Some Said it Thundered: Divine Encounter as Pure Experience

God spoke, but not everyone heard it the same way.

In the Gospel of John, chapter 12, Jesus prays, “Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice from heaven responds, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.” everyone present at the time, heard something, yet the crowd's reaction to this encounter was not uniform. Some thought they heard thunder. Others believed that an angel spoken. What are we to make of this?

This isn’t the only time a divine encounter has divided human perception. It often happens when the record says there was more than one witness. For instance, on the road to Damascus, Paul sees a blinding light and hears the voice of Jesus. It says his companions saw the light, but heard nothing. At Pentecost, many people miraculously heard the apostles preaching in their native language; others did not, and dismissed it as drunken babble. Why do divine encounters—moments of infinite significance—seem to resist universal agreement? Kitaro Nishida, a Japanese philosopher, might have an answer.

Pure Experience: Before the Categories

Nishida describes a stage of perception he calls Pure Experience: the moment of direct, immediate awareness before our minds step in to label, analyze, and divide. In this state, there is no “me” observing the sunset or “you” listening to my story. There’s just the event—whole, undisturbed, complete.
Imagine standing at the edge of the ocean. The waves, the wind, the salty air, and the sunlight all come as one unified event. In Pure Experience, you don’t think, “I am here” or “This is the ocean.” Those thoughts come later, once the mind begins its inevitable work of categorizing, naming, and interpreting.
For Nishida, this act of reflection—while useful—distorts the original encounter. What begins as direct experience becomes mediated through thought. It’s secondhand knowledge, reshaped by memory, and the limits of individual perspective.

What Does This Mean for Theology?

Theology is the work of reflection. It’s an attempt to make sense of the pure experience of the divine encounters recorded in scripture. These texts describe extraordinary events: the burning bush, the still small voice, the Word made flesh. We make sense of these terms and describe them using terms like Trinity and Substitutionary Atonement. But these are just models—useful, perhaps even necessary, but ultimately artifical.

As George Box, the statistician, once said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Theology is no exception. Its models reflect mediated experience, not the pure, unfiltered encounter with God.

Karl Barth, the great theologian, famously said, “The Bible becomes the Word of God.” For Barth, the text on the page is lifeless until the Spirit breathes life into it. You might say it’s like dry bones being awakened. In Nishida’s terms, this moment of awakening is a new Pure Experience—a direct encounter with God through the medium of Scripture.

When God Speaks, Some Hear Thunder

This brings us back to John 12 and the voice from heaven. When God acts, why isn’t the experience the same for everyone?
I think the answer lies in the very nature of divine encounters. When God acts, it’s not like seeing a sunset, or hearing the ocean. These are events that transcend human categories. They have no earthly analog, no familiar reference point. As a result, people interpret them differently—some profoundly, some skeptically, some not at all.
It’s not just the experience that varies but also the reflections on it. Take the death and resurrection of Jesus. Christians agree it is the pivotal event in history, yet they debate it endlessly. Why? Theories of atonement—whether penal substitution or Christus Victor—are only attempts to describe the same event. Faith should rest on the event itself, not on our models. Some models may be better than others. New models may answer some of the shortcomings of older models. To hold a single model up as equivalent to the event itself does a great disservice to the reality of the pure event itself which escapes any attempt to fully describe it. 

Always Reforming

The early Reformers used to use the expression: Semper Reformanda—“Always Reforming” to remind us that the work of theology is never finished. Our reflections must continually adapt as we wrestle with divine revelation - to understand it more clearly and the implications it holds for our lives.

Nishida’s idea of Pure Experience offers us a challenge and an invitation. It reminds us to distinguish between the raw event and our interpretations. Divine encounters are like thunder—that rumbles through history, powerful but elusive. What we hear depends on how we listen.
Faith, then, is not in the model but in the reality.

Change

"At the heart of our Western culture lies a contradiction, one that we seem unwilling to confront, and might just be the source of much of our unhappiness. I'm referring to our concept of perfectionWe uphold an ideal of perfection that is unchanging and eternal, even as all around us we experience nothing but change. 

