Religious Experience, Human Finitude, and the Cultural-Linguistic Model
AbstractThe article argues that the anthropology of the cultural-linguistic model elaborates the radical materiality, historicity, and contingency of religious experience in a way that the experiential-expressivist model does not. More specifically, the article argues that experiential-expressivist thinkers who conceptualize religious experience as having a nonconceptual core which is not constituted by the contingencies of a person's material, social, and historical environments implicitly compromise human finitude. The article also suggests that the cultural-linguistic model will seem threatening to our sense of human freedom as long as we share the modern assumption that material causes and human choices are competing kinds of “things” in the world, rather than being descriptions of the same concrete phenomena from different perspectives and for different purposes, and that the cultural-linguistic model will seem atheistic if one shares the modern view that this-worldly causal efficacy is in competition with God's agency.