Heribert Mühlen’s “Introduction to the Basic Christian Experience” (wrongly entitled in English A Charismatic Theology), though not intended as a work of speculative theology, is nonetheless a theological work of considerable interest—probably the first so far to come from within Catholic Pentecostalism.

As we should infer from the very title of his book, one of Mühlen’s fundamental beliefs is that there is such a thing as “the basic Christian experience”. It is the “experience” of a real presence of Christ in his life, consequent upon a personal decision for Christ, that makes a man a Christian (p. 43). For Mühlen this can never be simply a private conversion experience, however: there is no experience of Christ which does not involve an experience of the church. The essential Christian experience is Jesus’s own experience of the Spirit, continued historically in the church. According to Mühlen, Jesus gave the church, not just the Holy Spirit, but his own experience of the Spirit. Reference is also made to Jesus’s experience of his Father, though it is not quite clear whether Mühlen believes the church to be the continuation of this experience too. He does maintain that the kernel of Jesus’s kerygma is his “Abba-experience”. He also says that “God gives us his experience of himself”. He regards it as an important sign that God is renewing his church that “the experience of the primitive church has today been bestowed in an historically new and surprising way to many Christians in all Churches” (p. 94).