Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 03:4 (Winter 1999)
Article: The Testimony of Christian Experience
Author: E. Y. Mullins

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SBJT 3:4 (Winter 1999) p. 80

The Testimony of Christian Experience

E. Y. Mullins

E. Y. Mullins (1860–1928) was President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1899–1928, President of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1921–1924, and President of the Baptist World Alliance from 1924–1928. His influence on Southern Baptists as a leader and scholar was enormous. This essay first appeared in The Fundamentals.

Introduction

Human experience is the one datum of all philosophy, and all science. The experience of the individual and of the race is the grist which is poured into all the scientific and philosophic mills. Hence Christian experience as a distinct form of human experience ought to receive more attention than it has ever received before.

Professor Bowne has emphasized the fact that whatever your philosophy, your experience is the same. You may call things by any names you wish and it will not affect experience. Christian Science says that all is mind; that a cobble stone, for example, is simply an idea and not a real piece of matter. We will suppose that some one hurls it and it strikes your head and sends you off for relief. Then you have an experience in the realm of the ideal. You have an ideal stone, striking an ideal head, and raising an ideal bump and producing an ideal dizziness and pain, and requiring the application of an ideal
liniment, which produces an ideal cure, and affords you an ideal satisfaction and peace of mind. But all this does not in the slightest degree alter the experience itself. And if you were going to rear a philosophic system on the principle deduced from sudden contact of cobble stones with human craniums, you would be compelled to take this concrete human experience to begin with.

John Jasper Philosophy

Science and philosophy are beginning to recognize the evidential value of Christian experience though they are very slow about it and very reluctant about it even yet, apparently because it is not as obvious to the sense as the facts of the physical world. The world has laughed long at brother John Jasper who contends that the “Sun do move” around the earth because he sees it on one side of his house in the morning and on the other side at night. But we know there is a system and set of motions in the background more comprehensive and wonderful than the rising and setting sun alone can explain. Now to refuse to accept the testimony of Christian experience because it lies in a realm behind sense experience is to adopt the John Jasper attitude towards truth. Science and philosophy have both been guilty of this to a greater or lesser extent. They have been pursuing the Ptolemaic system of truth with brother Jasper instead of the Copernican with modern astronomy.

Religious Radium

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