Search results for ""Author Hans Geybels""

How and why theological discourse uses religious experience? What kind of reflection was there about religious experience in the past? At what point during the history of Christianity did religious experience become an important epistemological category? What paradigm changes were at the basis of the diverse interpretations of religious experience? These are some of the questions addressed in this volume, a theological history of ideas, about the historical development of the meaning of religious experience and how it evolves from a mode of knowing to an object for knowledge. In general, during Antiquity and the Middle Ages, theology creates experience, and in certain modern and post-modern currents, experience creates theology: an end becomes a means. With regard to Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modernity, the author examines what is meant by religious experience and drafts the evolution of an intellectualistic concept that changes into an emotionally charged concept. Two research questions however recur: what do the different writers, during different periods, mean by religious experience, and what is the object of that experience?

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Ademm Adelmann of Liege was one of the first interlocutors of Berengar of Tours in the Eucharistic controversy of the eleventh century. For that reason, his contribution was of great importance for the development of sacramental theology. This book contains all the known texts of this pre-scholastic theologian from the school of Liege, that is, not only his correspondence with Berengar, but also his famous poem on the theologians of Chartres - the Rhythmus alphabeticus - and his admonishing letter to Arshbishop Hermann of Cologne on the forgiveness of sins.

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This volume consists of several contributions to a refined understanding of religious experience in view of contemporary theological epistemology. Diverse sample studies taken from the extensive field of religion, theology and religious studies reveal that 'religious experience' is today clearly a pivotal issue. More specifically, this is made evident in modern theological hermeneutics and in the anti-modern and/or post-modern reactions thereto, the theology of world religions and inter-religious dialogue, the contemporary resurgence of religiosity in Western society and culture, and the so-called turn to religion in contemporary continental philosophy. It would appear from such studies that the category of 'religious experience' is frequently called upon to clarify or explain the phenomenon of religion and religiosity on the one hand and to support and legitimise religious positions or the critique thereof on the other. Because of the loss of plausibility of tradition-bound religiosity and of foundational, so-called onto-theological schemes, 'religious experience' has come to constitute, for many, the last (or latest) point of departure and anchor for religion and religious thinking. This is certainly the case with respect to tendencies within contemporary Christian traditions and theological reflection. In a multitude of ways and from a variety of different perspectives, 'religious experience' and 'experience of transcendence' or 'of the divine' have gained a prominent place in philosophical and fundamental-theological conceptual schemes. In reaction to this, other authors have denied the very primacy given to religious experience in reflecting upon faith, pointing to the constitutive role of tradition and narrative without which there is no religious experience. From all this follows that the category of religious experience is in great need of reconceptualisation, not least from a theological point of view. On the one hand, religious experience is all too easily called upon to legitimise religious claims (often against 'tradition') and on the other hand, the category has become misleading in so far as it is tainted by the modern scientific understanding of experience - in reaction to which 'tradition' is then easily invoked to protect the core of religion. Both young scholars at the preceding junior conference and senior scholars during the conference's paper sessions presented from diverse perspectives new ways to conceive of religious experience in view of today's challenges of secularisation, religious plurality, the aestheticisation of religion, etc. The selected contributions have been arranged in four thematically oriented parts: 'Approaching Religious Experience in a Postmodern Age', 'Modern (re)Thinking of Religious Experience', 'Liberating Religious Experience', and 'Challenges for Spirituality'.

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