Fords & Bridges between religions

(Originally written April 29, 2007 in Book 15)

Chapter 8: Finding Fords and Building Bridges

How can Christianity, a set of beliefs that together forms an exclusive truth, share so many of its truths with other religions?

Finding Fords

Avoiding the Genetic Fallacy

God does not work against or apart from human psychology or culture.

As Christians, we need to accept that aspects of Christianity are a part of human culture. But this does not mean that they are not part of what God has revealed.

Sometimes God works within human culture; sometimes He works against it.

Sinkholes

Ludwig Feuerbach claimed that all alleged attributes of God are merely projections of idealized human attributes.

This understanding would provide a common ground between Christians and non-Christians, but only at the expense of the exclusive truth of Christianity. It is a sink hole.

Basic Phenomenology of Religion

Phenomenology is the study of appearances. It describes the world from the inside out; that is, it begins with human beings and their most fundamental perceptions.

Phenomenological analysis describes reality as directly experienced by the subject.

The Primordial Experience

Phenomenology aims at taking us to the most fundamental experience of a human being in a given situation - the primordial experience.

The Problem: The universality of religious experience

There is somewhere in the human noetic structure that either relates to an object of religious experience or simulates doing so.

The Key: Appearances behind appearance

Some religions are false and thus, there an be no objective reference point to the experience of their adherents.

There is a basic dimension that frequently appears to underlie religious experience.

This dimension does not say anything about the reality of the object of experience. It can manifest itself when there is a real object (Christ) or when there is a not-real object (Shiva)

This dimension leaves the possibility open to allow someone who believes in the exclusive truth of Christianity to align certain aspects of Christian experience with experience in other religions without conceding the truth of Christianity.

Rudolf Otto: The Holy

Rudolf Otto exposed the non-rational side of religion.

The rational side of religion is its objective beliefs and ethical practices.

Otto claimed that the most profound significance lie in the non-rational, the numinous side of religion: the encounter with the dimension of the Holy.

Otto calls the experience when you feel the sudden, overwhelming presence of God the Holy, the numinous and the mysterium tremendum.

The mysterium tremendum:
1) Tremendum: Indicates the experience carries with it the feeling of the awesome presence of God which reveals his purity and righteousness
2) Mysterium: Indicates that the object of this feeling is not wholly knowable
3) The experience of the mysterium tremendum includes a component of fascinosum.

Fascinosum: the alienating feeling of tremendum is concurrent with a feeling of deep love and grace. The mysterium feeling both repels and attracts at once.

While one cannot follow Otto to his conclusions and be a consistent Christian one can thank him for his enumeration of mysterium.

It seems that whenever people have a religious experience they seem to encounter the mysterium.

The mysterium is a dimension of the primordial religious experience.

Mircea Eliade: hierophanies

Hierophanies are particular segments of life or cultures that transforms it from being profane into an encounter with the sacred.

A spatial hierophant is "Holy Ground" like a shrine or a sanctuary.

Eliade claims that when cultures create a sacred sector in space they are reenacting the very creation of the world.

Eliade claims special meanings for these hierophanies:

trees - the quest for immortality
the moon - fertility and the oscillation between life and death
the sun - autonomy and sovereignty
the hero - purity and perfection

Eliade points out that the awareness of the sacred is not limited to some ill-defined encounter with the numinous. Human beings can relate to the numinous in various ways.

C.G. Jung - archetypes

Carl Gustav Jung, a swiss analytic psychologist had much to say on this topic, but it is heavily tainted by pantheism.

Jung was a student of Freud, but broke with him over the interpretation of dreams.

Jung saw Freud as too narrow in that all dreams were either obsessed with sex or death, or both. Jung saw them as a consistent array of symbolic images.

He concluded that there are basic images (archetypes) that reside in the human unconscious and manifest themselves only indirectly in dreams and art.

These archetypes are also the building blocks of religion

Jung divided the unconscious into two parts:
1) Personal and individual
2) Collective

The archetypes dwell in the collective unconscious.

There are major problems with Jung's theory. While it is true that there are recurrent themes in mythology and symbolism it is not necessary to posit a collective unconscious to justify them. These similarities are the very fundamental thought patterns that human beings have.

These archetypal patterns express themselves in primordial religious experiences.

God has revealed himself, at least partially through these archetypes, but in other religions these archetypes are embedded in false content.

Don Richardson, a missionary, claims that God has instilled in many cultures some way that facilitates the understanding of the gospel.

These ways are no substitutes for the gospel, but provide an avenue for a person of that culture to come to understand the gospel.

At the heart of all religious experience there seems to be the awareness of the numinous- the mysterium tremendous et fascinosum.

However, people do not encounter the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum in a disembodied form. They experience them in hierophanies as they are because of the archetypal images embedded in the human mind.

Christians and non-Christians have similar religious experience despite one being true and all others being false because they share the phenomenological experience of the numinous, hierophanies, archetypes and redemptive analogies.

Reenter the rational and ethical

Ronald Green makes the rational concern of religion the cornerstone by showing that religion resolves the conflict between our moral standards and our moral performance.

The religious experience of an individual is constituted by both the phenomenological dimension and the ethical/redemptive context.

Back to General Revelation

Religion does not have solely a phenomenological existence. It has its grounding in a self-disclosing God.

From Finding Fords to Building Bridges

Bridges serve many purposes:
1) Facilitation of evangelism
2) Help us to live together in a civilized society
3) Identify where and where-not common social and ethical causes can be tackled
4) Contribute to the theologian's work in explaining the universe of God's making

Bridge One: Truth

Religion is about truth. Truth is an indispensable aspect of religion.

"Inter religious dialogue is only meaningful so long as truth is an overriding concern" (Corduan, 216).

Bridge Two: Morality

Religions have different moral codes and where they overlap they do so superficially. Nonetheless this is a good bridge point.

Bridge Three: The need for the transcendent
Philosophical:
1) There is a universal need for the transcendent
2) Where there is a universal need there must be an objective way of fulfilling that need
3) Therefore, there must be a transcendent to fulfill the human need of transcendence

Theological:
1) All human beings were created with the need for fellowship with God. This need goes largely unfulfilled due to the interference of sin.
2) This is a real need.
3) Therefore, we can appeal to this need and its objective fulfillment by God in Christ.

Summary

People can have experiences that appear religious because all human beings have fundamental similarities (the Holy [Otto], the role of hierophanies [Eliade], and the subconscious patterns [Jung, Richardson])

To bridge the gap between true religious experience (Christianity) and non-true religious experiences we can use emphasis on truth, morality and the need for the transcendent.