Experience
Main
specific experiences such as wonder at the infinity of the cosmos, the
sense of awe and mystery in the presence of the holy, feelings of
dependence on a divine power or an unseen order, the sense of guilt and
anxiety accompanying belief in a divine judgment, and the feeling of
peace that follows faith in divine forgiveness. Some thinkers also point
to a religious aspect to the purpose of life and with the destiny of the
individual.
In the first sense, religious experience means an encounter with the
divine in a way analogous to encounters with other persons and things in
the world. In the second case, reference is made not to an encounter
with a divine being but rather to the apprehension of a quality of
holiness or rightness in reality or to the fact that all experience can
be viewed in relation to the ground from which it springs. In short,
religious experience means both special experience of the divine or
ultimate and the viewing of any experience as pointing to the divine or
ultimate.
Study and evaluation
“Religious experience” was not widely used as a technical term prior to
the publication of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) by
William James, an eminent U.S. psychologist and philosopher, but the
interpretation of religious concepts and doctrines in terms of
individual experience reaches back at least to 16th-century Spanish
mystics and to the age of the Protestant Reformers. A special emphasis
on the importance of experience in religion is found in the works of
such thinkers as Jonathan Edwards, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Rudolf
Otto. Basic to the experiential approach is the belief that it allows
for a firsthand understanding of religion as an actual force in human
life, in contrast with religion taken either as church membership or as
belief in authoritative doctrines. The attempt to interpret such
concepts as God, faith, conversion, sin, salvation, and worship through
personal experience and its expressions opened up a wealth of material
for the investigation of religion by psychologists, historians,
anthropologists, and sociologists as well as by theologians and
philosophers. A focus on religious experience is especially important
for Phenomenologists (thinkers who seek the basic structures of human
consciousness) and Existentialist philosophers.
A number of controversial issues have emerged from these studies,
involving not only different conceptions of the nature and structure of
religious experience but also different views of the manner in which it
is to be evaluated and the sort of evaluation possible from the
standpoint of a given discipline. Four such issues are basic: (1)
whether religious experience points to special experiences of the divine
or whether any experience may be regarded as religious by virtue of
becoming related to the divine; (2) the kinds of differentia that can
serve to distinguish religion or the religious from both secular life
and other forms of spirituality, such as morality and art; (3) whether
religious experience can be understood and properly evaluated in terms
of its origins and its psychological or sociological conditions or is
sui generis, calling for interpretation in its own terms; and (4)
whether religious experience has cognitive status, involving encounter
with a being, beings, or a power transcending human consciousness, or is
merely subjective and composed entirely of ideas and feelings that have
no reference beyond themselves. The last issue, transposed in accordance
with either a Positivist outlook or some types of Empiricism, which
restrict assertible reality to the realm of sense experience, would be
resolved at once by the claim that the problem cannot be meaningfully
discussed, since key terms, such as “God” and “power,” are strictly
meaningless.
Proponents of mysticism, such as Rudolf Otto, Rufus Jones, and W.T.
Stace, have maintained the validity of immediate experience of the
divine; theologians such as Emil Brunner have stressed the
self-authenticating character of man’s encounter with God;
naturalistically oriented psychologists, such as Freud and J.H. Leuba,
have rejected such claims, explaining religion in psychological and
genetic terms as a projection of human wishes and desires. Philosophers
such as William James, Josiah Royce, William E. Hocking, and Wilbur M.
Urban have represented an idealist tradition in interpreting religion,
stressing the concepts of purpose, value, and meaning as essential for
understanding the nature of God. Naturalist philosophers, of whom John
Dewey was typical, have focussed on the “religious” as a quality of
experience and an attitude toward life that is more expressive of the
human spirit than of any supernatural reality. Theologians Douglas Clyde
Macintosh and Henry N. Wieman sought to build an “empirical theology” on
the basis of religious experience understood as involving a direct
perception of God. Unlike Macintosh, Wieman held that such a perception
is sensory in character. Personalist philosophers, such as Edgar S.
