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Putting ‘Experience’ to the Test in Theological Reflection*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

David C. Lamberth
David C. Lamberth
Affiliation:
Harvard Divinity School
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Extract

I discovered religious experience at Harvard Divinity School, in the Sperry lecture hall, sometime in the late 1980s. By that I do not mean to confess that I had a “first religious experience” there; nor do I mean that, somehow through some activity of my own, I laid hold novelly to the notion of “religious experience,” exposing something new to scholarship, some new direction, or some deep, fundamentally new insight. Rather, I mean quite simply that “religious experience,” the idea, the genre for thinking and reflection, came to my attention for the first time in that room in the late 1980s. In retrospect, I must say that it did so momentously, as I have not been able since to expunge it from my habits of thinking.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 93 , Issue 1 , January 2000 , pp. 67 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2000

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References

1 Peirce, Charles Sanders, “Phaneroscopy or the Natural History of Concepts” (1905), in Hartshorne, Charles and Weiss, Paul, eds., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (8 vols.; Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960) 1. 335–36Google Scholar.

2 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

3 See Lamberth, David, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), particularly chapter 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See, for example, Alston's, WilliamPerceiving God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) 16Google Scholar.

5 , James, Varieties, 335–39Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., 336.

7 For current elaborations that I would categorize as within this evidential usage, see, among others, Alston, William P., Perceiving God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Yandell, Keith, The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

8 Katz, Stephen, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

9 Proudfoot, Wayne, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 197Google Scholar.

10 In addition to Katz's and Proudfoot's work, one might also consider Preuss's, J. SamuelExplaining Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar and Harvey's, Van A. more recent Feuerbach and the Interpretation ofReligion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),Google Scholar which generally share this position.

11 Smith, John, America's Philosophical Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 19Google Scholar.

12 Katz and Proudfoot included.

13 , Proudfoot, Religious Experience, xvi, 221Google Scholar.

14 See Jonathan Edwards, Treatise on Religious Affections (1746; reprinted New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) 193, 383-84.

15 James, E. g., The Will to Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; , James, Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975) 28–29;Google Scholar and , Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Collected Papers, 5. 397–401Google Scholar.

16 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Experience,” in Ferguson, Alfred R. and Carr, Jean Ferguson, eds., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (5 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983) 3. 25–29Google Scholar.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 27.

19 Ibid., 47.

20 See the listing “Experience” in the Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; , Edwards, Treatise on Religious Affections, 93Google Scholar.

21 See entries for both “Experience” and “Proof” in the Oxford English Dictionary.

22 , Emerson, “Experience,” 47Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., 48.

24 James Gustafson, personal communication concerning Niebuhr's retirement, May, 1999.

25 Niebuhr, Richard R., Experiential Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1972)Google Scholar.

26 Ibid., xi.

27 Ibid., xii.

28 See Bultmann, Rudolph, Kerygma and Myth (trans. Bartsch, H and Fuller, R. H.; New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961) 5Google Scholar.

29 James Gustafson, personal communication concerning Niebuhr's retirement, May, 1999.

30 , Emerson, “Experience,” 48Google Scholar.

31 , Niebuhr, Experiential Religion, 25Google Scholar.