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Our Experience of the Ultimate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Ninian Smart
Affiliation:
Professor of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Extract

My title is of course a variation on Professor H. D. Lewis' well-known Our Experience of God. There he expounded a variety of religious intuitionism, which stands in the line of Schleiermacher, Rudolf Otto and Martin Buber. These and other writers have characteristically made ‘the move to experience’, as a new blend of natural and revealed theology. The move makes a great deal of sense. On the one hand it grounds belief at a time when the older natural theology apparently had crumbled. On the other hand, it points to the dynamics of religious inspiration and gave a new perspective on revelation. It softens both reason and faith, of course, but it also provides a defence against skepticism. It fits well with a liberal attitude to scriptures and tradition. So there are manifest advantages of the move to experience, for those who wish to make it in the context of the Western theistic tradition. The writers I cited above, and Professor Lewis himself, have discussed religious experience from a mainly Western and theistic angle – even Otto with his great comparative concerns did so; and more needs to be said about the nature of religious experience in the broader context of Eastern and other religions. Lewis, however, paid attention to this wider problem, for instance in his 1963 article ‘Buddha and God’. In some respects this issue of the relationship of apparently non-theistic religions to theism is the most important one in contemporary crosscultural philosophy of religion.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

page 19 note 1 I take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude for the five years I spent at the University of London, working in the history and philosophy of religion under Professor Lewis' direction. It was a fruitful time for me, and this was in no small measure due to his solicitude.

page 19 note 2 The Monist (1963).Google Scholar

page 21 note 1 For a bibliography of this distinction see my Beyond Ideology (1981), pp. 317–18.Google Scholar

page 21 note 2 In the general sense: I am thinking of varieties of Buddhist and Jain yoga as well as Hindu.

page 21 note 3 In his God Has Many Names (1983).Google Scholar

page 22 note 1 Philosophy of Religion (1975), p. 328.Google Scholar

page 23 note 1 Murti, T. R. V., The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (1955).Google Scholar

page 24 note 1 See Magee, Bryan, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1983)Google Scholar, appendix on Buddhism.

page 24 note 2 See my article God's body’, Union Seminary Quarterly Review XXXVII, 1 and 2 (Fall/Winter 19811982).Google Scholar

page 24 note 3 For the phenomenological theory of foci see my The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge (1973)Google Scholar and The Phenomenon of Religion (1973).Google Scholar