A friend of mine recently hiked Garcia Trail in Azusa with me. We used to do that night hike frequently while in collage at Azusa Pacific University. We’ve had many great conversations up and down the hill (1100 feet climb in 1.2 miles), and the last hike was no exception.
One of our topics was on flowers. Jeremy just started working for a large nursery in the area, and his knowledge of flowers is growing exponentially. It reminded me of how vital experience is to understanding. If someone to say “that’s a red flower,” they are no less right than the person saying “that’s a red ipomoea quamoclit.” But here’s where it gets interesting as far as the relationship between experience and intellectual learning.
Say two people are actually having a conversation about an ipomoea quamoclit. Going into the conversation, one of our subjects only knows it to be a red flower. The other is like my friend and trained in identifying flowers. The former learns the name of the flower, and goes on his merry way.
Later, he is with another friend and he says a very similar flower, say an “ipomoea coccinea.” He says, “Hey, that’s a ipomoea quamoclit.” Now it’s not a red flower, it’s the wrong flower. He learned the words to go with it, but he did not have the experience and training that leads to an understanding of why one ipomoea is a quamoclit, and the other is a coccinea.
What we have here is a fundamental concept of learning. All words are symbols. Words represent things, but they are not the thing. How well words are used in relation to the actual thing symbolized can have a profound effect on the quality of learning.
You’ve probably already made some of the connections I have in relating to biblical teachings. It does us very little good to make sure someone is delivering the right words, if they do not have the proper understanding to know what they mean and be able to apply them in real life situations. In fact, we can learn the words of some fancy doctrine which is the niche for our particular denmoniation, and totally distort it… maybe because our take on sanctification does not include actually being sanctified… That’s another post, eh? Members of a pentecostal church may have a totally different understanding of sanctification as a second work of grace than say members of a Wesleyan church. And members within each of those congregations will mean different things when they use the word.
In the whole postmodern/emerging/hypermodern blah blah blah, we most often fail to communicate the issues and end up arguing about things neither camp believes. I’m most qualified to speak from the emerging perspective, and I will say, quite adamantly, that very few in the emerging church do not believe in absolute truth. The issue is with absolute understanding and boiling down absolute truth into propositions which can be memorized, stated, and rarely understood in their full depth.
Experience is not antithetical to intellectual learning, it is essential. And whether we like it or not, we ALL practice experiential learning. No one knows what a table really is without having the experience of sitting down at one. You can teach some tribesman who does not use tables to say, “That’s a table,” but has he really learned anything?
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