The placebo effect in the medical/scientific world shows the mysterious interplay between mind and experience and therefore to a degree reality (both subjective and objective). Fake medications relive pain, experiments in managing expectations cause us to anticipate pain and therefore feel it (although no pain stimuli are physically triggered). Similarly, do you want to improve your physical health? The protocols for doing so will depend significantly on your mental health. True also in reverse. Want better mental health? Improve your physical health. One set of actions changes the experience of the other, and at least regarding physical health, it is significantly dependent on the mind and mind-state.
Probably the most significant leverage of all for effecting changes across one’s life is social/relational factors. If I recall correctly non-for profits like Compassion Australia consider relational poverty as potentially the root cause for monetary poverty.
Thus far we might then say that relational resources are going to be a key determinative factor in the overall experience of life (not a unique proposition).
Also, not a unique proposition but what I think is an incorrect one, namely, that many who talk (positively) of people’s religious views and how that contributes to their overall (positive) experience of life do so reasoning that the religious life is functioning basically as a psychological or emotional resource. An entirely reasonable way of thinking within an imminent framework. But for a variety of reasons, the imminent framework is unreasonable.
I want to propose that the resource of one’s theological views is not primarily an intellectual or emotional resource, but it is a relational resource. This relational resource, much like what was argued for poverty been fundamentally a relational poverty, is likewise the greatest source of leverage for experiencing positive changes in basically all areas of one’s life.
In an ironic way, the psychologised self operating within an imminent worldview views the doctrines of God and knowledge of God as having no reference to the person of God, but the idea of God (and at best, the positive influence of other like-minded individuals gathering under the same ideas).
However, the experience of God is far from merely intellectual or merely social. It is personal.
To illustrate again from the medical sphere. Our social situation is going to especially impact our experience of suffering and sickness. Someone well supported socially is going to experience suffering with the benefit of others also shouldering some of the suffering and responsibilities of life they can’t handle. But also, simply the wordless presence of others is a comfort.
Oppositely, those who are lonely will experience the same physical suffering more acutely due to their lack of social resources. But within both these situations let us factor the Christian doctrine of belief in a personal God. I would pose that the benefit of belief is not merely an added psychological buffer for the sufferer, but a relational resource.
In much the same way as someone’s wordless presence comforts us, so too God who is present (as many christians will personally attest to during suffering) is comforting us with His presence, but also with his word (stored in our heart or meditated on and received during suffering).
It would be selling the blessings of God short to say that they are primarily physiological or emotional. The blessedness of the Gospel is the very personal presence of God.
Bigvai and Shiphrah 