(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.
Showing posts with label Jung. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jung. Show all posts
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Reality and the Existential Need for God
(Originally written March 1, 2007 in Book 13)
Philosophy of Religion
Norman Geisler & Winfried Corduan
The Meaning of Reality
"Reality is more than a subjective condition of human experience" (64).
In dealing with religious experience it seems there is no surefire way of separating the hallucinatory from the real.
There is always the possibility that one's supposed religious experience is actually explainable by purely psychological phenomena.
All experience is subjective, hence religious experience is subjective.
"Religious transcendence must be more than a subjective condition in religious experience before it should be called 'real'" (64).
Reality is more than merely a projection of human imagination.
Religious transcendence is not real if it is merely a projection of human nature.
Ludwig Feuerbach argued that God was really a projection of humanity's ideal man.
Karl Marx believed that religion was a projection of man's hope for the superman in heaven.
Reality is more than an object of wish-fulfillment.
Freud believed religion is an illusion, not in the sense that God is not real, but that it came about from man's wish that there be a God.
Reality is more than a subconscious force in human experience.
Carl Gustav Jung called the collective subconscious the real, but this is insufficient.
"Reality means to have an independent existence"
Transcendence, in order to be real, must exist outside of the mind of those who conceive it and must exist outside of the experiences of the people who experience it.
"Reality means to have an objective existence" (67).
Objective existence means to exist in and of itself, independently of other things.
The Need For Verification
Deception and illusion are possible so there must be some means of determinism whether there is a basis in reality for religious experience.
Kierkegaard held that the need to give evidence for God is evidence of one's choice to reject God.
Kierkegaard believed verifying God's existence was ridiculous,: "For if God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it, and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it". (68).
Kierkegaard held that in order to offer a proof for God's existence one must presuppose that God exists.
He believed that faith, not reason, brings one to God.
Alvin Plantinga echoes Kierkegaard in stating that a belief in God is "properly basic".
Properly basic beliefs are beliefs that one needn't require verification; i.e. "I exist" or "there is a past".
There is a difference between the basis for believing that there is a God and the basis for believing in God.
"One needs evidence to know that there is a God, but one needs faith to commit oneself to the God that the evidence indicates is really there" (68).
Verifying the Reality of Religious Experience
People sense a basic need for God and this is the beginning of religious experience.
Theists and atheists alike have a feeling of dependence and a sense of contingency. But, is there really a God to fulfill the need people sense?
The Need for the Transcendent
Freud analyzed the human need for religion as a purely psychological need.
Religion was an infantile neurosis of mankind for Freud.
The Sense of Absolute Dependence
Freud did not deny the validity of people having religious experience.
"Science can never overcome a human's finitude or sense of cosmic contingency" (70).
Friedrich Schleiermacher takes the sense of cosmic need as the essence of religion.
A feeling of absolute dependence is a religious experience.
There is a need for the Transcendent because of the feeling of absolute contingency.
People sense a need for some Transcendence, whether or not it is really there.
Humanity's Being Unto Death
Martin Heidegger characterized human life as "being-unto-death".
Fear of death or nothingness is the anxiety of all man.
"I am, but I need not be and will not be" (70).
Asking about why one is are evidence of human ontological dependency.
Paul Tillich held that finite beings are ungrounded and must search for grounding, an ultimate grounding.
Does the need for God as ontological grounding of one's being imply that there is really such a grounding?
The Existential Need for God
Jean-Paul Sartre said he needed religion, he needed God and "Had it been denied me, I would have invented it myself" (71).
Sartre maintained that humans have more than a psychological need for God. Sartre held that humans have an existential need for God.
Essay Idea: Needs for God
-Psychological
-Existential
-Ontological
-Religiou
-etc.
Sartre held that "To be man means to reach toward being God" (71).
Man is seeking to be self-determined and self-caused.
The existence of a person cries out to God to give it definition and essence.
Sartre held that while this is man's need and goal, the whole concept is absurd. How can man transcend himself to discover himself?
The need for God is a fundamental, existential need, even if there is no God to fulfill this need.
Philosophy of Religion
Norman Geisler & Winfried Corduan
The Meaning of Reality
"Reality is more than a subjective condition of human experience" (64).
In dealing with religious experience it seems there is no surefire way of separating the hallucinatory from the real.
There is always the possibility that one's supposed religious experience is actually explainable by purely psychological phenomena.
