The Methodist in me was pleased to discover that the Wesleyan Quadrilateral is still taught in divinity schools. If the four sources for theological claims are tradition, scripture, experience and reason, we can see that Kant pretty much rejected tradition and put reason first. Schleiermacher also rejected tradition for the most part, but put experience first. Unlike Kant, Schleiermacher believed that religion could only be described--not explained.
For Schleiermacher, religious experience was an unmediated experience of the infinite, an intuition of the Universe. He believed that any religious formulation that posited God as a being among beings was a sort of idolatry.
Mike asked how can an object of intuition be pre-conceptual (a la Schleiermacher)? In other words, he has a hard time buying that anything can be intuited without our already having some notion of what it is we are intuiting.
I, on the other hand don't understand how anything that is intuited can be described as other than pre-conceptual. From my perspective, intuition is by its very nature unshaped by language and ideas--although we can use language and ideas to attempt to describe the object of our intuition.
So maybe I'm a mystic after all!
I'll not write about Channing and Ballou here, but the lecture and discussion were both very useful and informative. And I led the morning devotional today. A beautiful, snowy day in Chicago!
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| The View from My Window |
