" (about the Christian agape and Eucharistic meals), is actually the least interesting. The problem here is that Johnson seems to abandon his program of dealing with experience and to retreat into ideas--he says a great deal about what the Eucharist meant, at the level of ideas and symbols, to earliest Christians, but not much about the actual religious experience that attended on Christian and other sacred meals in late antiquity.

Johnson's wide reading is impressively on display throughout the thoroughly-footnoted volume. I found myself repeatedly remarking on interesting lines of study suggested by his notes. There is much to be learned in these pages, even if they are ultimately more revelatory of disagreements over method and theory within religious studies than they are of the experiential world of the first Christians at what became their chief act of worship.

It is refreshing to read that finally academcis start to deal with the specific Christian experience. Mr. Johnson has made a good start. However, his view on protestants dealing with religious experience is flawed. The protestant academic schools he criticises have never been accepted by non-academic protestant believers. On the contrary, missionaries like E. Stanley Jones, academics like C.S. Lewis and Eta Linnemann, minister-scholars like Raymond J. Lawrence, and not to mention the large body of lay people of all kind of different protestant streams, for instance, the Pentecontalists, the Jesus people, Christian healers, etc., they all have always rejected the 19th and 20th century academic stream of Protestantism. If Mr. Johnson would not insist on his anti-protestant attitude actual experience could be a basis for talks between Catholics and Protestants.