Change defines every moment of our existence, yet we resist it. We fight aging, we try to hide the flaws in our work and in ourselves. We  imagine what success looks like in our minds and then try to reproduce it in the real world. When we achieve anything we try to lock it down and make it last as long as possible, and when they crumble—as they always do—we rebuild. Why do we persist? What drives this relentless pursuit of a permanence that never existed?

Once, two voices spoke to the ancient world. Heraclitus, who saw change as the only constant, and Plato, who believed the world who's foundation was built of on unchanging realm of perfection. This was the watershed moment, and we chose Plato, and with him, the belief that life is a shadow cast by a higher, ideal form. In doing so, we inherited a longing for the immutable and an enduring suspicion of the transient.

But what if we had listened to Heraclitus instead? Would we still fear failure and aging as betrayals of an imagined ideal? Would we still chase an ideal we're doomed to never find?  Or would we learn to enjoy the present, and find fulfillment in the process more than the final goal?

For most of my life, I’ve been chasing shadows, trying to become some distant version of myself I thought I should be. There were brief moments of joy, times when I thought, If only this could last. But nothing ever did.

Now, at 53, I find myself wondering if permanence was the wrong goal all along. Maybe happiness isn’t waiting somewhere down the road, after achievement of some perpetually receding goal. Maybe it’s right here, in the passing moments I take for granted. Maybe the challenge isn’t to try and hold on to the good ones—but to fully experience them now before they’re gone."

How did Paul die

Paul's death comes after the end of the Bible, so we can't be sure. 

One tradition says he was beheaded in Rome and the last we hear of him in the Bible is during his imprisonment in Rome. But he did have plans to eventually go to Spain and some say he was released and eventually made that missionary journey as well and died in Rome later during another imprisonment.

This would mean that his appeal to Caesar as a Roman citizen was ultimately successful. This is not unlikely especially when you consider his behavior in the Roman prison when it collapsed and during the shipwreck. Paul and his companions could have taken the opportunity to be free, but they said stayed saving the lives of their captors.

Paul's actions might have been seen not as a guilty man, but an honorable kne seeking the vindication only Caesar could offer to his reputation. 

And history is rarely as neat and tidy as we would like it to be.

 Everyone agrees that Paul was beheaded in Rome, and the  New Testament ends with Paul in Rome. It's very tempting to say that he simply died there, since we have no records beyond legend, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Erickson on Ecclesiology

Today I took a stab at reading Millard Erickson.  I am hoping that, over time, my mind will become more focused - but it is very easy to get distracted by every little detail.  I'd wanted to read straight through his section on The Nature of the Church pp 949 - 970.  In actuality, I only got started on his section "Defining the Church". Pp 950-956

Lots of rabbit trails to wander here.  For instance, Erickson's assertion that the doctrine of Ecclesiology has not received as definitive treatment as doctrines such as Christology, the atonement, salvation (951).   

Is this true?  Or does it simply reflect the state of Protestant Ecclesiology after its reframing of the doctrine during the reformation?

The Catholic and Orthodox churches have a very clearly defined ecclesiology.  For them the term "Church" indicates a concrete historical body, with an authority structure, that was passed down to the present through Apostolic succession. This claim to historical continuity with the first disciples of Jesus is, for both bodies, perhaps the most important claim to authenticity.

The idea of apostolic succession appears to have its roots in one of the early churches strategies to combat gnostic heresies.  When rival interpretations of the Christian faith presented themselves - from the very beginning - the church has dealt with one of two strategies.  The first is apologetic - using reason and scripture.  The second is through a type of certification of authenticity - an appeal to a direct line of succession from Jesus' apostles down to the leadership of the church today.  Though one can find appeals to certification through succession in the Bible, the appeal to reason is far more prevalent and important - especially in light of the warnings that "false teachers will arise among you".  Despite this obvious weakness, the popularity of the appeal to succession seems to have grown in importance to the point where it overshadowed the appeal to reason.

