Religious Experience 1 Flashcards
What can religious experiences give rise to?
New religious movements and/or conversion
What are the 5 types of prayer?
Petition
Adoration
Confession
Thanksgiving
Supplication
Give 2 Biblical examples of imaginative visions.
Jacob and the ladder up to heaven in Genesis 28, Joseph in the nativity story in Matthew 1:28
What is conversion?
Giving up forming ideologies and starting again with a new focus on God
What is active conversion?
Seeking answers and achieving conversion purposefully
What is passive conversion?
Taken by surprise when God is suddenly revealed to them
What is William James’ definition of conversion?
A transformation from a divided and imperfect self to a unified consciousness
What is the story of Paul on the Road to Damascus (Acts 9)?
- Saul of Tarsus was actively engaged in the 1st century persecution of Christians
- A blinding light flashed from heaven and he heard the voice of God
- He converted to Christianity and devoted himself to missionary work
What was the Aldersgate Experience?
John Wesley, a preacher, reported a sensation of his heart warming whilst listening to Luther’s Preface to the Epistle of the Romans. This caused his to preach salvation through faith
Give an example of a communal conversion experience.
Acts 2 - Holy Spirit came to a service for the Jewish festival of Pentecost
What are revival meetings?
Meetings with the aim of rekindling interest in Christianity
What is a sensory/corporeal vision?
Experience of an external reality with the senses e.g. hearing a voice
Given an example of a corporeal vision.
St. Bernadette experienced an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes, 1858
What are the 3 types of vision?
-corporeal/sensory
-intellectual
-imaginative
Who was Teresa of Avila?
16th Century Catholic nun, living in Spain at the time of the Inquisition
What is an intellectual vision?
Gaining a deeper understanding of God not discoverable through reason
What are Teresa of Avila’s 4 criteria of an authentic vision?
- Clear
- Things the person has not thought of
- Ineffable
- Sense of peace and light
What is the purpose of ‘The Mansions’?
An analogy of the soul in its relationship with God
What are the 7 Mansions?
- easily distracted
- importance of prayer
- self-discipline
- rest in prayer
- spiritual union
- ecstasy and pain
- complete unity
What were Teresa of Avila’s dates?
1515-1582
What are Teresa of Avila’s 4 stages of prayer?
- Meditation
- The Prayer of Quiet
- Union
- Rapture
What is the purpose of Teresa of Avila’s stages of prayer?
Shows prayer as a spiritual exercise, developing union with God
What is mysticism?
Overall - sense of self is lost, encounter with God
Why was mysticism coined?
To find common ground between different world religions
Who was Manikka-Vacchagar and what did he write?
Hindu poet and saint, Indian Theism
What did Manikka-Vacchagar write about mystical experiences?
God transcends all description yet can be met in a unitative experience
Who was Abraham Abulafia and what did he teach?
13th Century Jewish mystic, concentrated meditation on the name of God leads to spiritual ecstasy
What was William James’ dates and work?
1842-1910, ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’
What are James’ 4 characteristics of mystical experiences?
- Passivity - experience is outside themselves
- Ineffability - ‘defies expression’
- Noetic - understanding of important truths not available through reason
- Transiency - cannot be reproduced in memory
What were Rudolf Otto’s dates and work?
1869-1937, ‘The Idea of the Holy’
What is the numinous?
The feelings evoked by a non-rational sense of being in the presence of God
What was Otto’s key argument?
Too much focus on rationality, religion should be based on personal experience
What are the 3 characteristics of the numinous?
- Creature consciousness - awareness of own smallness
- The ‘Wholly Other’ - cannot be mistaken for any other type of experience
- Emotional Response - profound and conflicting lasting emotions
What is mysterium tremendum et fascinans?
the feeling of the numinous
What does each part of mysterium tremendum et fascinans convey?
-Mysterium - otherness of God
-Tremendum - magnitude of God
-Fascinans - misture of dread, awe and fascination
What is the ‘faculty of divination’ (Otto)?
The ability to sense the presence of the supernatural
Give 3 responses to challenges to religious experiences.
- Belief does not need to be verified to be meaningful (Franks-Davis)
- Experiences can be verified by whether a person’s behaviour afterward is consistent with God’s existence (James)
- The unrepeatability of an experience does not invalidate it
In what book did Swinburne write about religious experiences?
‘Is there a God?’ 1979
What is the Principle of Credulity?
We should believe the evidence of our senses, unless there is good reason not to
What is the Principle of Testimony?
If a person is generally trustworthy, we should believe their experiences
Who is Caroline Frank-Davis and what did she write?
