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

by Luke Timothy Johnson

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.

In three fascinating probes of early Christianity--examining baptism, speaking in tongues, and meals in common--Johnson illustrates how a more wholistic approach opens up the wolrd of healings and religious power, of ecstasy and spirit--in short, the religious experience of real persons. Early Christian texts, he finds, reflect lives caught up in and defined by a power not in their control but engenedered instead by the crucified and raised Messiah Jesus.

Genres: Church History, Religion, Theology, Christianity, Biblical Studies

199 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1998

About the author

Luke Timothy Johnson is an American New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity. He is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.

Johnson's research interests encompass the Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts of early Christianity (particularly moral discourse), Luke-Acts, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Epistle of James.

Reviews

[Matthew C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though I've seen LTJ's name floating around in footnotes for some time, this is my first foray into his work. And I must admit that I am impressed with his prowess at understanding and critiquing his historian/religious studies colleagues in this book. He also writes at my preferred level of academic rigor while remaining fun to read. I expect to engage with more of Johnson's work going forward.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even though he states his thesis at the beginning and end of the book, I'm still not quite sure of the purpose of this book. It seems to spend more time on how to research and write on the topic and on other scholars' works than the actual topic. The intended audience seems to be other scholars rather than the average l ayperson.

[John]

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.

[Matt Friedman]

Johnson is here writing a phenomenological study of particularly issues surrounding baptism, glossolalia, and sacred meals, folding into his analysis the insights such as Victor Turner's _Ritual Process_. By his own admission, however,this is also Johnson's response to (or rather, ended up becoming Johnson's response to) Chicago's J. Z. Smith's highly secularized approach to religion in _Drudgery Divine_ and other related writings. Critiquing not only Smith, but what he sees as Smith's uncritical use of sources such as Mack on early Christianity, Johnson challenges what he sees as Smith's own "aggressively hegemonic" (183) approach which would seek to make his own reductionistic views of religious experience the only academically valid approach in religious studies. He sees Smith's view to be one of "expression of a philosophical commitment that is at root profoundly ahistorical, since it anachronistically projects onto the entire world of antiquity the demystified consciousness peculiarly characteristic of a certain segment of the educated population of post-seventeenth-century European culture" (42).



Fascinating, though

[Karen Maskarinec · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, which originated from the author's guest lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, was interesting and informative not only about the subject, but also about other scholarship on the subject. It will help me take a more critical view of similar studies, quickly assessing an author's bias, whether historical, theological, or from the perspective of religious studies. The author makes a strong case for the the latter method, closing with this thought: "Christianity came to birth because certain people were convinced that they had experienced God's transforming power through the resurrection of Jesus. A scholarship based not on this fact but on its denial may be a study of something or other in antiquity but is certainly not the study of early Christianity." Though I was easily convinced in this regard, I had to step back from saying I REALLY liked this book to simply liking it because of the super-intellectual language. Nonetheless, I look forward to reading other books by this prolific author.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnson's main thesis - that the historical-critical approach to religions is inherently reductionist and that a phenomenological approach is wanting in scholarship - is probably as true now as it was back in 1998. While I agree with his analysis, however, I don't think his arguments would be compelling to one who did not already agree with him. He moves too quickly through is arguments in the first two chapters, though his 'case studies' are a bit more fleshed out. But the book did get me thinking in many different ways about both the early Christian canonical and non-canonical texts. In the end, however, Johnson's argument is good: if we want to understand any religion we have to understand how that religion is experienced. Otherwise we're not studying religion.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in early Christianity, particularly those who have found mere comparison to be wanting as a investigative mode of religion.

[Charles Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Going to take this slow...we are reading this in JGS Bookclub. This has more footnotes than text.
Now have finished this and it is a good approach to investigating the religious experiences of the new testament using the phenomenological approach rather than just using 'form criticism' to analyze. Discusses baptism, tongues, and the eucharist. A very interesting approach. I liked it.

[Samuel Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent book but overstates its case and is fairly dated now. I'm not sure that his complaints about JZ Smith get him all that far, but it is useful to remember that JZS is taking a pretty strong position about the nature of the endeavor of religious studies.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love that Luke Timothy Johnson is investing his time studying religious experience, a topic too-often dismissed among New Testament scholars. Love it.

[Skylar Burris]

Religion as a personal experience of power, rather than as history or theology. Too academic.

[Ruth Ann]

I haven't read this yet, but I've listened to Johnson's Teaching Company course "Early Christianity: The Experience of the Divine" which covers much of the same material - it was excellent.