Living Religion

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-143
Author(s):  
James W. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Relational Model ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Cloud Of Unknowing ◽  
Human Understanding

An embodied approach to human understanding can ground the case for a “spiritual sense” and for understanding religious knowledge as a form of perception, especially if proprioception (and not just ordinary sense perception) is used as an analogue. The long-standing tradition of the existence of a spiritual sense is brought up to date by linking it to various contemporary neuroscientific theories. An embodied-relational model offers several avenues for understanding our capacity to transform and transcend our ordinary awareness. Two classical Christian theological texts on religious experience—the Cloud of Unknowing and Scheiermacher’s The Christian Faith—are also discussed.

Knowing Religion

2019 ◽  
pp. 94-122
Author(s):  
James W. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Relational Model ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
The Way

Taking embodiment seriously impacts the way religion is theorized in the discipline of cognitive psychology and in other religious studies disciplines, including theology. This chapter describes new avenues of research that follow from adopting an embodied perspective. An embodied perspective also transforms the way we think about traditional topics concerning religious knowledge. The often argued parallel between ordinary perceptual experience and certain religious experiences commonly described as religious perceptions is analyzed and an appreciative critique of William Alston’s 1991 book Perceiving God is offered. Arguments for conceiving of religious experience as a form of perception are strong but the argument as currently framed is seriously flawed psychologically. Reframing the argument in terms of an embodied-relational model strengthens it and supports the argument in this book that reason is on the side of those who choose a religiously lived life.

Why Teach Theology to a Catholic College Student Today?

Horizons ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin R. Tripole
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
College Student ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Catholic College ◽  
Proper Role ◽  
Student Today

AbstractTheology has a problem Justifying itself to its students as well as to itself. Its proper role is to bring the student to a deeper Christian faith experience. Two methods for doing this are the “general religious experience” approach and the method which concentrates on the uniqueness of Christ and his message and an interpersonal encounter with him. The latter method is preferred, and has proven most useful in rekindling the faith among college students.

Numinous Experience and Religious Language

1992 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leon Schlamm
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Religious Feeling ◽  
Numinous Experience ◽  
Rational Understanding ◽  
The Relationship

The purpose of this article is to evaluate Rudolf Otto's account of the relationship between numinous experience and religious language in The Idea of the Holy, and this will inevitably also involve some more general discussion of the relationship between all religious experience and discursive reason. In The Idea of the Holy Otto makes a number of controversial claims about the nature of numinous experience and the problems which it creates for anyone wishing to speak about it. Numinous experience, Otto asserts, is qualitatively quite unlike any other experience. It is a religious feeling providing a unique form of religious knowledge inaccessible to our ordinary rational understanding. It is frequently spoken of as ineffable. Moreover because it resists literal description, it must be approached, if at all, then indirectly through analogy. At the heart of this collection of claims about numinous experience is an epistemological assumption about the distance separating religious language and experience. Otto believes that the parameters of numinous experience extend beyond the parameters of religious language, and consequently that it is possible to compare religious experience with language about it in a straightforward way. Indeed, much of The Idea of the Holy is devoted to the struggle of religious experience to cast off what Otto sees as its imprisonment by inadequate religious language.

Rudolf Otto and the Limits of Religious Description

1994 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Philip Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Friedrich Schleiermacher ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
Numinous Experience ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

In a recent study entitled ‘Numinous Experience and Religious Language’, Dr Leon Schlamm has endorsed Rudolf Otto's well known and much discussed account of the relationship of religious experience to religious language, and then used this position to criticize some highly influential voices in the continuing debate on the precise nature of mystical experience. The aim of this paper, in response to Schlamm, is to question the plausibility of Otto's account in The Idea of the Holy of the nature of religious knowledge and his closely related understanding of the relationship between religious experience (or as he prefers, numinous experience) and religious language. By implication, this also calls into question Schlamm's use of Otto's position in his criticism of those writers on mysticism that he takes issue with, chiefly Steven Katz and those who propose an essentially Kantian interpretation of mysticism. However, for the most part I shall leave the contemporary debate on mysticism unaddressed, though my comments do have a bearing on it. If there is a wider target, it is chiefly those interpreters of religion, like Schlamm, who conceive of the relationship of religious experience (or the religious object itself) and religious language in essentially the same way as Otto. One thinks immediately here of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom Otto admired greatly, and who stands in the same Liberal Protestant tradition. Also Karl Barth, who ironically, for all his strictures of Liberal Protestantism, actually propounded a view of the meaning and nature of religious language which is remarkably similar to the views of both Schleiermacher and Otto; at least at the beginning of his theological career, in his famous commentary on Romans: all that talk of God as ‘the inexpressible’ and ‘the Wholly Other’. In addition one could mention those classical texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, which like many contemporary writers on mysticism (e.g. the late Deirdre Green), conceive of mystical experience and the truth which it reveals as ‘beyond the scope of discursive thought, language and empirical activity’.

