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• W4383554481 abstract "The indefatigable Dale Allison is widely known for his excellent New Testament commentaries and studies. Here we have something distinctly different, though perhaps not surprising to those familiar with his overall oeuvre, where aspects of his long-term interest in religious experiences around the world have already become evident (as in the latter part of his The Resurrection of Jesus, [London: T&T Clark, 2021]). Allison is fascinated by, and takes seriously, a wide range of religious experiences. He focusses particularly on experiences of ‘Someone is there’, which can bring either bliss or terror, on extensive informal practices and understandings of prayer, on encounters with angels, on people approaching death, when those with dementia may recover lucidity just before the end or have visions or auditions, and on near-death experiences, where, among other things, people may report information inaccessible to their prone body. Allison emphasises throughout how common and well-attested such experiences are, yet equally emphasises how often people are reluctant to speak of them, even when, as often, they have been reckoned as a highlight of their life. This is because of a dominant secular culture which is dismissive of such experiences and of people who own to having them and which is thus existentially and intellectually limited and limiting. As he puts it with regard to near-death experiences: ‘Even today many continue to hold their stories close. What is the point of baring your soul if the smug response is, “They've decided it's just oxygen deprivation, right?” or “Must've been a dream”?’ (p. 130). The first-class scholarly abilities of Allison are evident in numerous ways throughout, despite his disclaimer at the outset: ‘This is not an academic treatise. My orientation is rather pastoral, and my focus is on what ordinary people, in significant numbers, have reported and continue to report, as well as on some of the implications’ (p. ix). The point is that he is not writing for other scholars and well-established scholarly debates but rather for anyone who wants a disciplined and thoughtful guide to unusual but common experiences and what to think and say about them. On the one hand, Allison is entirely aware of, and open-eyed about, the range of modern interpretations of unusual experiences in terms of sociology, psychology, neuroscience and so on, and he has no problem with scientific analysis and its explanatory potential. For example, he offers his own analysis of certain angelic rescue stories in ‘natural’ terms (pp. 78–79). His objection is to a reductive worldview which refuses to take seriously the transcendent and the metanormal. The tone of writing is robust and disarmingingly commonsensical. Allison does not want to score points or prove or disprove positions in relation to secular culture but rather to draw attention to what is actually there in our world: ‘When we know that the world is a truly weird place, that human beings are more than complex, and that God works in unpredictable ways, we will own an open mind’ (p. 194). On the other hand, there are extensive endnotes which contain a fine bibliography of relevant literature, both from sociological and psychological and neurological perspectives, and from popular Christian (and other religious) perspectives. It is clear that there is a world of literature that is generally rather little known, which Allison has compiled and worked with over many years. Anyone interested in the field can start here! Occasional passing comments reveal that some of Allison's colleagues down the years have given him a hard time over this interest: ‘Some of my colleagues are perplexed that I read and ponder popular books on angels. Is it not a waste of time for an educated mind to bother with tales told by the gullible?’ To which he responds: ‘But I pay attention to these books for the same reason my colleagues pay attention to the daily news: they want to know what is going on in our world’ (p. 97). This book is in fact a tribute to time well spent. It is also one of the most lucid and readable scholarly books I have read in a good while. Allison is up-front about his own interpretive stance as a Christian, which he develops thoughtfully and constructively and does not use in an exclusive way to shut down other interpretations. He uses it to show how in his own life, as in that of others, religious experiences can play an important role, formative of direction and priorities in life. Yet the way he utilises his role as a Christian interpreter gives rise to my two reservations about this generally excellent book. First, the penultimate chapter, ‘Some Theological Issues’, is the weakest chapter, as it has elements of polemic and imprecision which are absent elsewhere. There is, for example, some in-house wrestling with scholarly peers, such as N. T. Wright. Allison also criticises other leading NT scholars for ‘tepid or belittling appraisals’ of Paul's rapturous experience in 2 Corinthians 12:1–5 (p. 186)—but with no acknowledgement of the contextual issue that Paul cites this heavenly experience, about which he cannot speak, precisely so as to relativise it in relation to the experience of which he can speak, and which matters the most, his learning from his risen Lord, via the thorn in his flesh, that grace is sufficient and Christ's power is perfected in weakness. Secondly, Allison's recurrent lament that ‘most theologians and scholars of religion pay this trove [of religious experiences] no heed as they go about their business’ (p. 10) is not entirely justified. He says this in the context of praising the work of Alister Hardy's Religious Experience Research Centre in Oxford, which has collated and analysed much material, on which Allison has drawn. I had hoped for some recognition of a major critique of the work of that Centre by one of the leading British theologians of the last generation, Nicholas Lash. Lash delivered at that Centre, by invitation, the Alister Hardy Memorial Lecture of 1992, available as ‘On what kinds of things there are’ in Lash's The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’ (1996), pp. 93–111 (a lecture which makes available his fuller argument in his Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God [Charlotteville: University Press of Virginia, 1988]). Lash has no desire to downplay experiential encounter with God but is rather concerned to probe what does, and does not, count as such, and his account is sharp and probing. He says, for example, ‘If … Christianity has an experiential “root” or “core”, then this is to be found not in “fleeting” or “puzzling” transient states of private consciousness, but in the experience of Jesus in Gethsemane and on Calvary, and in the experience of his followers … worked out in courageous opposition to the authorities and in painful conflict with their fellow Jews’ (p. 110). This sounds notes which are hardly present in Allison's account. Admittedly, Allison delimits his book at the outset with the disclaimer, ‘I do not … discuss whether the very idea of “religious experience” … is coherent or useful’ (p. ix). And one should not find fault with someone for not writing a different kind of book. Yet if one key working category, ‘religious experience’, may in fact be problematic in important ways that are not allowed into consideration, that does surely mean that more still needs to be said. To invoke Lash is not, I hope, to devalue the valuable and accessible work that Allison has done. But it is to invite Allison to follow up his important book with a sequel, in article or book form, that will offer fuller engagement with this challenge to some of his working assumptions." @default.
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• W4383554481 title "Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age, Dale C.AllisonJr., Eerdmans, 2022 (ISBN 978‐0‐8028‐8188‐5), x + 254 pp., pb $21.99" @default.
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