In the previous section, I discussed external factors that shape our religious beliefs. They were tradition, scripture, and culture. This section looks at internal factors that shape our religious beliefs: revelation, reason, and experience. They are factors of our “inner journey.”

Most people draw from these six factors when they try to make sense of religious and spiritual matters, and so do I. However, for a metaphysical Christian, the internal factors are more important. Traditional Christians have often looked to external factors for answers about why their inner life is a mess. Not so for a metaphysical Christian. We, as metaphysical Christians, find ourselves looking to our inner journey for answers about how our external life is taking shape. To use a theological term, the internal factors are authoritative for us.

What is different about the three internal factors is that they emerged as authoritative in different historical eras. The external factors seem to have evolved randomly, but the internal factors emerged one at a time and built upon one another. Revelation came first in shaping our human understanding of God. Then reason appeared with our advance into the Enlightenment. And, most recently and exhibited by Transcendentalism and “new theology,” experience has become authoritative today in theological thinking.

Religious thinking has always included revelation as a formative and authoritative factor, but only since the Enlightenment has reason been included as authoritative. Our awareness of the importance of experience in shaping religious beliefs has come about only in the past 150 years. As I will explain, experience is, for the metaphysical Christian, the most important of all six factors.

Understanding the sequence of these three internal factors is important for understanding their unique strengths and weaknesses. Some of that understanding was given in the previous insight, Why Truth Transcends Culture.

The gist of these following three insights is this: revelation helped us see how our life is one with the cosmos but did so at the cost of closing off our perception of separate external realities; reason helped us see how particular external realities function, but at the expense of closing off our sense of love and compassion for others; and experience opened our understanding of love and compassion for others, but at the cost of a diminished sense of oneness with God and individual prosperity.

Understanding these strengths and weaknesses of revelation, reason, and experience is essential to understanding why metaphysical Christianity is the future of the Christian faith.