All experience is subjective, hence religious experience is subjective.
"Religious transcendence must be more than a subjective condition in religious experience before it should be called 'real'" (64).
Reality is more than merely a projection of human imagination.
Religious transcendence is not real if it is merely a projection of human nature.
Ludwig Feuerbach argued that God was really a projection of humanity's ideal man.
Karl Marx believed that religion was a projection of man's hope for the superman in heaven.
Reality is more than an object of wish-fulfillment.
Freud believed religion is an illusion, not in the sense that God is not real, but that it came about from man's wish that there be a God.
Reality is more than a subconscious force in human experience.
Carl Gustav Jung called the collective subconscious the real, but this is insufficient.
"Reality means to have an independent existence"
Transcendence, in order to be real, must exist outside of the mind of those who conceive it and must exist outside of the experiences of the people who experience it.
"Reality means to have an objective existence" (67).
Objective existence means to exist in and of itself, independently of other things.
The Need For Verification
Deception and illusion are possible so there must be some means of determinism whether there is a basis in reality for religious experience.
Kierkegaard held that the need to give evidence for God is evidence of one's choice to reject God.
Kierkegaard believed verifying God's existence was ridiculous,: "For if God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it, and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it". (68).
Kierkegaard held that in order to offer a proof for God's existence one must presuppose that God exists.
He believed that faith, not reason, brings one to God.
Alvin Plantinga echoes Kierkegaard in stating that a belief in God is "properly basic".
Properly basic beliefs are beliefs that one needn't require verification; i.e. "I exist" or "there is a past".
There is a difference between the basis for believing that there is a God and the basis for believing in God.
"One needs evidence to know that there is a God, but one needs faith to commit oneself to the God that the evidence indicates is really there" (68).
Verifying the Reality of Religious Experience
People sense a basic need for God and this is the beginning of religious experience.
Theists and atheists alike have a feeling of dependence and a sense of contingency. But, is there really a God to fulfill the need people sense?
The Need for the Transcendent
Freud analyzed the human need for religion as a purely psychological need.
Religion was an infantile neurosis of mankind for Freud.
The Sense of Absolute Dependence
Freud did not deny the validity of people having religious experience.
"Science can never overcome a human's finitude or sense of cosmic contingency" (70).
Friedrich Schleiermacher takes the sense of cosmic need as the essence of religion.
A feeling of absolute dependence is a religious experience.
There is a need for the Transcendent because of the feeling of absolute contingency.
People sense a need for some Transcendence, whether or not it is really there.
Humanity's Being Unto Death
Martin Heidegger characterized human life as "being-unto-death".
Fear of death or nothingness is the anxiety of all man.
"I am, but I need not be and will not be" (70).
Asking about why one is are evidence of human ontological dependency.
Paul Tillich held that finite beings are ungrounded and must search for grounding, an ultimate grounding.
Does the need for God as ontological grounding of one's being imply that there is really such a grounding?
The Existential Need for God
Jean-Paul Sartre said he needed religion, he needed God and "Had it been denied me, I would have invented it myself" (71).
Sartre maintained that humans have more than a psychological need for God. Sartre held that humans have an existential need for God.
Essay Idea: Needs for God
-Psychological
-Existential
-Ontological
-Religiou
-etc.
Sartre held that "To be man means to reach toward being God" (71).
Man is seeking to be self-determined and self-caused.
The existence of a person cries out to God to give it definition and essence.
Sartre held that while this is man's need and goal, the whole concept is absurd. How can man transcend himself to discover himself?
The need for God is a fundamental, existential need, even if there is no God to fulfill this need.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
The Dimensions of Religious Experience (B)
(Originally written February 28, 2007 in Book 13)
Pg. 46 Transcending Outward or Toward the Beyond
Transcending to the "outward" realm is the pressing beyond one's self by searching to the outermost limits of one's being.
"God or the Transcendent is found at the uttermost extremity of human experience" (46).
The Circumference of All Things
Meister Eckhart: "God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere" (46).
God has no boundaries and man can transcend outward to God and never reach a limit.
The "Beyond" or the "out there" are good ways of describing outward transcendence.
The Transcendent is somewhere beyond and man must go beyond himself to reach it.
