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6 Faith and the Conditions of Possibility of Experience A Response to Kevin Hart J A M E S K . A . S M I T H I think I know the fellow who knocked at Kevin Hart’s door: every Sunday, he sits just a few pews in front of me at Del Aire Assembly of God, an inner-city church in Los Angeles. And every once in a while, he comes to pester me in my adult education class. Lacking that handy remote which could stop him mid-sentence (I’ve put one on my Christmas list!), I don’t have the luxury of turning off his testimony regarding his experience of God. And so I often hear him recount similar experiences: ‘‘Jamie, I met God in such a powerful way this week,’’ he’ll testify. Or, ‘‘Brother, I just have to share with you the kingdom experience I had on our retreat this weekend.’’ He then proceeds to share—to testify to—his experience, what he has ‘‘gone through,’’ continuing a long tradition of testimony that includes Augustine ’s Confessions. In fact, testimonies to the experience of God are pretty common fare in my evangelical, charismatic tradition; but re- flection on just what that means—or its very possibility—is not. So I am thankful to Hart for raising these questions about the experience of God, and about the very idea of experience itself. Indeed, just as Marion suggests that it is the question of God’s ‘‘phenomenality’’ that My thanks to Barbara Wall, Director of the Office for Mission Effectiveness, and John Caputo, David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy, for both the invitation and support to engage Kevin Hart and participate in the Experience of God conference . 87 pushes us to the question of phenomenality per se, so an investigation of the experience of God brings us to a point of sustained reflection on experience per se.1 It seems that Hart, however, is immediately perplexed by the claim to an ‘‘experience of God’’: ‘‘that God can be experienced,’’ he remarks, ‘‘is to have assumed that the divine offers itself as a phenomenon , and this runs counter to everything you know about the proper usage of the word ‘God.’’’ That observation itself, however, assumes something about both the nature of ‘‘experience,’’ what constitutes a ‘‘phenomenon,’’2 as well as the nature of God and God’s ‘‘donation.’’ In the remainder of the essay, Hart attempts to unpack just what he means by this slippery word ‘‘experience’’ and hence what can be characterized as a ‘‘phenomenon.’’ There is a correlation between the two: only a phenomenon can be experienced, and experience can only be experience of a phenomenon in a strict sense. So any ‘‘encounter’’ with something (or someone) that cannot—or will not—be subjected to the conditions of phenomenality cannot be ‘‘experienced ’’ in a strict sense. But this does not mean that it cannot be encountered, or that it cannot encounter us; it’s just that we’ll have to find a different name for that ‘‘event’’—a ‘‘counterexperience.’’ (Of course, all of the problems that Hart believes attend our claims to an ‘‘experience of God’’ must, Levinas reminds us, also accompany any claim to an ‘‘experience’’ of the other person, the Other. For Levinas, the other person is also an alterity who refuses to be submitted to the conditions of appearance imposed by phenomenality.3 Thus Levinas must also provide an account of how I can ‘‘encounter’’ the other without the other being reduced to the conditions of my horizons of expectation. His ‘‘solution’’ is a ‘‘relation without relation.’’4 In this sense, Hart carries on a Levinasian tradition that includes Marion.) Hart locates this nonobjectifying, nonreductive encounter in prayer:5 ‘‘If anything is likely to persuade us that the words ‘experience ’ and ‘God’ can enter into a positive relation with one another it is the simple fact that people pray.’’ This is because ‘‘if we meet God in prayer it is as absolute subject, not as intentional object, and this means several things. To begin with, it suggests that the encounter does not take the form of an experience; at the most, we could call it a counterexperience. . . . As absolute subject, God never presents himself as object in any sense, and so he comes to us not as experience but in experience.’’ It is at this juncture that Hart seems to oppose ‘‘experience’’ and ‘‘faith’’ (another slippery word). Faith, in fact, is...

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