It is in the full exercise of the life of reason that human life finds its highest fulfillment. The progress of science has produced a revolution even in the perspective of the lay citizen.
Intelligible Religion by Philip H. Phenix Part 1: An Approach to Intelligible Religion
How to Make Religion Intelligible
In each of the following five chapters, a basic concept will be defined in this way. The final component of our method will be to develop the implications of historically connected, communicable, definitive, universal experiences which are taken as defining religion.
Intelligible Religion by Philip H. Phenix
Five Fundamentals of Religious Experience
Change
If they are really new, they cannot come from the world of the present or the past. Let us now try to briefly outline the minimal consequences of the fact of change.
Dependence
One of the most immediate religious ideas to emerge from the experience of addiction is the idea of divine providence. Gratitude, generosity, trust and humility -- these are some of the fruits of the addiction experience.
Order
The experience of order has been an important element in all the major religions of the world. Another religious concept based on the experience of order is the idea of the "Word of God".
Value
The complexity of the human personality is such that one cannot always speak of value without ambiguity. For example, a child will tend to take on the parent's values because of the strong attachment to the parent. The problem of the ultimate relativity of values depends on whether or not it is.
The feeling of beauty is a positive response derived from a person's relationship with the aesthetic object. In the opposite case, the negative value or experience of the ugly represents a clash or discrepancy between the object and the subject. Finally, value is related to order, because it is itself one of the products of order.
A theological expression for the experience of positive value is the idea of the goodness or. Positive moral value is taken in most religions as an expression of God's will. From the experience of value springs not only the positive reactions of faithfulness and love, but also the feeling of tragedy.
Imperfection
Our libraries are filled with records of scholarly achievements in many fields. No work of art ever expresses the full dimension of the experience of beauty. We can briefly relate the experience of imperfection to the previously discussed four bases of religious experience.
With this evaluation principle in mind, we can now make explicit the meaning of the experience of imperfection. The view suggested in the last paragraph is that there is none, and that "the infinite" is a way of speaking of the process of incessantly imagining ideal possibilities. It can also be understood as an expression of the eternal perfectibility of the experienced world.
If the world is what it is and there is no better or worse, then there is no point in talking about ideals or about the perfectibility of existence. Practical people can become so engrossed in the affairs of life that they lose awareness of the higher possibilities for which any actual achievement is but a preparation. Finally, if we turn to the attitudes typically associated with the religious experience arising from the sense of imperfection, perhaps the most obvious is hope.
Application To Some Traditional Religious Problems
Or "god of justice" may arise within the experience of the impulse toward equity in the life of organized society. That God is one and not many means that the various experiences by which the meaning of the word "God" is defined are not separable, but always accompany each other. It is important to see what is implied in the definition of the word "God" just set forth.
It does mean that God is the name applied to a series of well-defined and intelligible aspects of the world that become apparent in the experience of everything in it. That such an experience takes place is one of the roots of the idea of God. We are now ready to deal with some aspects of the nature of God.
In the field of moral values, the idea of God's holiness arises from the experience of imperfection. One important aspect of what it means to be personal is possibility. It provides a symbol for certain dimensions of the ultimate nature of the world as we encounter it.
Good and Evil
It is the variety of such interrelations that gives rise to the problem of the good. One of the lessons derived from this view of the nature of value is that there is no universal catalog of the good. The introduction of the idea of "better" immediately presents us with the problem of whether there is some sovereign good in terms of which all other goods can be judged.
With regard to these questions, a distinction arises between a religious and a non-religious worldview. It means that the very experiences that define the awareness of the good and better towards which desire tends are the very experience by which God is defined. And that is because of the presence of one kind of being and the absence of another kind of being.
This means that there is some standard of the moral good that is not a matter of social approval. But that in every situation there is a higher order, a better possible behavior, is the meaning of the statement that human action involves sin against God. To be at one with God is to experience divine forgiveness, and this is possible when one is dedicated to the progressive realization (through grace from the sources of our being) of the ideal of communion.
The World Beyond
34 "The supernatural" is the answer given to the question of the source of the new and the destination of the old. The experience of value is one of the foundations of religion, as shown in Chapter VI. A somewhat better case can be made for the supernatural as the realm of ideal possibilities as opposed to the realm of the real.
Or more accurately, the supernatural is that dimension of the real world by which it is seen as infinitely perfectable. The first problem that presents such a view as this concerns the idea of the soul. Dependence involves recognizing the sources of one's being as the answer to the problem of change.
It is this kind of experience that perhaps best explains the meaning of the traditional expression. What they do is add a moral dimension to the problem of soul destiny. The character of individual destiny now becomes conditioned by the character of the life we live in the body.
The Christian Message
It is in the biblical record that we find the earliest statements of the essential message. This is the reason why the Jewish books or "scriptures" (Old Testament) are part of the Christian Bible. It follows that the key to the interpretation of the Christian message is the meaning of Jesus' resurrection.
From the point of view of the foundations of religious experience, the resurrection first answers the problem of change. We can assume that this is the main reason for the central role of the resurrection in the Christian faith. Thus, even on the basis of the New Testament itself, it is unlikely that the ascension is an integral part of the Christian story.
The core of the Christian message is that Jesus is the Christ, demonstrated as such by his victory over death in his resurrection. It is easy to interpret the doctrine of the divinity of Christ in terms of our analysis of religious experience. Thus the identification of Jesus with God also leads to the identification of the Spirit with God (and with Jesus).
Church, Bible, Prophecy, and Miracle
It follows that there is nothing inherently unnatural or illiberal about the idea of. The Christian Church is largely an outgrowth of the Jewish idea of the Chosen People. The people of Israel considered themselves the custodians of God's holy oracles contained in the Law.
34;articles", each differing in function, but each also contributing to the good of the whole. This leads to an interpretation of the doctrine of divine inspiration of the Bible. The extreme form of the doctrine asserts verbal inspiration, i.e. the words themselves were given by God (as in Muslim or in some fundamentalist Jewish or Christian circles).
The usual form is that God in all essential features guided the production of the Bible. It is often thought that the function of the prophet is to predict the future. There are miraculous returns of the dead to life (resurrection stories) which in the case of Jesus is the central Christian miracle.
Prayer and Sacrament
If we have included all aspects of experience in which the use of the word. But we have shown that this experience is one of the ways in which God is defined. This is quite analogous -- for the same reasons -- to the well-known antithesis of individual and society.
It is the personal nature of the prayer response that makes one religious. The prayer for guidance is therefore the search for direction within the context of the. The prayer of worship is the highest form of all, for in it self-concern is lost in the joyful contemplation of the highest good.
We can understand the nature of the sacraments using the basics of religious experience. In the sacrament of the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper there is also an appropriate characteristic form. It is the nature of symbols to show beyond themselves what they represent.
