What Happens When Experience Is Valued Over Doctrine?

Question 0041.

When a church begins to prize experience over doctrine, the change is rarely announced and rarely sudden. No one stands up and says they have decided to value feelings above truth. It happens by a slow shift of weight, where the test of whether something is right gradually moves from what God has said to how the moment made me feel. And because feelings are powerful and pleasant, the shift can seem like life and freedom even as it is quietly cutting the church loose from its anchor.

I do not despise Christian experience. Far from it. I want my faith to be felt as well as believed, and a cold orthodoxy that never moves the heart is its own kind of failure. But the question here is one of authority, of what governs what. When experience over doctrine becomes the rule, experience stops being the warm fruit of truth and starts being the judge of truth, and that is where the trouble begins. Let me trace where the road leads.

The Quiet Reversal

In a healthy Christian life, doctrine comes first and experience follows. I learn that God is faithful, and so I rest in him, and the resting feels like peace. The truth produces the feeling. When experience over doctrine takes hold, that order is reversed. Now the feeling comes first and is used to decide what is true. If a teaching produces a strong sense of God, it must be right, and if a teaching leaves me cold, it must be wrong, however clearly Scripture may affirm it.

You can see how subtle this is, because the early stages look so spiritual. There are tears, there is excitement, there is a sense of God’s nearness, and who would dare question that? But the standard has shifted underfoot. The question is no longer “Is this true according to the word?” but “Did this feel like God?” Once that reversal is in place, the door is open to almost anything that can stir the emotions strongly enough.

Where Experience Over Doctrine Leads

Follow the road of experience over doctrine and you find several destinations, all of them sad. The first is instability, the very thing Paul warned about when he spoke of being “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14). A faith built on feeling rises and falls with the feeling, so the believer lurches from mountaintop to valley with no settled ground beneath. When the emotions go quiet, as they always do, the faith that depended on them goes quiet too, and the soul concludes that God has withdrawn when in truth only the feeling has.

A second destination is deception. If a strong experience proves that something is from God, then anyone who can manufacture a strong experience can lead you wherever they like. This is precisely the soil in which manipulative teaching grows, and it is why I take such care over discernment. The heart is deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17:9), and a movement that trusts the heart’s impressions over the written word has handed itself to the one thing the Bible says cannot be trusted.

A third destination is a drift from the gospel itself. Doctrine is how the church remembers the gospel accurately from one generation to the next. When experience over doctrine becomes the rule, the content of the faith slowly evaporates, until a church may still have plenty of feeling while the actual truths of sin, the cross, and the resurrection grow vague and then vanish. You can keep the warmth long after you have lost the fire that justified it.

The Pattern of Scripture

The apostles never set experience and doctrine against each other, but they always put truth in the place of authority. Even Peter, who had stood on the mount of transfiguration and heard the voice of God with his own ears, said that we have something “more fully confirmed” than that overwhelming experience, namely “the prophetic word,” to which we do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place (2 Peter 1:19). Think of that. The man who had the experience pointed away from it to the word as the surer thing.

That is the model I want to follow. By all means let me treasure the moments when God feels near. But when I want to know what is true, I do not consult my goosebumps. I consult the Scriptures, and I let them judge my experiences rather than letting my experiences judge them. The Bereans were called noble for exactly this, testing even an apostle’s preaching against the written word (Acts 17:11).

Holding Truth and Feeling in the Right Order

So I am not asking anyone to choose a dry faith over a felt one. I am asking for the right order. Let doctrine lead and let experience follow, and you will end up with both, a faith that is true and warm. Reverse the order, putting experience over doctrine, and in time you will lose both, ending with a faith that is neither anchored nor, when the feelings fade, even very warm. The order is everything.

This is one reason I labour over teaching that may seem unexciting at first. Sound doctrine is the riverbank that lets the river of genuine experience run deep and strong. Remove the bank and the river does not become freer. It becomes a shapeless flood that soon dries to mud. If you want to think further about this danger, I have written on why people prefer teachers who tell them what they want to hear, and on how to detect false teaching.

Why This Is a Matter of Love, Not Coldness

I am aware that to argue against experience over doctrine can sound like a plea for a passionless religion of the head. It is the opposite. I press this point precisely because I want people to have a joy that lasts, and a joy built only on feelings cannot last. The most loving thing I can do is point a brother or sister to ground that will hold when the emotional weather turns, as it always does.

Truth is what holds. When grief comes, or doubt, or the long grey seasons when God feels absent, the believer who rested on experience over doctrine has nothing to stand on, while the believer anchored in what God has said can hold fast even with no warm feeling at all. That is not coldness. That is the deepest kindness, and it is why I keep putting doctrine first and letting the feelings follow where they will.

A Test I Can Apply to Myself

It is easy to spot experience over doctrine in other churches and harder to spot it in my own heart, so I try to keep a simple test before me. When I come away from a service or a book or a conference, do I ask first whether it was true, or first whether it moved me? The order of those two questions tells me a great deal about where my weight is really resting, and it is a more searching test than I usually want it to be.

I am not after a faith with no feeling. I am after a faith where the feeling grows out of the truth rather than standing in its place. When experience over doctrine has crept in, the feeling becomes the thing I chase and the truth becomes optional decoration. When the order is right, the truth comes first and the feeling follows it home, deeper and steadier than any feeling I could have worked up on my own. That is the faith I want, and the only kind that lasts.

Where I Have Landed

So I refuse the false choice between a thinking faith and a feeling one. God made me to love him with heart and mind together, and he means the two to reinforce one another rather than compete. Put the truth first and the warmth will come, deeper and steadier for being grounded in something real. Put the feeling first and you will, in the end, lose even the feeling. The order is not a cold technicality. It is the difference between a faith that endures the years and one that evaporates with the first cold morning.

So, now what?

Examine where your weight is resting. Do you decide what is true by what stirs you, or do you let the word decide and allow the stirring to follow? If you find that your sense of God rises and falls entirely with your feelings, that is a sign the order has slipped, and it is worth putting right before a dry season convinces you that God has left.

So treasure your experiences without enthroning them. Keep the word in the place of authority, and let your heart be warmed by truth rather than asking truth to bow to your heart. The peace you are looking for is steadier on that footing than on any feeling, however bright. Which will you trust the next time the two seem to pull apart?

And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place.

2 Peter 1:19 (ESV)