Brightman and Peter Bertocci, have regarded the person as the basic
category for understanding all experience and have interpreted religious
experience as the medium through which God is apprehended as the cosmic
person. Existential thinkers, such as Søren Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel,
and Paul Tillich, have seen God manifested in experience in the form of
a power that overcomes estrangement and enables man to fulfill himself
as an integrated personality. Process philosophers, such as Alfred North
Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, have held that the idea of God emerges
in religious experience but that the nature and reality of God are
problems calling for logical argument and metaphysical interpretation,
in which emphasis falls on the relation between God and the world being
realized in a temporal process. Logical Empiricists, of whom A.J. Ayer
has been typical, have held that religious and theological expressions
are without literal significance, because there is no way in which they
can be either justified or falsified (refuted). On this view, religious
experience is entirely emotive, lacking all cognitive value. Analytic
philosophers following the lead of Ludwig Wittgenstein, an
Austrian-British thinker, approach religious experience through the
structure of religious language, attempting to discover exactly how this
language functions within the community of believers who use it.
Religious experience and other experience » Views of experience in
general
Religious experience must be understood against the background of a
general theory of experience as such. Experience as conceived from the
standpoint of a British philosophical tradition stemming from John Locke
and David Hume is essentially the reports of the world received through
the senses. Experience, as a tissue of sensible content, was set in
contrast to reason, understood as the domain of logic and mathematics.
The mind was envisaged as a wax tablet on which the sensible world
imprints itself; and the one who experiences is the passive recipient of
what is given. It is possible to distinguish and compare these sensible
items by means of understanding, but the data themselves are available
only through experience—i.e., the sensation of things and reflection
upon thought and mental activities, feelings, and desires. According to
this classical empiricist view, all ideas, beliefs, and theories
expressed in conceptual form are to be traced back to their origin in
sense if they are to be understood and justified.
The above view of experience came under criticism from two sides.
Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century German philosopher, who still retained
some of the assumptions of the position he criticized, nevertheless
declared that experience is not identical with passively received
sensible material but must be construed as the joint product of such
material and its being grasped by an understanding that thinks in
accordance with certain necessary categories not derived from the
senses. Kant opened the way for a new understanding of the element of
interpretation in all experience, and his successors in the development
of German Idealism, Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and G.W.F.
Hegel, came to characterize experience as the many-sided reflection of
man’s multiple encounters with the world, other men, and himself.
A second attack on the classical conception came from U.S. Pragmatist
philosophers, notably Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John
Dewey, for whom experience was the medium for the disclosure of whatever
there is to be encountered; it is far richer and more complex than a
passive registry of sensible data. Experience was seen as a human
activity related to the purposes and interests of the one who
experiences, and it was understood as an interpreted product of multiple
transactions between man and the environment. Moreover, stress was
placed on the social and funded character of experience in place of the
older conception of experience as a private content confined to the mind
of an individual. On this view, experience is not confined to its
content but includes modes or dimensions that represent frames of
meaning—social, moral, aesthetic, political, religious—through which
whatever is encountered can be interpreted. James went beyond his
associates in developing the broadest theory of experience, known as
radical empiricism, according to which the relations and connections
between items of experience are given along with these items themselves.
Critics of the classical view of experience, while not concerned
exclusively with religious experience, saw, nevertheless, that if
experience is confined to the domain of the senses it is then difficult
to understand what could be meant by religious experience if the divine
is not regarded as one sensible object among others. This consideration
prompted attempts to understand experience in broader terms. Cutting
across all theories of experience is the basic fact that experience
demands expression in language and symbolic forms. To know what has been
experienced and how it is to be understood requires the ability to
identify things, persons, and events through naming, describing, and
interpreting, which involve appropriate concepts and language. No
experience can be the subject of analysis while it is being had or
undergone; communication and critical inquiry require that experiences
be cast into symbolic form that arrests them for further scrutiny. The
various uses of language—political, scientific, moral, religious,
aesthetic, and others—represent so many purposes through which
experience is described and interpreted.
Religious experience and other experience » Views of religious
experience
Specifically religious experience has been variously identified in the
following ways: the awareness of the holy, which evokes awe and
reverence; the feeling of absolute dependence that reveals man’s status
as a creature; the sense of being at one with the divine; the perception
of an unseen order or of a quality of permanent rightness in the cosmic
scheme; the direct perception of God; the encounter with a reality
“wholly other”; the sense of a transforming power as a presence.
