reformed blogging.

In none of the twelve articles of faith can “I believe” be replaced by “I experience.” That God is the Creator of heaven and earth, that Christ is God’s only begotten Son, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, are things that cannot, in the nature of the case, be experienced. Although there certainly are effects in the church that directly proceed from its glorified head in heaven, that Christ arose from the dead, ascended to heaven, and is now seated at the right hand of God are things we know only from Holy Scripture. Our heart can most certainly bear witness to all these facts and experience their power, but as facts they are firmly established to our mind only by the testimony of the apostles. If, denying this, people want to deduce and construct these facts from Christian experience, they do violence to that experience. They make of experience–as mystical philosophy did with respect to intellectual contemplation–an organ that is foreign to human nature and so turn Christians into a separate class of people, something like the “spirituals” among the Gnostics, the born-again among Anabaptists, and those equipped with a superadded gift among Catholics.
…if for once I may also appeal to experience–experience teaches us that no individual believer ever arrived at knowledge and acceptance of the historical facts and truths of Christianity by this method; on the contrary, he or she knows them only from Scripture and accepts them on its authority.
- Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics (Volume I): Prolegomena, 534-5.