The Supernatural in Other Religions
I had a discussion this week with a friend on the subject of spiritual experiences in the context of other religions. My friend had just read the testimony of a man who converted to Sufi Islam because he was convinced that he had experienced God through Sufi practices. The question that came up was how we Christians should account for such experiences. Some thoughts:
(1) Sometimes we confuse a non-spiritual experience with a truly spiritual one. This happens even in the Church. We can sometimes imagine ourselves transported by angels, when it's simply a melody working on our emotions.
(2) Experiences, in general, do not interpret themselves. When we feel something or witness a scene that seems beyond the natural, we look for an explanation in the understanding we already have of the world. When Paul heals a lame man in Lystra, the crowd takes them for Zeus and Hermes, and in Malta when Paul isn't hurt by the viper's venom, people conclude that he himself is a god.
(3) There are spiritual powers other than God whose aim is to lead people astray. As Westerners, I think it's this aspect that we tend to forget. We've inherited from the Enlightenment a materialistic, mechanical worldview. We believe that the world functions automatically according to the laws of nature, with God intervening on the rarest of occasions. This is not the worldview of most people who have lived on this earth, and it's not the approach of the authors of the Bible either. If the activity of supernatural beings seems bizarre to us, that itself may be explained by a strategy of the dark powers, as imagined by C.S. Lewis in his imagined correspondance between two demons:
I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in ignorance of your own existence. That question, at least for the present phase of the struggle, has been answered for us by the High Command. Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course this has not always been so. […] I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that ‘devils’ are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.1
The Biblical authors speak openly of the activity of demons and evil spirits, which is not always recognized as what it is. The magic practiced by Simon Magus was attributed to God by the Samaritans (Acts 8.9-12), and Satan himself disguises himself as an angel of light according to Paul (2 Cor 11.14). So we shouldn't be surprised if there are supernatural experiences outside Christianity. This is exactly what a biblical worldview would predict.
Afterward there's the question of how to talk about it. It may not be the best approach to automatically respond to any account of a supernatural experience with: “It was a demon!” For myself, I don't claim to know where the Qu’ran comes from, for example. I simply argue from the text we have that it is not a revelation from God. That way the discussion stays objective grounds where it can be more fruitful.
Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010, p. 31.