468 Touching the Supernatural (Dale Allison)

Renowned Historical Jesus Scholar and Princeton Theological Seminary Professor, Dale Allison’s life changed forever when he was just sixteen years old. In fact, he has chronicled nine profound spiritual experiences throughout his life. These extraordinary moments of transcendence led him to a comparative study to learn more about what is happening to people all around the world in our time. The result? A book that catalogues and describes weird encounters with angels in white, sudden terminal lucidity, near death experiences, and even encounters with evil spiritual entities. This is not the typical sort of book written by someone who has made a career of scholarship within a guild that generally prefers naturalism and reductionism to the miraculous or inexplicable. Nonetheless, now tenured and sitting atop a mountain of published successes–and without concern about his career–Professor Allison feels free to explore his own numinal episodes as well as those of a staggering number of others–most of whom keep such experiences to themselves.

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—— Links ——

• Get the book we discussed, Encountering Mystery
• For more about Dale Allison, see his books on Amazon
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• Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio Library.
• Who is Sean Finnegan?  Read his bio here

—— Questions ——

1. You begin your book by telling three personal experiences of the transcendent. Were you worried what people would think about you as a distinguished scholar of Jesus and the New Testament, especially among the more secular-minded elements in the academy?
2. You remark on the difficulty of acquiring accurate statistics on mystical experiences because people tend to keep their encounters private. Why is that?
3. And yet, they seem to be increasing, or at least reported more (see p. 21)
4. You talk about a small piece of paper that you keep in your desk draw that chronicles nine experiences you’ve had between 1979 and 1999. Do you think it’s important for people to maintain their memories of extraordinary events?
5. Honestly, your little piece of paper reminded me of Blaise Pascal’s night of fire. He sowed it into his house jacket and it was only discovered after he died.
6. Why do you think there’s so much shame and silence surrounding people’s experiences of spiritual realities?
7. Let’s talk about the dark side. You related some stories of people who experienced love or joy or light and then others where people felt terrified by the numinous. Let’s talk about the so-called old hag experience (Newfoundland Legend). What is that?
8. You found one source that claimed approx. 20% of North Americans have had this experience (p. 24). How do you make sense of that? Is it that people are in an altered stage of consciousness and can perceive a spiritual dimension that is usually invisible to them?
9. Specifically, could you share about your daughter? (She saw shadow people and had PTSD for 10 years!?)
10. Have you thought much about psychedelics? There’s increasing research about micro dosing where people have similar experience to what you cover in the book, both benevolent and malevolent.prayer (skip)…though one story about the lady who saw a phone number and called a pay phone and got the guy who was struggling with negative thoughts
11. Angels: you talk about the AIW (angel in white) as well as anti-gravity stories. You talk about people nearly falling off roofs or falling and then floating downwards. These are especially hard for people to believe since they aren’t subjective experiences. These are either the most powerful or the most ridiculous. Did you struggle to include these?
12. Sudden clarity among the dying..other dreams and visions (60%)
13. Many Christians hold to cessationism, probably b/c it’s easy. Dismiss everything as hearsay and hallucination. But, you’re book, essentially makes that view impossible. But this raises another problem. Read p. 82. How do you respond to this objection?