Religious Experiences

It is an encounter with the divine. It is a non-empirical occurrence that brings with it awareness of something beyond ourselves. A direct experience where the person having the experience feels that he or she is in contact with God.

Caroline Franks Davis defines seven types of religious experience:

1. Seeing the work of God when looking at the world (awareness experience)
2. Having a vision or inner experience of God (quasi-sensory experience)
3. Encountering the holiness of God (numinous experience)
4. Conversion experience (regenerative experience)
5. Having prayers answered (interpretive experience)
6. A sense of ultimate reality (mystical experience)
7. Receiving enlightenment or knowledge (revelatory experience)

Many religious experiences happen in private thus there’s no way of verifying them.

“God was present, though invisible; he fell under not one of my sense, yet my consciousness perceived him”

“The argument from personal experience is the one that is the most convincing to those who claim to have had one. But in the least convincing to anyone else” (Dawkins)

Types of Religious Experience §

Dramatic or conversion event  §

Considered a direct experience described as numinous, it refers to a religious experience which offers an insight into a “wholly other” nature of God.

Responses to Life and the World  §

Gentle, indirect experience which enhances a person’s understanding of their life and the world around them.

“Not just a feeling… but a conviction or insight, a sense that something must be” (Lewis)

Revelatory experiences  §

A divine self-disclosure, where God makes himself directly known via vision or dream. The experiment acquires new knowledge of God.

Near-death experience  §

Those include a feeling of peace and ineffability, going through a dark tunnel, meeting a being of light and having to make a decision about whether or not to cross a barrier before returning to life.

Mystical experiences  §

A mystical experience is one in which a person experiences the ultimate reality, which brings with it a sense of unity with the divine, separateness from the divine and dependence on the divine.

“Human language is unable to express the sense of mystical union with God”

Corporate experiences §

A large number of people experience God at the same time. Such as the Toronto Blessing.