In the Q&A feature on ReasonableFaith.org, William Lane Craig’s online ministry, Craig recently addressed the classic conundrum of two religious persons, a Mormon and a Fundamentalist Christian, as the case may be, each communicating a claim to an authentic experience with the Holy Spirit; the Christian must conclude, reasons the questioner, that the Mormon is “lying or mistaken,” but the argument is “reversible.” I would like to point out that I see no reason why both Mormon and Christians cannot each have an experience with the Holy Spirit; many religious traditions, in fact the majority of Christians, acknowledge that salvation is open to non-Christians, that a glimmer of grace can persist in non-Christian religious traditions, and that God can work in the hearts of all men, without compromising the essential value of the “correct” religion. But, that aside, I recognize the tension between the two seemingly incompatible claims of authentic experiences with the Holy Spirit and I recognize that for many, this tension matters; one of my subscribers, for example, recently PMed me a hypothetical dialog between a hypothetical Christian and William Lane Craig, a dialectic, capturing much of the original question from ReasonableFaith.org. The hypothetical Christian says: “My Mormon friend claims to experience the Holy Spirit, and that through this experience he knows his beliefs are true.”
(more…)