THE LIMITS OF OUR OWN EXPERIENCE
Martin Marty refers to Joseph Sittler as one of his mentors. He quotes from Sittler’s book, Gravity and Grace in a recent issue of Context: We ought not permit the term ‘experience’ to be confined within the brackets of one’s own existence. The meaning of experience is a poor and haggard thing if it only refers to what has happened to me. The meaning of education and of culture is that we live vicariously a thousand other lives, and all that has happened to human beings, things that have been recorded not by my experience but by the experience of others, become a second life, and a third, and so on. I’m annoyed by those who defy experience by saying, ‘Well, I haven’t met it yet; it hasn’t happened to me. Therefore, it has no authority.’ I would be a poor person if the only things I knew were what I have found out for myself.” There is…
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