Reaction to the God up there or out there:
Rudolf Bultmann states that referring to God up there or out there is holding onto a mythological conception of reality. Bultmann feels that by demythologizing God makes the true meaning of God's mystery clear. He contends that the demythologization of the Bible is not to make religion more acceptable to modern men, but to make the Christian faith clearer to modern man.
Bultmann rejects the objectification of God by showing God in the determined worldview of modern science.
He holds that God acts in ways that are hidden and to try and un-hde his actions is to objectify God.
Bultmann did not intend to deny the possibility of transcendence, but that God is active in human personal, existential experience in ways that are unobservable.
Bultmann advocates for an eschatological transcendence.
Transcending Toward the End
Christianity radically changed the nature of time by sanctifying it through the Incarnation.
The Death of God
"G.W.F. Hegel wrote that God is dead and Friedrich Nietzsche took it seriously" (49).
Thomas J.J. Altizer contends that God died when he became Incarnate. If Christ is identical with God, then heaven was emptied of God when Christ came to Earth.
Altizer sees God as a dialectical process rather than an existent being. "God is a historical and dialectical process which can come to realization only by negation" (51).
Altizer claims retrospective and vertical transcendence are impossible. He seemingly advocates eschatological transcendence.
One must transcend forward in the movement of history.
The Secularization of Christianity
Theology must be anthropological: "God cannot be found beyond the world but only in other persons" (53).
We can no longer speak meaningfully of God or the Transcendent.
Religion can be secularized and humanized by being understood in completely human forms.
Transcending toward a center:
The Primitive Mythical Center of Life
The center served as a doorway to God in preliterate religions.
The primitive religious man sought to center himself where the Sacred breaks through.
The Mystical Center of the Universe
Mysteries often speak of God as the Center of all things.
Becoming union with the center of God is the goal of transcendence to the center.
The Center in the Divine Milieu
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls God the Center of the Universe and that man should plunge into God. He must seek "to be united while remaining oneself" (55).
Transcending toward the Depth or Ground
Mystics have sought the Divine in the depth of their souls for a long time.
Robinson's God Within
John A.T. Robinson argued that God cannot be "up there" as a sky or High God. He states that the spatial way of picturing God is a stumbling block rather than aid to belief in God.
Robinson does not seek to replace a transcendent God with a pantheistic and purely immanent one. He simply seeks to remove symbolism of spatial language in religion to make it more relevant.
Instead of speaking about the Transcendent up there, people ought to speak of the transcendent depth of God in relationships.
God and the Subconscious
Since Freud it has been common to closely associate the subconscious with the Transcendent or to render them identical.
Carl Gustav Jung saw God as the idealization of one's own self-image and thus, to know self is to know God and to know God is to know self.
Transcending in a circle
Transcendence by Eternal Recurrence
Atheism does not necessarily deny all transcendence. Nietzsche even needed to transcend. He complained about the "unbearable solicitude of life without God" in a letter from July 2, 1885.
Conceptually, Nietzsche was never theistic or pantheistic; but, existentially, he related traditional self-transcendence with a type of his own: the "willing the eternal recurrence of the same state of affairs" (59).
Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence' is the only way of overcoming utter nihilism.
Life is not fleeting, it is eternally recurring.
Transcendence by Eternal Absurdity
Albert Camus did not want to negate God or appeal to God. He wanted to live on what he knew and that alone.
Camus seeks transcendence in rebelling against nihilism in affirmation for he cyclical nature of one's absurd life.
There is a self-determined and self initiated transcendence byron the absurdity of one's life in an absurd universe. One can transcend a personal nihilism, but nothing else.
Religious experience always involves transcendence.
Transcendence goes seven ways:
1) Backward to the origin - primitive man's transcendence
2) Upward to the highest possible reality: Neo-Platonism
3) Outward - mystical transcendence
4) Inward - mystical transcendence
5) Forward to the final end - modern demythologized transcendence
6) Downward to the Ground of all - modern demythologized transcendence
7) Circular - those who deny religion
Religious experience has many dimensions. It is more broader than theism.
Humans are incurably religious.
A human must transcend.
The truly religious man seeks reality in transcendence.
Pg. 46 Transcending Outward or Toward the Beyond
Transcending to the "outward" realm is the pressing beyond one's self by searching to the outermost limits of one's being.
"God or the Transcendent is found at the uttermost extremity of human experience" (46).
The Circumference of All Things
Meister Eckhart: "God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere" (46).
