Reply to Michael Levine

1983 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Oakes
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Experience Of God

I am grateful to Mr Levine for his careful and accurate rendering of the thesis which I presented and defended in my first paper on the topic of ‘self-authenticating religious experience’. As should be reasonably clear from his remarks, I defended therein the negative and somewhat modest epistemological thesis that even if it is inconceivable (or logically impossible) for there to occur self-authenticating experience of God, it is far from obvious that such is the case. Hence, it seems to me that the claim of more than a few theistic mystics to have had such experience is entitled to something more than the rather cavalier rejection it has received at the hands of many ‘tough-minded’ epistemologists of religion. (I except Mr Levine: his rejection of that claim inclines towards the distinctly non-cavalier.)

scholarly journals Institutional Religion and Religious Experience

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 791
Author(s):  
Lidia Rodríguez ◽  
Juan Luis de León ◽  
Luzio Uriarte ◽  
Iziar Basterretxea
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
God Image ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
American Cities ◽  
The City ◽  
Depth Interviews

A number of empirical studies have shown the continuous lack of adherence and the growing autonomy of the population regarding religious institutions. This article reflects on the kind of relationship between deinstitutionalisation and religious experience based on the following hypothesis: the evident decline in religious institutions does not necessarily lead to the disappearance or the weakening of religious experience; rather, it runs simultaneously with a process of individualisation. Our aim is to provide empirical evidence of such transformations; therefore, we do not get involved in speculations, but take into account the contributions of scholars concerning three key terms integrated in the conceptual framework of “religious experience’’: “experience of God”, “God image”, and “institutional belonging”. We analysed 39 in-depth interviews with a qualitative approach; interviews were conducted during the years 2016–2018 amongst Evangelical and Catholic populations in three Latin American cities (Córdoba, Montevideo, and Lima) and in the city of Bilbao (Spain). These interviews clearly indicate a growing autonomy from the religious institution, while evidencing a rich range of experiences of God and a great diversity of God representations. In both cases, they point to processes of individualisation of believers who elaborate their own religious experience in a personal and complex way.

scholarly journals The World as a Theological Problem

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-46
Author(s):  
Martin Koci
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Proper Sense ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
Theological Turn ◽  
Christian Worldview ◽  
The World ◽  
Theological Turn In Phenomenology

Abstract We have no other experience of God but the human experience, claims Emmanuel Falque. We – human beings – are in the world. Whatever we do, whatever we think and whatever we experience happens in the world and is mediated by the manner of the world. This also includes religious experience. Reflection on the possibility of religious experience – the experience of God – suggests that the world is interrupted by someone or something that is not of the world. The Christian worldview makes the tension explicit, which is perhaps why theology neglects the concept and fails in any proper sense to address the world. Through following the phenomenologist Jan Patočka, critiquing the theologian Johann B. Metz and exploring the theological turn in phenomenology, I will face the challenge and argue for a genuine engagement with the world as a theological problem.

scholarly journals Objective, Intersubjective Mystical Relationships: Justification and Reality

Open Theology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 198-216
Author(s):  
Michael Barber
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Rational Justification ◽  
William Alston ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
Personal Character ◽  
Bodily Presence ◽  
Phenomenological Account ◽  
Analytic Philosopher

Abstract Amplifying the idea of religious experience as occurring within an encompassing “religious province of meaning” and developing the personal character of the experience of God in the Abrahamic religious traditions, this paper argues that mystics in those traditions experience God “objectively.” Their experience of God is that of experiencing God as what Alfred Schutz called a “Consociate,” despite the lack of God’s bodily presence. Such a phenomenological account of religious experience converges with the description by analytic philosopher William Alston of religious experience as an objectively given, non-sensual perception of God, even though the personal Consociate model is preferable to the perceptual one, given the Abrahamic traditions. Conversely, Alston and Alvin Plantinga show how ascending levels of rational justification of religious experience are possible with reference to the experiential level, and such levels can be accommodated within the Schutzian “theoretical province of meaning” in its collaboration with the religious province. Both the Consociate and Schelerian/personalist accounts of God resist any explaining away of religious experience as mere phantasy, and the religious finite province of meaning provides a more comprehensive explanation of religious experience than either Alston’s or Plantinga’s approaches. However, the strategy of envisioning religious experience as taking place within a finite province of meaning is more noetic in character than Scheler’s view of an eidetically elaborated noematic absolute reality that precedes the rise of consciousness itself and that counterbalances the noetic portrayal of religious experience.

scholarly journals "With Sincere Reverence": A Christological Perspective for the Interreligious Dialogue Envisioned by Nostra Aetate

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Gamberini, SJ
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Interreligious Dialogue ◽  
The Other ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
First Moment ◽  
The Church ◽  
Third Moment ◽  
Practical Dimension

