7. Religious Language, Religious Experience, and Religious Pluralism

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.

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Science, Religion and a Culture of Life

Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies ◽

10.5840/jis2003151/25 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 61-78

Author(s):

Stephen C. Dilley ◽

Keyword(s):

Religious Experience ◽

Religious Belief ◽

Religious Pluralism ◽

Human Life ◽

Science And Religion ◽

Sensus Divinitatis ◽

The Relationship

For those who wish to affirm a culture that values human life, the relationship between science and religion continues to be of import. Some, like Edward O. Wilson, think that naturalistic science will eventually account for all phenomena, even religious experience itself. This essay considers Wilson's hypothesis by surveying three classic explanations of universal religious belief: Sigmund Freud's projection theory, Charles Darwin's evolutionarry paradigm, and John Calvin's sensus divinitatis. Both Freud's and Darwin's views suffer from self-referential and evidential problems. In contrast, Calvin's model handles well major objections of religious pluralism and atheism. Of these three, Calvin's view is superior. Religion may not be reducible to a naturalistic explanation, and those who wish to promote a culture of life ought to view the relations between science and religion in a non-Wilsonian fashion, eschewing reductionism.

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Rudolf Otto and the Limits of Religious Description

Religious Studies ◽

10.1017/s0034412500001505 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 30 (2) ◽

pp. 219-230 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

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’.

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Qohelet's concept of deity: A comparative-philosophical perspective

Verbum et Ecclesia ◽

10.4102/ve.v34i1.743 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jacobus W. Gericke

Keyword(s):

Religious Pluralism ◽

Analytic Philosophy ◽

Problem Of Evil ◽

Religious Language ◽

Philosophical Theology ◽

Religious Epistemology ◽

Existence Of God ◽

Philosophical Perspective ◽

The Problem Of Evil ◽

Similarities And Differences

This article discusses the concept of deity in the book of Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) from the perspective of issues of interest in analytic philosophy of religion. Of concern are assumptions in the text about religion, the nature of religious language, religious epistemology, the concept of revelation, the attributes of the divine, the existence of God, the problem of evil, the relation between religion and morality and religious pluralism. A comparative philosophical clarification is offered with the aim of discerning similarities and differences between popular views in Christian philosophical theology and what, if anything, Qohelet took for granted on the same issues.

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J.H. le Roux�s philosophy of religion

Verbum et Ecclesia ◽

10.4102/ve.v34i2.827 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 34 (2) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jaco W. Gericke

Keyword(s):

Religious Pluralism ◽

Philosophy Of Religion ◽

History Of Philosophy ◽

Religious Language ◽

Religious Epistemology ◽

Existence Of God ◽

History Of ◽

The Subject

J.H. le Roux had a passion for philosophy. His writings contain recourse to the history of philosophy in a way that bespeaks a deep underlying interest in the subject. This much is relatively well-known. This contribution, by contrast, aims at reconstructing something hitherto mostly covert: Le Roux�s philosophy of religion. Of interest is what his writings presuppose about the nature of religion, religious language, the nature of God, the existence of God, religious epistemology, the relation between religion and morality and the problem of religious pluralism.

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SABOREAR A FÉ EM MEIO À PLURALIDADE OS CAMINHOS DA TEOLOGIA EM MEIO AO DIÁLOGO INTER-RELIGIOSO

Perspectiva Teológica ◽

10.20911/21768757v36n99p221/2004 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 36 (99) ◽

pp. 221

Author(s):

Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer

Keyword(s):

Religious Experience ◽

Religious Pluralism ◽

Christian Theology ◽

History Of Christianity ◽

Contemporary World ◽

History Of ◽

Present Text

O presente texto procura pensar o estatuto da teologia cristã no atual contexto de modernidade, secularização e pluralismo religioso. Após fazer uma breve análise do percurso do pluralismo religioso na história do cristianismo, desde suas origens, o texto propõe a centralidade da experiência religiosa e da espiritualidade como caminho fecundo para que a teologia possa reelaborar-se a si mesma em atitude de abertura e diálogo com as outras formas de crer e as outras tradições que formam o tecido religioso do mundo contemporâneo.ABSTRACT: The present text seeks to reflect upon the statute of Christian theology in the following actual contexts: modernity, secularization, and religious pluralism. After briefly analyzing the itinerary of religious pluralism in the history of Christianity since its origins, the text proposes the centrality of the religious experience and spirituality as the fertile path by which theology may re-elaborate itself with an attitude of openness and dialogue with other forms of believing and other traditions that are woven into the religious fabric of the contemporary world.

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Metaphor and Theological Realism

European Journal for Philosophy of Religion ◽

10.24204/ejpr.v6i1.192 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 6 (1) ◽

pp. 79-92

Author(s):

Sebastian Gäb

Keyword(s):

Religious Pluralism ◽

Religious Language ◽

Negative Theology ◽

Realist Theory ◽

Realist Interpretation ◽

New Perspective ◽

Theological Realism

In this paper, I argue that there are indispensable and irreducible metaphors in religious language and that this does not threaten a realist interpretation of religion. I first sketch a realist theory of religious language and argue that we cannot avoid addressing the problems metaphor poses to semantics. I then give a brief account of what it means for a metaphorical sentence to be true and how metaphors can refer to something even if what they mean is not expressible in literal terms. Finally, I discuss how this realist theory of metaphor influences our understanding of negative theology and gives a new perspective on religious pluralism.

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Horizons on Christianity's New Dialogue with Buddhism

Horizons ◽

10.1017/s0360966900018235 ◽

1981 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 40-61

Author(s):

Paul F. Knitter

Keyword(s):

Religious Experience ◽

Religious Language ◽

Christian Doctrine ◽

New Directions ◽

The World ◽

Christian Literature

AbstractA survey of recent Christian literature on the dialogue with Buddhism reveals a conversation which is new in both spirit and content. This article summarizes these new directions in five areas: (1) the methodology of dialogue; (2) the nature of the Ultimate and of religious language; (3) religious experience as an experience of selflessness; (4) the value and need of acting in the world, and (5) the unique, salvific mediation of Jesus and Gautama. In each of these areas, suggestions are offered as to how the new insights from the dialogue with Buddhism might aid in clarifying questions and incoherencies in present-day Christian doctrine and practice.

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Phenomenology and the Possibility of Religious Experience

Open Theology ◽

10.1515/opth-2017-0039 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Ronald L. Mercer

Keyword(s):

Religious Experience ◽

Religious Language ◽

The Self ◽

Human Beings ◽

Theological Turn ◽

Human Situation ◽

The Face ◽

The Subject ◽

The Way ◽

Idea Of God

AbstractWork in what has been known as the theological turn in French phenomenology describes the way in which human beings are always, already open to a religious encounter. This paper will focus on Levinas as a proper transcendental phenomenologist as would be characterized by parts of Husserl and Husserl’s last assistant Eugen Fink. What Levinas does in his phenomenology of the face/other (which gets tied up in religious language) is to describe an absolute origin out of which the subject arises. This point of origin structures the self in such a way as to always, already be open to that which overflows experience and, thus, makes possible the very experience of an encounter with the numinous. Such an approach to religious experience for which I am arguing simply takes Levinas at his word when he declares “The idea of God is an idea that cannot clarify a human situation. It is the inverse that is true.” (“Transcendence and Height”) Understanding the structure of the subject as open to that which cannot be reduced/totalized/ encapsulated is to recognize that the human situation is ready for the possibility of religious experience.

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