Sometimes, as in the striking case of the Old Testament prophets, the
experience of God has been seen as a critical judgment on man and as the
disclosure of his separation from the holy. Those who identify religion
as a dimension or aspect of experience point to man’s attitude toward an
overarching ideal, to a total reaction to life, to an ultimate concern
for the meaning of one’s being, or to a quest for a power that
integrates human personality. In all these cases, it is the fact that
the attitudes and concerns in question are directed to an ultimate
object beyond man that justifies their being called religious. All
interpreters are agreed that religious experience involves what is final
in value for man and concerns belief in what is ultimate in reality.
Because of their intimate relation to one another, the religious and
the moral have often been confused. The problem has been intensified by
many attempts—beginning with Kant’s treatise on religion (1793)—to
interpret religion as essentially morality or merely as an incentive for
doing one’s duty. Religion and morality are, however, usually taken to
be distinguishable; religion concerns the being of a person, what he is
and what he acknowledges as the worshipful reality, while morality
concerns what the person does and the principles governing his relation
to others. While it is generally acknowledged that religion must affect
man’s conduct in the world, some have maintained that there is no
morality without religion, while others deny this claim on the ground
that morality must remain autonomous and free of divine sanctions.
Religious experience may be distinguished from the aesthetic aspect of
experience in that the former involves commitment and devotion to the
divine, while the latter is focussed on the appreciation and enjoyment
of qualities, forms, and patterns in themselves, whether as natural
objects or works of art. Anthropological studies have shown that
primitive religions gave birth to many forms of art that, in the course
of development, won independence as secular forms of expression. The
problem of the relation between religion and art is posed in a
particularly acute way when reference is made to religious art as a
special form of the aesthetic. Since it is concerned with the holy and
the purpose of human life as a whole, most scholars would hold that
religious experience should be related in an intelligible way to all
other experience and forms of experience. The task of tracing out these
relationships belongs to theology and the philosophy of religion.
The structure of religious experience » The self and the other
All religious experience can be described in terms of three basic
elements: first, the personal concerns, attitudes, feelings, and ideas
of the individual who has the experience; second, the religious object
disclosed in the experience or the reality to which it is said to refer;
third, the social forms that arise from the fact that the experience in
question can be shared. Although the first two elements can be
distinguished for purposes of analysis, they are not separated within
the integral experience itself. Religious experience is always found in
connection with a personal concern and quest for the real self, oriented
toward the power that makes life holy or a ground and a goal of all
existence. A wide variety of individual experiences are thus involved,
among which are attitudes of seriousness and solemnity in the face of
the mystery of human destiny; feelings of awe and of being unclean
evoked by the encounter with the holy; the sense of a power or a person
who both loves and judges man; the experience of being converted or of
having the course of life directed toward the divine; the feeling of
relief stemming from the sense of divine forgiveness; the sense that
there is an unseen order or power upon which the value of all life
depends; the sense of being at one with the divine and of abandoning the
egocentric self.
In all these situations, the experience is realized in the life of an
individual who at the same time has his attention focussed on an
“other,” or divine reality, that is present or encountered. The
determination of the nature of this other poses a problem of
interpretation that requires the use of symbols, analogies, images, and
concepts for expressing the reality that evokes religious experience in
an understandable way. Four basic conceptions of the divine may be
distinguished: the divine as an impersonal, sacred order (Logos, Tao,
ṛta, Asha) governing the universe and man’s destiny; the divine as power
that is holy and must be approached with awe, proper preparation, or
ritual cleansing; the divine as all-embracing One, the ultimate Unity
and harmony of all finite realities and the goal of the mystical quest;
and the divine as an individual or self transcending the world and man
and yet standing in relation to both at the same time.
