What is meant by religious experience?

Question 1

Richard Swinburne - ‘The Existence of God’ - 2 ways of describing religious experiences:

Answer 1

1. PUBLIC.
   A) An occasion where everyone can see the same thing, but may have different interpretations. E.g. Sunset – miraculous or natural.
   B) Healing: Someone may be healed with clear evidence that a sudden change physical and/or mental health has occurred. Everyone witnesses the same event, but may differ about its cause.
2. PRIVATE.
   A) A private experience that can be described E.g VISIONS. The Virgin Mary appearing to St. Bernadette at Lourdes.
   B) A private experience that cannot easily be put into words. E.g. MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE. St Thomas Aquinas: ‘All I have written is like straw’.
   C) Experiencing God over time, through places, people and events, leading to an awareness of God’s presence in ones life.

Question 2

William James (1842-1910) ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)”: 4 main features of Mysticism:

Answer 2

• INEFFABILITY: the experience ‘defies expression, that no adequate report of its content can be given in words” Must be directly experienced and cannot be imparted to others.
• NOETIC QUALITY: Mystical states seem also to be states of knowledge. ‘They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.’
• TRANSIENCY: ‘Mystical states cannot be sustained for long’
• PASSIVITY: The mystic has no control over the experience, feeling ‘as if he were grasped and held by a superior power’.

‘Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance’. ‘They modify the inner life.’

Question 3

Rudolf Otto: ‘The Idea of The Holy’ (1923):

Gave many examples on different types of rel exp, suggesting they share certain common themes:

Answer 3

• Sense of awe’ in the presence of the supernatural or what he described as ‘numinous’.
• Whenever people were in touch with mystery, awe, wonder & fascination, it could be said that they had therefore been in touch with that which was beyond themselves, the Holy, the Transcendental, the Eternal.
• Otto describes this with phrase ‘mysterium tremendum es fascinans. F.C. Happold explains ‘The word mysterium implies the idea of something ‘wholly other than man’; tremendum the idea of awefulness, overpoweringness, and urgency; fascinans the idea of something which draws one in spite of one’s self.

Question 4

Caroline Franks Davis: In ‘The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (1989)
6 descriptions:
1) INT
2) Q-S
3) REV
4) REG
5) NUM
6) MYS

Answer 4

1) Interpretive experiences: When someone ‘sees an experience as religious not because of any unusual features of the experience itself, but because it is viewed in the light of a prior religious interpretive framework’. E.g. Seeing an event as God’s will.
2) Quasi-sensory experiences: Any experience connected to sense perception. E.g. Visions, dreams, voices (‘inner locutions’), smells, the feeling of heat, pain, levitation (rising up). Visions can be either a direct apprehension of an object (e.g. Resurrection stories), or like pictures sent by a divine being and requiring interpretation (e.g. Julian of Norwich has a vision of a lord and his servant which she only fully understood 20 years later).
3) Revelatory experiences: A person experiencing such a thing might be describes as a ‘sudden conviction, inspiration, revelation, enlightenment, ‘the mystical vision’ ad flashes on insight.’ St Teresa of Avila: ‘the Lord introduced into the inmost part of the soul what he wishes that soul to understand’
4) Regenerative experiences: The most frequent type of rel exp among ordinary people: experiences of new hope, strength, comfort, peace, security, joy. These are seen as connected to a religious activity, such as prayer and worship, or accompanied by a sense of divine presence. Healing experiences e.g. Of being ‘saved’, ‘called’ or ‘forgiven’ (e.g. Wesley in 1738 ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt a trust in God, He had taken away my sins, & saved me from the law of sin & death.’ The discovery of meaning in life. This would include conversion experiences.
5) Numinous experiences: God as wholly other (Otto). When confronted with infinite goodness, might, majesty, we realize how insignificant and fragile our existence is.
6) Mystical experiences: 4 Characteristics. 1) Sense of having apprehended an ultimate reality. 2) Sense of freedom from the limitations of time, space & individual ego. 3) Sense of ‘oneness’. 4) Bliss or serenity.