God has no boundaries and man can transcend outward to God and never reach a limit.
The "Beyond" or the "out there" are good ways of describing outward transcendence.
The Transcendent is somewhere beyond and man must go beyond himself to reach it.
Reaction to the God up there or out there:
Rudolf Bultmann states that referring to God up there or out there is holding onto a mythological conception of reality. Bultmann feels that by demythologizing God makes the true meaning of God's mystery clear. He contends that the demythologization of the Bible is not to make religion more acceptable to modern men, but to make the Christian faith clearer to modern man.
Bultmann rejects the objectification of God by showing God in the determined worldview of modern science.
He holds that God acts in ways that are hidden and to try and un-hde his actions is to objectify God.
Bultmann did not intend to deny the possibility of transcendence, but that God is active in human personal, existential experience in ways that are unobservable.
Bultmann advocates for an eschatological transcendence.
Transcending Toward the End
Christianity radically changed the nature of time by sanctifying it through the Incarnation.
The Death of God
"G.W.F. Hegel wrote that God is dead and Friedrich Nietzsche took it seriously" (49).
Thomas J.J. Altizer contends that God died when he became Incarnate. If Christ is identical with God, then heaven was emptied of God when Christ came to Earth.
Altizer sees God as a dialectical process rather than an existent being. "God is a historical and dialectical process which can come to realization only by negation" (51).
Altizer claims retrospective and vertical transcendence are impossible. He seemingly advocates eschatological transcendence.
One must transcend forward in the movement of history.
The Secularization of Christianity
Theology must be anthropological: "God cannot be found beyond the world but only in other persons" (53).
We can no longer speak meaningfully of God or the Transcendent.
Religion can be secularized and humanized by being understood in completely human forms.
Transcending toward a center:
The Primitive Mythical Center of Life
The center served as a doorway to God in preliterate religions.
The primitive religious man sought to center himself where the Sacred breaks through.
The Mystical Center of the Universe
Mysteries often speak of God as the Center of all things.
Becoming union with the center of God is the goal of transcendence to the center.
The Center in the Divine Milieu
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls God the Center of the Universe and that man should plunge into God. He must seek "to be united while remaining oneself" (55).
Transcending toward the Depth or Ground
Mystics have sought the Divine in the depth of their souls for a long time.
Robinson's God Within
John A.T. Robinson argued that God cannot be "up there" as a sky or High God. He states that the spatial way of picturing God is a stumbling block rather than aid to belief in God.
Robinson does not seek to replace a transcendent God with a pantheistic and purely immanent one. He simply seeks to remove symbolism of spatial language in religion to make it more relevant.
Instead of speaking about the Transcendent up there, people ought to speak of the transcendent depth of God in relationships.
God and the Subconscious
Since Freud it has been common to closely associate the subconscious with the Transcendent or to render them identical.
Carl Gustav Jung saw God as the idealization of one's own self-image and thus, to know self is to know God and to know God is to know self.
Transcending in a circle
Transcendence by Eternal Recurrence
Atheism does not necessarily deny all transcendence. Nietzsche even needed to transcend. He complained about the "unbearable solicitude of life without God" in a letter from July 2, 1885.
Conceptually, Nietzsche was never theistic or pantheistic; but, existentially, he related traditional self-transcendence with a type of his own: the "willing the eternal recurrence of the same state of affairs" (59).
Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence' is the only way of overcoming utter nihilism.
Life is not fleeting, it is eternally recurring.
Transcendence by Eternal Absurdity
Albert Camus did not want to negate God or appeal to God. He wanted to live on what he knew and that alone.
Camus seeks transcendence in rebelling against nihilism in affirmation for he cyclical nature of one's absurd life.
There is a self-determined and self initiated transcendence byron the absurdity of one's life in an absurd universe. One can transcend a personal nihilism, but nothing else.
Religious experience always involves transcendence.
Transcendence goes seven ways:
1) Backward to the origin - primitive man's transcendence
2) Upward to the highest possible reality: Neo-Platonism
3) Outward - mystical transcendence
4) Inward - mystical transcendence
5) Forward to the final end - modern demythologized transcendence
6) Downward to the Ground of all - modern demythologized transcendence
7) Circular - those who deny religion
Religious experience has many dimensions. It is more broader than theism.
Humans are incurably religious.
A human must transcend.
The truly religious man seeks reality in transcendence.
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