The two most important concepts that have been developed by
theologians and philosophers for the interpretation of the divine are
transcendence and immanence; each is meant to express the relation
between the divine and finite realities. Transcendence means going
beyond a limit or surpassing a boundary; immanence means remaining
within or existing within the confines of a limit. The divine is said to
transcend man and the world when it is viewed as distinct from both and
not wholly identical with either; the divine is said to be immanent when
it is viewed as wholly or partially identical with some reality within
the world, such as man or the cosmic order. The conception of the divine
as an impersonal, sacred order represents the extreme of immanence since
that order is regarded as entirely within the world and not as imposing
itself from without. The conception of the divine as an individual or
self represents the extreme of transcendence, since God is taken as not
wholly identical with either the world or any finite reality within it.
Some thinkers have described the divine as wholly transcendent of or
“wholly other” than finite reality, some have maintained the total
immanence of the divine, and still others claim that both concepts can
be applied and therefore that the two characteristics do not exclude
each other.
The structure of religious experience » Social forms or expressions
Most enduring, historical religious traditions find their roots in the
religious experience and insight of charismatic individuals who have
served as founders; the sharing of their experience among disciples and
followers leads to the establishment of a religious community. Thus, the
social dimension of religion is a primary fact, but it need not be seen
as opposed to religious experience taken as a wholly individual affair.
There has been some difference of opinion on the point; Whitehead, for
example, put emphasis on the “solitariness” of religious experience
precisely in order to deny the claim of those who, like Émile Durkheim,
a French sociologist, characterized religion as essentially a social
fact. The social expression of religious experience results in the
formation of specifically religious groups distinct from such natural
groups as the family, the local society, and the state. Religious
communities, including brotherhoods, mystery cults, synagogues,
churches, sects, and monastic and missionary orders, serve initially to
preserve and interpret their traditions or the body of doctrine,
practices, and liturgical forms through which religious experience comes
to be expressed. Such communities play a significant role in the shaping
of religious experience and in determining its meaning for the
individual through the structure of worship and liturgy and the
establishment of a sacred calendar. Communities differ in the extent to
which they stress the importance of individual experience of the divine,
as distinct from adherence to a creed expressing the basic beliefs of
the community. The tension between social and individual factors becomes
apparent at times when the individual experience of the prophet or
reformer conflicts with the norm of experience and interpretation
established by the community. Therefore, although the religious
community aims at maintaining its historic faith as a framework within
which to interpret experience of the divine, every such community must
find ways of recognizing both novel experience and fresh insight
resulting from individual reflection and contemplation.
The structure of religious experience » Objective “intention,” or
reference
Religious experience is always understood by those who have it as
pointing beyond itself to some reality regarded as divine. For the
believer, religious experience discloses something other than itself;
this referent is sometimes described as the “intentional” object that is
meant or aimed at by the experiencing person. Analysis of religious
experience, interpretations placed upon it, and the beliefs to which it
gives rise may result in the denial that there is any such reality to be
encountered or that the assertion of it is justified by the experience
in question. This conclusion, however, does not change the fact that all
religious experience, whether that of the mystic who strives for unity
with God or of the naturalist who points to a religious quality in life,
purports to be experience “of” something other than itself. The question
of the cognitive import or the objective validity of religious
experience is one of the most difficult problems encountered in the
philosophy of religion. In confronting the question, it is necessary to
distinguish between various ways of describing the phenomena under
consideration and the critical appraisal of truth claims concerning the
reality of the divine made on the basis of these phenomena. Even if
describing and appraising are not utterly distinct and involve one
another, it is generally admitted that the question of validity cannot
be settled on the basis of historical or descriptive accounts alone.
Validity and cognitive import are matters calling for logical, semantic,
epistemological, and metaphysical criteria—of the principles of rational
order and coherence, meaning, knowledge, and reality—and this means that
the appraisal of religious experience is ultimately a philosophical and
theological problem. The anthropologist will seek to identify and
describe the religious experience of primitive peoples as part of a
general history and theory of man; the sociologist will concentrate on
the social expression of religious experience and seek to determine the
nature of specifically religious groupings in relation to other
groups—associations and organizations that constitute a given society;
the psychologist will seek to identify religious experience within the
life of the person and attempt to show its relation to the total
structure of the self, its behaviour, attitudes, and purposes. In all
these cases attention is directed to religious experience as a
phenomenon to be described as a factor that performs certain functions
in human life and society. As William Warde Fowler, a British historian,
showed in his classic Religious Experience of the Roman People (1911),
the task of elucidating the role of religion in Roman society can be
accomplished without settling the question of the validity or cognitive
import of the religious feelings, ideas, and beliefs in question. The
empirical investigator, as such, has no special access to the critical
question of the validity of religious experience.
