Introduction: The Background
The contemporary religious scene in Britain today, is often summarised
by the statement that people are interested in the spiritual but not
in religion. Hay considers that religion is understood as primarily
a institutional structure which controls and defines, and provides
a system of rituals which can be useful for recalling the sacred.
Hence he presents religion with both negative and positive aspects.
At one level it is confining, defining and authoritative and concerned
with maintaining and propagating the "metanarrative". As such it is
a thing of suspicion in a post-modern context. However it also provides
rituals, symbols, language and a history which are useful. When these
become fixed into a past era and context they are rejected, but when
they can be "mined", regenerated and adapted for contemporary use
they can have importance and influence.
Within the Western Church, and particularly the Protestant Church,
religion has also been portrayed as primarily a cognitive and mental
process. This is partly due to the consequences of the Reformation,
which had to reject experience and tradition in favour of "reason".
This process was confirmed throughout the enlightenment period, when
much emphasis was put on "reason" and the empirical nature of enquiry,
and the rise in rational and scientific approaches to life and study.
The search for knowledge under the guidance of scientific enquiry
led to the Church emphasising more and more that faith is about understanding
and knowledge. The outcome of this approach was that there has been
an emphasis on knowledge and understanding, upon the cognitive aspect
of faith and the diminution of the importance of experience. As such
the Church has been ambivalent about the place of experience in the
process of faith and in its institutional forms of worship. Acknowledging
that faith may come through an experience, it then defines how that
experience can be expressed and understood. Again this has both negative
and positive aspects, as the authority of the Church will define the
boundaries for interpretation of experience, but at the same time
provides the language through which it can be understood, interpreted
and communicated.
However throughout the history of the Western Church there has been
a counter movement which has attempted to re-emphasise the place of
experience in faith and spirituality. The medieval mystics, may be
popular today, but at their time they were marginal to the main life
of the church and even at times considered to be bordering on the
heretical . Joan of Arc was martyred because she could be condemned
for her spiritual experiences. George Herbert's poems and hymns portray
an interest in the experience of God through nature, that looked more
to a mystical aspect of life, emphasising the senses and experience
and so representing the spiritual aspect of the Reformation period.
In the contemporary era the invention of the neo-Celtic tradition
with its reinterpretation of history, is seen as a challenge to orthodox
Christianity because it emphasises the feelings, experience and emotion
over against the cognitive and mental process. Van der Weyer has used
the neo-Celtic tradition to challenge traditional Anglicanism and
attempt to establish a new form of Christianity where that faith is
something that is lived out on the experiential level rather than
something that is understood through doctrine and ritual.
The contemporary religious situation raises many questions for the
church, which centre around the issue of the relationship between
spirituality, religion, experience and faith.
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