The Protestant reformation called in to question the reliability of historical continuity as a criteria for defining the authentic church. What is to stop the church from going wildly wrong?  It suggested that scripture was the agent to employ in keeping the church on track, and that at may even need to operate from outside the institutional body of the church to be the agent of correction.  As Luther argued in his response to The Diet of Worms, "Popes and Councils can err".   The faith of the Reformers shifted from the institutional church, to the scriptures (Sola Scriptura).   "Ad Fontes" (To the Sources,) was the cry of the Reformation. 

SO the protestant reformation shifted the locus of authority from the leadership of the church to the scriptures.  Along with this the composition of the church changed from that of a concrete institution founded by Christ and his apostles and passed down through the laying on of hands, to a community of people gathered by the proclamation of the Word of God.

So, far from saying that ecclesiology has been an ignored topic in Church history - I would argue that there has been some significant activity in trying to define the nature of the church - and that activity has split the protestant church from its Catholic and Orthodox forebears. 

Perhaps what is meant by neglect has more to do with the practical FORM of the church.  The plethora of ecclesiological structures clearly indicate that the matter of organization has not been settled.  But I wonder how important this issue "how we run the church"  is to ecclesiology.  Is it a central, or a peripheral issue?  I would argue that the management of the church is not part of the ontological discussion of what the church is.  The core questions are rather,  what it is made of, how it comes into being, and what is its purpose.  These are all questions that scripture very clearly talks about. 

Father's Day

One of my favorite activities is organizing my thoughts, or at least learning about new ways to try to do that.  I'm very drawn to things like bullet journaling, commonplace notebooks, and the whole second brain thing.  The concept of outsourcing the task of memory reminds me a bit of computing, where the cloud and various sorts of drives are used to relieve your PC from the burden of having to store everything on its hard drive.  

This is Father's Day, and it did not go as I had planned.  I had hoped to spend last night out with my friend Austin, and after church today, to go out and spend some time reading.  Then I was going to go home and spend some time with my family.  Last night it was pouring - so I decided to stay home, then our power cut out and I spent the night trying to sleep in a recliner because my C-Pap doesn't work without electricity.  I finally went to bed this morning when the power came back on, but that meant we missed church.  Determined to salvage what I could of the day I am not sitting in Starbucks and spending some time structuring my notebooks which are spread across OneNote and Notion. It's a little consolation gift I'm giving myself to ward of my general disappointment with how things have unfolded. I'm not a very resilient person. If I'm able to get some things done, I when I go home to spend some time with April and the kids.  

I first became aware of the concept of external memory for humans, reading Steven Johnson's book "Emergence, the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.  He talks about cities becoming a sort of external communal memory.  Because it has a logical structure which we all can understand, it becomes a coherent space we can all navigate instead of a jumble of random locations we have to search whenever we need something. 

Anyhow, this is morphing from an update into some kind of informative essay on memory, which was not my intention.  I'm going to stop writing now so I can get down to work for an hour or so and then maybe read a bit before I go home.

Hello World! . . .Hello?

Is anybody blogging anymore?  

It feels like a stupid time to start blogging.  Like that ship has sailed.  Yet here I am with my steamer trunks like I'm actually going somewhere.  But I'm late to the dock.  People I want to follow all seem to have stopped blogging years ago. Most of the information I've seen about blogging is for entrepreneurs hoping to make a buck off their content.  I hear people complain about being overlooked by the algorithms. It seems like anyone hoping to start a blog these days should accept that nobody is ever going to read their stuff.

The thing is, I need this.  My mind is a jumble of thoughts and dream projects, and ideas that I think are clever - and it kills me to think that after springing to my awareness, that they will just sink back again into the obscurity of my subconscious maybe never be seen again.  Or just as bad, keep poking their heads above water as clever yet unfinished ideas to taunt me and remind me of how little I've ever done.  I need a place to put it all down.  To record it.  To look at it objectively, and maybe build on it.

Well, if that is all I want, I suppose there is nothing to stop me.  Does it really matter if anyone sees this, if that is all I want? I guess not. But it would still be nice to think a person could put themselves out there and be known by someone who reads what they wrote.  I'd like to think that might still happen.