The most radical form of the denial that religious experience has
cognitive import is advanced by the Logical Positivists, who hold that
all assertions or forms of expression involving a term such as “God” are
meaningless because there is no way in which they can be verified or
falsified.
Others who hold that religious utterance based on experience is
without cognitive import regard it either as the expression of emotions
or an indication that the person using religious language has certain
feelings that are associated with religion. Those who follow the lead of
Wittgenstein regard religious utterances as noncognitive but attempt to
determine the way in which religious language is actually used within a
circle of believers. Some psychologists have denied cognitive status to
religious experience on the ground that it represents nothing more than
man’s projection of his own insecurity in the face of problems posed by
life in the world and therefore has no referent beyond itself.
The structure of religious experience » Immediacy and mediation »
Revelational and mystical immediacy
Among defenders of the validity and cognitive import of religious
experience, it is necessary to distinguish those who take such
experience to be an immediate and self-authenticating encounter with the
divine and those who claim that apprehension of the divine is the result
of inference from, or interpretation of, religious experience. Two forms
of immediacy may be distinguished: the revelational and the mystical.
Christian theologians, such as Emil Brunner and H.H. Farmer, speak of a
“divine-human encounter,” and Martin Buber, a Jewish religious
philosopher, describes religious experience as an “I Thou” relationship;
for all three, religious experience means an immediate encounter between
persons. The second form of the immediate is the explicitly mystical
sort of experience in which the aim is to pass beyond every form of
articulation and to attain unity with the divine.
The structure of religious experience » Immediacy and mediation »
Mediation through analysis and critical interpretation
A number of thinkers have insisted on the validity of religious
experience but have denied that it can be understood as wholly immediate
and self-supporting, since it stands in need of analysis and critical
interpretation. Some, like Paul Tillich, hold that there are certain
“boundary experiences,” such as having an ultimate concern or
experiencing the unconditional character of moral obligation, that
become intelligible only when understood as the presence of the holy in
experience. Others, such as H.D. Lewis and Charles Hartshorne, find the
divine ingredient in the experience of the transcendent and supremely
worshipful reality but demand that this experience be coherently
articulated and, in the case of Hartshorne, supplemented by rational
argument for the reality of the divine. Dewey envisaged a religious
quality in experience pointing to God as an ideal that stands in active
and creative tension with the actual course of events. Whitehead
identified the presence of the divine with an apprehension of a
“permanent rightness” in the scheme of things and based the validity of
the experience on the claim that an adequate cosmology requires God as a
principle of selection aiming at the realization of the good in the
world process. James found the justification of religious experience in
its consequences for the life of the individual: valid experience is
distinguished by its philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness.
Finally, some have sought to combine experience and interpretation by
taking the traditional proofs of God’s existence and pointing to their
roots in the experience of perfection, of the contingency of one’s own
existence, and of the reality of purpose in human life. On this view,
the arguments for the reality of God are not wholly formal
demonstrations but rather the tracing out of intelligible patterns in
experience.
