Jacob, I appreciate your perspective [and James K.A. Smith’s] on knowing, interpreting, believing, trusting, and declaring the resurrection of Jesus. Reality, rationality, self-evident truth, knowledge and faith… and how people acquire any of that… is a point worthy of discussion.

I encountered the living Jesus when I was on the edge of adulthood, after being presented with the evangelical-style gospel… and I encountered him in a revelatory and transformative “Damascus road”-type of experience. I realize I could be considered delusional by some, but I’m comfortable with living in this delusion for the past 30+ years. I traded anguish for deep fulfillment. I feel connected to others who have experienced this mass-Jesus-delusion over the past 2000 years. I sense the personal care and involvement of God in the forming of my life.

This revelation happened to me before I was conversant in the bible or church traditions and teachings. I wrongly assumed that my experience was consistent with other christians’ conversions. My understanding of Jesus seemed God-initiated and I figured if it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone in the same fashion. I quickly bumped into a large contingent of church people who had been raised in churchy-style doctrinal understandings of Jesus. I soon realized the majority of christians I would encounter, wouldn’t have necessarily shared my kind of experience.

I had to reconcile myself with a variety of ways that Jesus is embraced, encountered, believed in, called upon, and interpreted. My experiential faith became one of a diversity of ways in which some of us wrestle with the meaning and the person of Jesus. Those who insist this faith has to fit a specific criteria are often trying to make it fit their own experience… making God in our own image, or according to our limited understanding, as it were.

So I’m appreciative of a larger understanding than a one-size-fits-all kind of faith. I’m in favor of less polemic argument about certainty and unknowables, and a little more emphasis on God-initiated graces. And I think you and Smith point to such:

“We “can properly confess that we know God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, but such knowledge rests on the gift of (particular, special) revelation, is not universally objective or demonstrable, and remains a matter of interpretation and perspective (with a significant appreciation for the role of the Spirit’s regeneration and illumination as a condition for knowledge). We confess knowledge without certainty, truth without objectivity” (Smith, 121).”

I’m comfortable with that. Tony Jones is a personal friend and I know he would love having a face-to-face conversation with you about these subjects… because that’s what we do all the time in our little faith community.