Mysticism and Sense Perception

1973 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Wainwright
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Cognitive Status ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
Ordinary Objects ◽  
Important Phenomenon ◽  
The World ◽  
Mystical Experiences ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Numinous Experiences

In this paper I propose to examine the cognitive status of mystical experience.There are, I think, (at least) three distinct but overlapping sorts of religious experience. (1) In the first place, there are two kinds of mystical experience. The extrovertive or nature mystic (in some sense) identifies himself with a world which is both transfigured and one. The introvertive mystic withdraws from the world and, after stripping the mind of concepts and images, experiences union with something which (in some respects at least) can be described as an undifferentiated unity. Introvertive mysticism is a more important phenomenon than extrovertive mysticism. (2) Numinous experiences are complex experiences involving dread, awe, wonder, and fascination. One (apparently) finds oneself confronted with something which is radically unlike ordinary objects. Before its overwhelming majesty and power, one is nothing but dust and ashes. In contrasting oneself with its uncanny beauty and goodness, one experiences one's own uncleanness and ugliness. (3) The experiences bound up with the devotional life of the ordinary believer (gratitude, love, trust, filial fear, etc.) are also religious in character. Nevertheless these more ordinary experiences should, I think, be distinguished both from numinous experiences and from mystical experiences, for they do not appear to involve the sense of immediate presence which characterises the latter.

Frank, Semën Liudvigovich (1877–1950)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip J. Swoboda
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Ultimate Reality ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Intuitive Knowledge ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Conceptual Thought ◽  
European Thought ◽  
The Revolution

The philosophy of S.L. Frank was one product of the renewed interest in epistemology, speculative metaphysics and religion among educated Russians in the quarter-century preceding the Revolution of 1917. Frank published the first volume of his philosophical system in 1915, but most of his major works were written after the Revolution, in European exile. Influenced by tendencies in turn-of-the-century European thought that criticized the exaggerated pretensions of scientific reason, Frank formed the conviction that abstract, conceptual thought was inherently incapable of mastering ultimate reality. A valid metaphysics was nevertheless possible, founded on our capacity for direct, intuitive apprehension of reality in its living concreteness. In intuitive knowledge, reality discloses itself as a ‘total-unity’ – an all-embracing unity in which the dualities with which conceptual thought wrestles are overcome without being dissolved. Ultimate reality is itself grounded in, and embraced by, a principle Frank termed ‘Divinity’, one that manifests itself in religious experience as the personal God of Christian faith. The rootedness of the human person in this divine principle is the condition of possibility of all spiritual creativity – of art, science, morality and law, and religion.

Christian Faith and the Protestant Principle

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madhuri M. Yadlapati
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Paul Tillich ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Justification By Faith ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter takes a closer look at three figures whose discussions of faith are among the most influential in twentieth-century Christian theology. Two, Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, are twentieth-century Christian theologians and one, Søren Kierkegaard, is a nineteenth-century philosopher, but all three determine directions taken by existentialist Christian theology in the late twentieth century. All three figures happen to be Protestant, not simply by denominational identification, but more importantly, each is guided by the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone to emphasize the priority of God's saving grace over any human works and human understanding. All three adhere to the Protestant Principle (an individual's right and responsibility to radically question and reinterpret questions of faith), albeit in different ways.

What is ‘religious experience’ in Schleiermacher’s Dogmatics, and why does it matter?

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 44-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Dole
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
In Virtue Of

Schleiermacher is often credited with elevating the notion of ‘religious experience’ to prominence in theology and the study of religion.  But his position on religious experience is poorly understood, largely because he is typically read through the lens of his later appropriators.  In this essay I make a set of claims about what ‘religious experience’ amounts to in Schleiermacher’s mature dogmatics, The Christian Faith (or Glaubenslehre).  What is noteworthy about Schleiermacher’s position is its calculated coherence with religious naturalism, understood as the position that religious phenomena have natural causes.  I then argue that Schleiermacher’s understanding of religious experience is actually promising for contemporary discussions– partly because it allows for productive conversation with religious naturalists, and partly in virtue of the utility of Schleiermacher’s claim regarding the kind of religious experience at the heart of Christian religious identity.

ΔΙΑΝΟΙΑ and Plato's Cave

1970 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. G. Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Sense Perception ◽  
Ordinary Sense

In Part I of his paper Cooper gives indisputable evidence regarding Plato's use of the man-made image as a step to the apprehension of a Form under discussion, whether that image be in fact a diagram or a model, or simply a verbal picture, such as his imaginative account of Justice within a community, which we find used to provide us with in Republic 443 c 4 ff. However, Cooper goes on to assure us that the divided-line figure offers us only three types of object: ‘We have three kinds of objects which differ from one another in clearness and esteem, firstly, the Forms, secondly, the objects of ordinary sense-perception, and thirdly, images, shadows and reflections.’ Now the admitted fact that, as he notes, Republic 10 (597 b 5-e 5) gives the same three orders of reality, does not entirely absolve Cooper from all the implications of Plato's decision to divide his line into four parts rather than three; for it is made quite clear in 509 b 6–10 that the Form of the Good, is the source of being as well as of knowledge, so the Line must also classify both.

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