Canadian scholar of Swinburne, wrote ‘The Evidential Forces of Religious Experience’
What are Frank-Davis’ 3 categories of challenges?
- Description
- Subject
- Object
What is a description related challenge?
Something in the content of an experience doesn’t add up e.g. God saying to do something cruel
What is a subject related challenge?
Questioning whether the person giving the report is reliable/conflicting accounts
What is an object related challenge?
Whatever has been perceived is impossible to exist
Give 4 natural explanations of religious experiences.
- Misunderstanding
- Physical Causes - e.g. hallucination
- Delusion - e.g. substance abuse
- Illusion - projection of hopes
Give 3 challenges to the authenticity of religious experiences.
- How could anyone recognise God?
- Is the subject telling the truth or interpreting correctly?
- Freud - repression of sexual urges account for feelings of religious experience
Give 3 challenges to the objectivity of religious experiences.
- Religious views cause accounts to be biased
- Experiences are private and personal, no evidence
- Logical positivism argues something has no value without empirical evidence
Give 2 responses to challenges to objectivity of religious experience.
- All experiences are subjective
- Communal experiences provide greater evidential support
Visions - Isaiah 6:1
‘I saw the Lord, high and exalted, sat on a throne’
Intellectual visions - TofA
‘the words spoken by the Lord seem to be heard with the soul’s own faculty of hearing’
Communal conversion - Acts 10:44
‘the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message’
Ineffability - James
‘one must have been in love oneself to understand a lover’s state of mind’
Noetic quality - James
‘and I shuddered at the sight of my iniquities, stupefied, melted, overwhelmed with wonder and gratitude’
Creature consciousness - Otto
‘the note of submergence into nothingness before an overwhelming, absolute might of some kind’
Mysticism - Abraham Abulafia
‘the man who has felt the divine touch and perceived its nature is no longer separated from his master’
Prayer - TofA
‘and anyone who has not begun to pray, I beg, for love of the Lord, not to miss so great a blessing’
Frank-Davis’ challenges are persuasive:
- Reasonable describes religious experience as a misunderstanding
- Logically suggests the possibility for impaired perceptions
- Show the likelihood of the experience as being so low it is almost untrue
Frank-Davis’ challenges are not persuasive:
- Description challenges present a materialist assumption discounting things out of the ordinary
- Principles of testimony and credulity
- Nature of religious experiences are very different from hypothetical experiences
Challenges to religious experiences are valid:
- Logical positivists argue a religious experience cannot be considered meaningful
- Lack of uniformity and contradiction make experiences unreliable
- Scientific, medical, and psychological explanations e.g. collective neurosis
Challenges to religious experiences are not valid:
- It is reasonable to believe God would seek to act within creation
- Communal experience has evidence that can’t be fabricated
- It is impossible to compare religious and spiritual experiences to natural ones
Otto’s definition of the numinous is adequate:
- Anyone can have a personal encounter with the divine
- Numinous is very individual and personal
- Dramatic nature lies in what the religious experience evokes in the individual
Otto’s definition of the numinous is not adequate:
- Has little specifics about the nature of God
- Holds God cannot be known through the senses or rationality
- There are well-documented types of experience that are entirely different
James’ characteristics are adequate for defining mystical experiences:
- They are the long standing definitions of standard features
- Other classifications of experience don’t really add any further characteristics
- Numinous is just an elaboration
James’ characteristics are not adequate for defining mystical experiences:
- St. Bonaventure provides a focus on the process of experiences rather than just its features (illuminative, purgative and unitive stages)
- Have been challenged, added to and superseded
- Only identifies features
All types of experience are equally valid:
- Variety of experiences does not mean they are all in error
- If we accept testimony, we must accept that God’s appearances are equal
- It is wrong to undermine someone’s experience
Types of religious experience are not all equally valid:
- Diversity and contradiction mean they can’t all be correct
- Ineffability makes some less valuable or impactful
- Experiences are variable on different cultural interpretations
Religious experiences impact practice:
- Conversion experiences initiate belief in God e.g. Augustine
- Swinburne argues testimony provides good evidence for God
- James saw powerful transitional effects of religious experiences
Religious experiences don’t impact practice
- Russell argues that positive effects does not make religion true
- One can be influenced by fictional stories in the same way, but that doesn’t make them true
- Restricted only to those who believe
What is the verification principle?
An experience is only meaningful if it had empirical evidence to its truth
What is the falsification principle?
An experience is only meaningful if it can be proved false
What is meditation?
Concentrating on the life of Jesus and being filled with the love of God
What is the prayer of quiet?
Effort in prayer is no longer needed
What is union?
The soul becomes unified with God
What is rapture?
The feeling of the soul being carried away from the created world
