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Theology and Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Owen C. Thomas
Owen C. Thomas
Affiliation:
Episcopal Divinity School
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Extract

In the light of these warnings from two philosophers who are attended to very carefully by contemporary theologians it might be expected that theologians would use the term “experience” with considerable caution. Exactly the opposite, however, seems to be the case. Contemporary theologians are talking a great deal about experience and, as we shall see, without much clarity or precision. This is probably the result of the swing of the theological pendulum to the left in the latter half of this century. It is also probably determined by the “hunger for experience” (Gadamer, Biersdorf) which has emerged in Western culture since the sixties. This in turn I take to be an aspect of a contemporary romantic movement which, like its predecessor in the last century, is marked by a reaction against the effects of modern science and technology and their accompanying secularism and rationalization of society, and by a longing for a deeper experience of the self, the world, and the divine.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 78 , Issue 1-2 , April 1985 , pp. 179 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1985

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References

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7 Ibid., 105 n.

8 Ibid., 117; see 104–5, 114, 116.

9 Ibid., 33–34, 36–37, 114, 138, 140.

10 Ibid., 124–25; see 20.

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23 Ibid., 17.

24 Ibid.

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33 See, e.g., Reality of God, 20, 114, 125; and Empirical Theology, 77–86, where Ogden criticizes interpretations of experience that are derived from British empiricism, continental philosophy of life, and American radical empiricism, and commends Whitehead's interpretation of the nature of experience.

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35 Naming the Whirlwind, 428, 451.

36 Ibid., 455. It is interesting to note that the point which Gilkey affirms here is exactly the point he criticizes in neo-orthodoxy on pp. 97–99. See also Gilkey, Langdon, Reaping the Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Seabury, 1976) 147–48.Google Scholar

37 Naming the Whirlwind, 275, 451, 460, 463.

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45 Ibid., 71. I will not pause to point out the confusion in this passage. But one wonders how an “experience” can be shown to be “adequate to experience” by the transcendental analysis of a concept, by explicating how it is a “condition of possibility of all our experience.”

46 Ibid., chap. 8.

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52 See the summary of this development by Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, Foundational Theology: Jesus and the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1984) 259–64.Google Scholar

53 Ibid., 299.

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64 Theological Questions, 31–32.

65 For an excellent example of such a contradictory relationship see the study by Judith Plaskow of the relation between women's experiences and the doctrines of sin and grace in Niebuhr, R. and Tillich, : Sex, Sin and Grace: Women's Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Washington: University Press of America, 1980).Google Scholar

66 For the issues involved in the latter two points see the essays on “Interviewing: Social Research” by Robert L. Kahn and Charles F. Cannell, and “Sample Surveys” by Deming, W. Edwards in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (ed. Sills, David L.; 17 vols.; New York: Macmillan/Free Press, 1968) 8. 149–61, 13. 594–612Google Scholar, respectively.

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