Religious experience in the current theological discussion and in the church pew

Abstract

'Religious experience' ranks amongst the basic terminology that theologians and lay believers have over the past two centuries often used to refer to matters of faith. In this, the foundational works of William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902) and Rudolph Otto (Das Heilige, 1917 and The Idea of the Holy, 1923) played foundational roles. 'Religious experience' has since then become a pervasive element of religious language, in its various genres and on various practices. Yet, is indeed the meaning of this reference entirely clear?This contribution puts into focus some recent trans-disciplinary theological discussions on religious experience; however, the scope here is more applied too, to reflect on current Christian practice, namely on the place of experience within its precincts. In this, the Reformation commemorated by the present volume is honoured: Amongst the contributions of the Reformation counts, the 'democratisation' of theological discourse, namely that which also touches the heart of the individual believers and of them as a collective -the church. Half a millennium after the Reformation, that contribution remains one of the most productive.It is however, in particular, in this 'democratisation' that some worrying tendencies of continued inflation or perhaps hypertrophy can be discerned, in the form of a commodification of religious experience in the church 1 pews. It seems at the moment that no significant lesson has been learned from the criticism levelled against the experiential-expressive model of religion some three decades ago by George Lindbeck, in his Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (1984). In the intervening period, however, Lindbeck's position has had to sustain criticism, at times to the point of denigration, as some have pointed out that Lindbeck's analysis of the relation between experience and language was out of date already at the time of writing: The inadequacy of a romantic-idealist understanding of language and referentiality had been recognised at least since the early 1970s. In the eyes of his critics, Lindbeck's category of experiential expressivism amounted to an oversimplified scheme -a 'straw-man' easily knocked down (DeHart 2006:164-165). The authors of this article are aware of the above criticism; nevertheless, even when accepting the objections to Lindbeck's shortcomings, his work The Nature of Doctrine (1984) managed, in its 'oversimplified' division of theological thought into three models (vide infra), to attain two matters:1. to provide a valuable tool for at least two generations of theologians to orient themselves on the past development of Christian theology, and 2. to offer solutions to some current burning issues, above all those related to the ecumenical and pluralistic nature of the religious situation in the 1980s, and hence also in the situation of our time.This applies especially for our purposes here to his critical observations on the overly confident emphasis placed on religious experience in theology a...

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