Religious experience

Overview

Recall questions on mystical and conversion experiences and examples of each, William James's four marks, method and conclusions, union and the numinous, explanations of experience as illusion or as psychological and physiological effects, taking experience at face value, testimony, corporate experience, and religious experience as a basis for belief.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What counts as a religious experience?

   Model answer

   Broadly, an encounter which the person undergoing it takes to involve a reality beyond the ordinary world, and which is understood in religious terms. It may be a dramatic vision or a quiet sense of presence, sudden or gradual, and it typically carries conviction for the one who has it. What makes it religious is not the intensity of the feeling but the interpretation placed on it by the experiencer and their tradition.

2. 2

   What is a mystical experience?

   Model answer

   It is an experience in which a person feels taken beyond ordinary consciousness into direct contact with ultimate reality, often described as a union in which the usual boundary between self and what is encountered dissolves. Mystics across traditions report that it cannot be adequately described, that it brings overwhelming certainty, and that it comes upon them rather than being achieved. Practices such as prayer, meditation, fasting or chanting are often associated with it.

3. 3

   What four marks of mystical experience does William James identify?

   Model answer

   Ineffability: it defies description and has to be undergone rather than reported. Noetic quality: it feels like a state of knowledge, delivering insight into truths that reasoning cannot reach. Transiency: it does not last long, though its effects may. Passivity: the mystic feels held or grasped by a superior power rather than in control. James treats the first two as essential and the second two as usual.

4. 4

   What is a conversion experience?

   Model answer

   It is an experience in which a person's religious commitment is transformed, so that beliefs previously peripheral or absent become the centre of their life. James describes it as a divided, unhappy and inferior self becoming unified and consciously right through a firmer hold on religious realities. It may involve a change of religion, a move from indifference to devotion, or a renewal within a faith already held.

5. 5

   What distinctions does James draw between types of conversion?

   Model answer

   He distinguishes the volitional type, which is gradual and built up by conscious effort, from self-surrender, in which the person stops striving and the change breaks in suddenly. He also distinguishes the once-born, whose religion develops smoothly without crisis, from the twice-born, who pass through a period of division and despair before resolution. In every case the underlying pattern he identifies is a divided self becoming whole.

6. 6

   Give examples of conversion experiences.

   Model answer

   Augustine describes years of intellectual and moral struggle ending abruptly in a garden, when a child's voice prompted him to open the scriptures and he found the resolve he had lacked. Christians point to the persecutor Paul, who was struck down and blinded on the road to Damascus by a light and a voice, and became the movement's leading missionary. Revival and mission meetings have produced many sudden conversions of the self-surrender type.

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