A2 Edexcel Religious Experience
- Created by: Tabitha Smith
- Created on: 22-02-14 23:37
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What is a religious experience?
- ENCOUNTER with the DIVINE
- Non-empirical event - brings awareness of beyond
- Most convincing proof of existence for believers
- St Teresa: "impossible for me to doubt'
- DIRECT (experient feels they are IN CONTACT with God) or INDIRECT (inner experience of God's action in creation)
- Davis - 7 types of religious experience;
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- Seeing God's work - awareness experience
- Vision/inner experience of God - quasi-sensory experience
- Encountering holiness of God - numinous experience
- Conversion - regenerative experience
- Answered prayers - interpretive experience
- Sense of ultimate reality - mystical experience
- Gainging enlightenment and knowledge - revelatory experience
- Variety of experience - some are in private - some are in large groups, 'corporate' experiences (Toronto Blessing)
- Many have common themes - 1975 Greeley's survery shows most common themes in USA
- Deep inner peace
- Certainty everything will turn out good
- Feeling of needing to help others
- Love is the centre of everything
- Sense of joy
- Emotional intensity
- Some definitions:
- Smart: 'perception of the invisible world'
- Schleiermacher: sense of the ultimate
- Buber: people experience God through other people and nature - on a PERSONAL level - in an "I-Thou" relationship - Eternal Thou
- Tillich: Experiences are encounter that are then REFLECTED on to understand the religious significance
- James: draw on emotions, but directed at the divine - gives the experient a renewed approch to life
- Dawkins: no such thing as a religious experience - but a persons psychological needs
Types of religious experience
1) The dramatic or conversion event
- A direct experience
- Otto: the numinous
- Evidence of the "wholly other" nature of God
- Vision - then feeling of awe
- Linked to search for faith - sense of sin or guilt - looking for reassurance and certainty from God
- Wesley: "I felt my heart strangely warmed"
- Experient is both attracted and repelled by the sense of awe
2) Responses to life and the world
- Gentler, indirect experiences
- Enhance persons understanding of their life and the world around them
- Result of prayer or communication with God
- Lewis: 'conviction or insight'
3) Revelatory experiences
- Divine self-disclosure
- God is directly known
- Vision or dream
- Experient acquires new knowledge
- Propositional revelation - God communicates divine message to human - Moses and Ten Commandments
- Non-propositiona revelation - Person comes to moment of realisation - Buddha gained enlightenment
4) Near-death experiences
- 'dies' and is then resuscitated and then recalls what they saw
- Moody; studied the claims - common themes were peace; dark tunnel; meeting the light; barrier crossing decision
- Is it a religious experience? Have common ground - peace and light - scriptures have similar testimonies
- Those who had the experience think it is sufficient proof
5) Mystical experiences
- Experience of the ultimate reality - sense of unity with the divine
- Difficult to describe - St John of the Cross
- Intensley personal - other-wordly and transcendent
- Two types of mysticism:
- Theistic - an awareness of God
- Monistic - offers awareness of soul, self and conscience
- James lists the four types of mystic experiences:
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