Lived experience. . .

While listening to talk radio, I encountered a discussion of lived experience.  It was in the context of the Florida law that restricts classrooms of K-3 from addressing sexual agenda of any kind (not simply GLBTQ++).  I forget the speaker but the presumption being made was that the job of the teacher in the classroom is to share the lived experience of the teacher along with the ordinary subjects of the curriculum.  Lived experience is defined as “personal knowledge about the world gained through direct, first-hand involvement in everyday events rather than through representations constructed by other people.”  In this definition there is nothing that is real until you experience it or feel it -- everything is a social construct which can only be as deep and wide as the experience or judgement of the people who formed it.  It is as if Pilate had taken over the school and the church and turned all attention from the fact of what is to the question of whether anything can be at all -- what is truth?

Although it sounds lofty, it is the worst of bad ideas to replace objective content with lived experience as if they had equal authority and legitimacy.  The job of the teacher and the school is not to replace what is missing in the home or to do social engineering of the student but to teach the curriculum.  Of course, there will be anecdotal accounts of things that are part of that conversation in the classroom but that should be isolated and incidental and not regular or essential.  It could be said that the very reason why our children are failing academically is that we have placed too many non-academic burdens on the classroom and the teacher.  It should be said that the way to reach a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive society is by giving our students all the academic skills they need to be fully integrated into and to find success in our society -- especially in terms of employment, logic, communication, and informed participation.  This is much more reliable to advance the minorities into the mainstream than by sharing stories replete with emotional and social significance but hardly objective or factual.

Why would we expect that lived experience would not replace fact and truth in the schools when the churches have done such a wonderful job replacing revelation with it?  Yet that is exactly true of progressive and liberal Christianity.  When how you feel about something or how you have experienced it replaces its truth and efficacy, faith is in trouble.  That is the problem.  A significant segment of Christianity has decided that the factual nature or historicity of something is less important than how it makes you feel.  So whether Jesus was born of a virgin, is God incarnate, suffered for sin, died on a cross, and rose again is secondary and not altogether essential to the Gospel but how this makes you feel, how you can affirm it on the basis of your own experience, and what it does to console and encourage your own journey of self-discovery is primary and the only real Gospel.  Perhaps a few decades of Bible study in which the primary questions for the text are what do you think it means and  how does it make you feel have transformed the Christian faith and the authority of Scripture.

Truth does not depend upon you feeling it or liking it or agreeing with it in order for it to be true.  Yet we now routinely treat the truth of God revealed in Christ as something only true for those who feel it, like it, or agree with it.  It is a personal truth and not an objective one.  Nothing could be further from the witness of Scripture or the faith of early Christianity.  No Christian martyr died to defend his or her feelings or his or her lived experience of it all but they did willingly surrender their flesh to the sword, the fire, or the cross for an incarnate God who delivered the dead from their trespasses and graves by the blood that simultaneously cleansed them and clothed them with righteousness.  They were willing to offer up their own lives because they knew they had the real life that no one and not even death could take from them.  

If the classroom is not the place for the teacher to teach from his or her lived experience, neither is the pulpit or sanctuary a place for the pastor to substitute his own opinions, experiences, or feelings for the once for all truth of the cross and empty tomb.