ABSTRACT
In this final section of the book, we turn our attention to experience, and to the ways in which the practice of Christian theology is shaped by it. The territory covered by the word ‘experience’ is extraordinarily broad and disparate, and many ambiguities – and sometimes confusions and misunderstandings – surround its use. We therefore begin by looking at some of the characteristic ways in which theologians appeal to experience in their arguments, and then construct a map of six different meanings that the word ‘experience’ can have in theology, and six different characteristics of thoughtful appeal to experience. Although we start with apparently simple cases, in which ‘experience’ might be taken to be one distinct source or criterion for theological claims, we move on to the idea that the practice of theology is always and unavoidably experiential, because it is always and unavoidably the practice of particular people living in particular contexts and in particular relationships.