The structure of religious experience » Immediacy and mediation »
Preparations for experience
Mystics, prophets, and religious thinkers in many traditions, both East
and West, have been at one in emphasizing the need for various forms of
preparation as a preliminary for gaining religious insight. The basic
idea is that ordinary ways of looking at the world, dictated by the
demands of everyday life, stand in the way of the understanding of
religious truth; man must pass beyond these limitations by the
disciplining of his mind and body. Three classic forms of preparation
may be distinguished: first, rational dialectic for training the mind to
reach insight (this explains why many mystical thinkers from the
Pythagoreans to Nicholas of Cusa and Benedict de Spinoza were deeply
involved in mathematics); second, moral preparation aiming at purity of
heart, which was sometimes conjoined with bodily discipline, as in the
Indian Yoga exercises; third, the use of drugs to expand the range of
consciousness beyond that required for ordinary life. It is significant
that the great mystics invariably regarded such preparation as
necessary, but not sufficient, for experience. The self may be prepared,
but the vision may not come; being prepared, as it were, establishes no
claim on the divine. The experience described by St. John of the Cross,
a 16th-century Spanish mystic, as “the dark night of the soul” points
precisely to the experience of failure. The soul in this situation is
convinced that God has abandoned it, cast it into darkness, perhaps
forever. Mystics in the Taoist and Buddhist traditions have often
emphasized the spontaneity of insight and the need to seek it through an
“effortless striving” that combines the need to search with the
awareness that the insight cannot be compelled. Zen Buddhists are fond
of pointing to insights that are already possessed but not recognized as
such until their holder is shaken loose from ordinary patterns of
thought.
Situational contexts and forms of expression » Cultic and devotional
Religious experience receives its initial, practical expression in the
forming of the cult that provides an orderly framework for the worship
of the religious object. Worship includes expressions of praise,
acknowledgments of the excellency of the divine, communion in the form
of prayer, and the use of sacraments or visible objects that signify or
represent the invisible sacred beyond them, feelings of joy and of peace
expressed often in musical form, and sacrifice or the offering of gifts
to the divine or in the name of the divine. Worship is ordered by means
of liturgy directing the experience of the worshipper in patterns that
combine the written word, the spoken word, and sacred music in a unity
aimed at bringing him or her into the presence of the divine.
Situational contexts and forms of expression » Life crises and rites of
passage
Religious experience has to do with the quality and purpose of life as a
whole and with the ultimate destiny of the person. Certain special times
and events in the course of life present themselves as occasions that
are set apart and celebrated, because they direct man’s thought to the
divine and the sacred with peculiar forcefulness. These occasions,
called life crises, are regarded as dangerous because they are
transitional from one stage of life to another and open to view the
relation of life as a whole to its sacred ground. Pregnancy and birth,
the naming of a child, being initiated into the community—sometimes
called “puberty rites”—the choice of a vocation, the celebration of
marriage, and the time of death are experienced as special events
distinct from the routine happenings of secular life. These events
represent “crises”—i.e., turning points—when man’s relation to the
sacred becomes a matter of special concern. As Gerardus van der Leeuw, a
Dutch phenomenologist and historian of religions, points out, these
transitional times are occasions for celebration in every culture
because they mark the death of one stage and the birth of another in a
universal cycle of life.
Situational contexts and forms of expression » Sacred and secular
The marking off of these crisis occasions from the routine events of
daily life points to the all-important distinction between the sacred
and the secular. As directed toward the sacred, religious experience
finds expression in the specifically religious form of the cult and in
the cycle of sacred life. There is, however, a secular as well as a
sacred life, and, since religious experience concerns the whole of life,
the religious meaning must be related to all the dimensions of secular
life—political, economic, moral, technological, and other. The
relationship is twofold; on the one hand, there is the bearing of the
conception of the divine on standards of behaviour, and, on the other,
there is the influence that the religious meaning has upon one’s general
attitude toward life. The sacred, thus, makes its impact on the secular
by providing principles that are to govern the relations between persons
and by holding before men a vision of the divine that gives purpose to
life as a whole. Although the sacred retains its dynamism by becoming
related to secular life, there is the constant danger that it will lose
itself in the secular, unless specifically religious forms of life are
preserved. The existence in every society of secret and mystery cults,
of sacred brotherhoods, of groups of disciples devoted to holy men, of
monastic orders, and, on the broadest scale, of established churches and
denominations, points to the need felt to retain the sacred as a special
domain that can neither be merged into nor contained within secular
society.
