Faith and Experience VI. Is Conventional Religion Necessarily Naughty?

Extract

One of the most intractable questions involved in the whole programme of research undertaken by the Religious Experience Research Unit is: “What kind of experience counts as religious?” Very wisely, RERU have not, as yet, given themselves any definite answer to this question. But at least some of them realise that an answer will have to be found eventually (This Time-Bound Ladder, 1977, p. 48). Sir Alister Hardy seems to envisage an answer emerging from the actual empirical research itself, but, as I pointed out in my last article, (New Blackfriars, February, 1979), he can be convicted of being more dependent on certain dogmatic presuppositions himself than he seems prepared to admit. I find it difficult to see how any collection of reports of experiences, backed up by any number of observations and investigations, could yield a definition of religion, independently of any kind of doctrinal principle. At some stage I strongly suspect that RERU will find them selves faced with the need to make a serious study of religious and metaphysical doctrines propounded by different individuals and schools of thought. This Time-Bound Ladder is a lightweight, but interesting, beginning. Obviously no one is going to regard a series of after-dinner conversations as a substitute for careful theological and philosophical enquiry; but it may well be the case that this kind of informal airing of issues picked more or less at random was, in fact, the most appropriate mode of encounter, at this stage of the investigation, between RERU and the theorists. The results, at any rate, make rewarding reading. But they make awkward reviewing material.