Theologians have a particular task to provide discernment when expressing in interreligious dialogue the Christological proclamation that Jesus Christ is "'the way, the truth, and the life,' (Jn 14:6), in whom people may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself" (Nostra Aetate, §3). Therefore, there is a need to renew the spirit of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate,, which reminds us that the Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in the other religions. The Church acknowledges with sincere reverence ("sincera cum observantia") that the other often religions reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all people. In this article, I highlight three different moments in which this sincere reverence towards other religions may be realized. The first moment may be called methodological and refers to the Ignatian tradition of the Spiritual Exercises. I develop first of all the praesupponendum (presupposition) as an attitude of being able to listen to the religious experience of the other; then the contemplatio ad amorem (contemplation in attaining love), as awareness and recognition of the action of the Spirit: being able to distinguish the religious experience of God from its theoretical and practical interpretations; finally the magis, the continuing transcending of the religious conscience in reaching out God: Deus semper maior (God is always greater). The second moment of my paper is more theoretical. I deal with the question of Truth within the interreligious dialogue and how God’s ineffable transcendence and otherness have been revealed in this Jesus of Nazareth; "No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him" (Jn 1:18). The humanity of God, Jesus’ particularity, is not a limitation for interreligious dialogue, but constitutes an adequate perspective for determining the universality of Jesus Christ. The third moment considers the practical dimension of the dialogue. I relate the inner otherness of God (Trinity) with God’s becoming other than himself (Incarnation), showing how the evangelical praxis of the believer, who makes himself everything for everybody, is able in the praxis, more than in theory, to sustain the eschatological tension between the already and not yet that is characteric of interreligious dialogue.

Does Elusive Becoming in Fact Characterize H. D. Lewis' View of the Mind?

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-405
Author(s):  
Peter A. Bertocci
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
King's College ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The University

It was a little over ten years ago, 1967–8, that H. D. Lewis delivered the first series of Gifford lectures, The Elusive Mind, in the University of Edinburgh. It was my privilege that year to be an auditor in the Seminar at King's College that Professor Lewis was conducting with his students in the area of this topic. I had already read the works in which, in the midst of neo-orthodox and existentialist religious movements, he had devoted himself to critical valuation of those doctrines - witness his Morals and the New Theology (1947), and Morals and Revelation (1951). This earlier work prepared for a comprehensive interpretation of religious experience in his book in 1960: Our Experience of God.

Le Refus Lévinassien de la Mystique

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (45) ◽  
pp. 69-81
Author(s):  
Fabio Samuel Esquenazi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
Ethical Commitment ◽  
Consequent Reduction ◽  
The Needy ◽  
Prime Location ◽  
Ethical Experience

Despite recognizing the Other, particularly the needy person, as a prime location for a meaningful experience of God and the metaphysical nature of his interpretation of the fundamental ethical experience, a careful reading of Levinas’ corpus reveals the modulations of his rejection of the mystical phenomenon. This paper analyzes the main arguments that justify his « Lithuanian » distrust of mysticism and the consequent reduction of religion as ethics in his thought, as a result of forgetting that the perception of and adherence to the same transcendent principle present in the deep consciousness –conversio cordis – that directs one’s gaze towards the need and suffering of others –conversio morum – is common to the mystical experience, faith – as core of religious experience to Jewish-Christian tradition –, and ethical commitment.

Otto, Rudolf (1869–1937)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith E. Yandell
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Numinous Experience ◽  
Rudolf Otto ◽  
Kantian Philosophy

Rudolf Otto, an early and leading student of religious experience, was a devout Christian thinker (part theologian, part philosopher, part phenomenologist of religious experience) who was strongly influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He held that numinous experience – experience of the uncanny that is strongest and most important in cases in which it seems to its subject to be experience of God – is unique in kind. Such experience of God, he held, occurred in both Semitic and South Asian monotheistic traditions. Recognizing the intellectual or doctrinal content of numinous experience, but influenced by Kant’s thesis that knowledge-giving concepts cannot refer beyond possible objects of sensory experience, Otto tried to remain faithful to both numinous experience and Kantian philosophy by talking about ‘ideograms’ that express the content of numinous experience but, allegedly at least, are not concepts.

Our Experience of the Ultimate

1984 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ninian Smart
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
Liberal Attitude ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Reason And Faith ◽  
The One ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

My title is of course a variation on Professor H. D. Lewis' well-known Our Experience of God. There he expounded a variety of religious intuitionism, which stands in the line of Schleiermacher, Rudolf Otto and Martin Buber. These and other writers have characteristically made ‘the move to experience’, as a new blend of natural and revealed theology. The move makes a great deal of sense. On the one hand it grounds belief at a time when the older natural theology apparently had crumbled. On the other hand, it points to the dynamics of religious inspiration and gave a new perspective on revelation. It softens both reason and faith, of course, but it also provides a defence against skepticism. It fits well with a liberal attitude to scriptures and tradition. So there are manifest advantages of the move to experience, for those who wish to make it in the context of the Western theistic tradition. The writers I cited above, and Professor Lewis himself, have discussed religious experience from a mainly Western and theistic angle – even Otto with his great comparative concerns did so; and more needs to be said about the nature of religious experience in the broader context of Eastern and other religions. Lewis, however, paid attention to this wider problem, for instance in his 1963 article ‘Buddha and God’. In some respects this issue of the relationship of apparently non-theistic religions to theism is the most important one in contemporary crosscultural philosophy of religion.

C. S. Peirce and Religious Experience

1996 ◽  
pp. 140-154
Author(s):  
Vincent G. Potter
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Cognitive Content ◽  
Rational Argument ◽  
Experience Of God

This chapter discusses how Peirce viewed the role of experience in religion. Over the years, there have been two problems present in the analysis of religion and religious experience. The first is classical empiricism's charge that religious language is meaningless, in the sense of bearing no cognitive content. The second is the tension felt by religious believers between the need for an authentic experience of God—a sense of awareness of God's nearness or presence—and the need for rational argument to ground and to legitimate any such experience. Experience is required to make religion concrete and alive; argument is required to authenticate the experience. The chapter turns to Peirce to answer both these problems in terms of his general theory of experience and cognition.

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