Situational contexts and forms of expression » Verbal, conceptual, and
symbolic
In all of the world religions, religious experience receives its most
enduring expression in the form of sacred scriptures and the body of
commentary through which they are interpreted. Mythological and symbolic
forms of expression are older than conceptual forms and systems of
doctrine. Myth takes the form of a story and represents the imaginative
use of materials drawn from sensible experience in order to express a
religious meaning surpassing the sensible world. Myths of creation in
many religions give ample evidence of this imaginative function. The
task of the theologian using conceptual tools is to elucidate the
thought content of the myth and other primary forms of religious
expression—legend, parable, confession, lamentation, prophetic
vision—and thereby reduce the degree of dependence on the sensible and
imaginative elements. It is important to distinguish devotional and
liturgical expressions from the theological use of language. Creeds,
confessions, psalms and hymns of praise, litanies and scriptures
containing a record of the lives and experiences of sacred persons, all
give immediate expression to the primary experience upon which a
religious tradition is founded. Systems of theology and religious
philosophy make their appearance when it becomes necessary to
conceptualize and express consistently the body of belief about the
divine, the world, and man implied in this primary experience. Tension
exists between religious experience and theological expression at two
points: first, the pietistic and evangelical spirit in religion, as
seen, for instance, in some forms of Protestant Christianity, and the
bhakti devotional movement in Hinduism, seeks to preserve the primacy of
experience at the expense of theology; and, second, those who
acknowledge the indispensability of theology will also demand that its
formulations remain in accord with the experience it is meant to express
and interpret.
Types of religious experience and personality
The personal character of religious experience makes it essential to
understand its varieties as manifested in different types of personality
and the functions they perform. The mystic, a reflective and
contemplative type, shuts out the world and all distracting influences
in order to reach true selfhood through purification and enlightenment.
Although mysticism has social implications, the mystic is primarily an
individualist, whereas the prophet, a person of intense but intermittent
experience, sees himself called to be a spokesman for the divine to the
community or all mankind, and regards his own experience as a message
that enables him to interpret the past and the future in the light of
the divine will. The priest is a mediator between man and the divine,
and his main function is the proper ordering of worship through
liturgical forms. By contrast with the prophet, whose insight is
spontaneous, the priest attains the authority of his office through
education and training; as guardian of the tradition, he must assume
administrative responsibilities in addition to his role as spiritual
adviser; thus he is both active and contemplative. The reformer is a
figure who stands within a religious tradition and seeks to transform or
revitalize it in the light of his own experience and insight. The
reforms intended may be moral, intellectual, or ecclesiastical,
depending on the particular genius of the individual. Common to all
reformers is the conviction that some valid and essential feature of
traditional faith has been ignored or distorted and that these
deficiencies must be overcome if the religion is to be purified. It is
characteristic of the reformer to be actively engaged in bringing about
the reforms indicated by his renewing experience. The monk or member of
a religious order is in search of a special or sacred place set apart
from secular life within which a religious life can be lived and moral
and religious demands fulfilled to a greater degree than is possible in
the world. Different orders stress different aspects of experience: some
emphasize ascetic practices and self-discipline; others are devoted to
the preservation of learning and the development of theology; still
others make missionary zeal uppermost, and the members are impelled by
their own experience to seek to convert others. The forerunner of the
monk, who lives in a community governed by rule, was the hermit or
religious recluse, the type for whom solitary existence, preferably in
deserts and barren places, is necessary for communion with the divine
and self-purification. The saint is a figure venerated by the religious
community as one who embodies perfection in some form. The saint may
have been a martyr, exhibiting perfection in faith; a person possessed
of intensified capacity for experience and communion with the divine; or
one who achieves to a supreme degree the moral and spiritual ideals of
the beatific life. The theologian has the task of expressing the
historic faith of a community concerning the divine (theos) in rational
or conceptual form (logos). The content of his thought, though handed on
to him in its essentials by the tradition, will depend on his own
experience and his insight into the special relevance of that tradition
for his time. The theologian both interprets and reinterprets. The
founder, as might be expected, surpasses all others in importance. The
founder’s experience forms the basis of his own authority and the
substance of the religion he establishes. The intensity of his
experience and the effect it has upon his personality are decisive
factors determining the response of his initial followers and disciples.
There is reason to believe that the founders of the great religions,
such as Moses, Buddha, and Jesus, did not intend to fill this role; the
founding of the religion in each case was the result of the impact of
their personalities and of the profundity of their experience on those
who gathered around them.
John Edwin Smith
