ritual actions”(Sørensen, 2005, p. 178). As we have seen on the example of the
Eucharist, the very same event can be analyzed as different kinds of actions.
We can surmise that some ritual participants can see also dance or Bible
reading as bringing about change, such as bodily or spiritual healing. Prayer
can be understood as an action that influences God’s mind in ways that result
in changes in the state of affairs. Sørensen makes the important observation
that“the more elaborate the symbolic interpretation of ritual becomes, the less
efficacy is accorded to it”(p. 168). Religious traditions or ritual contexts
usually motivate participants to see rituals in either of these ways. For ex-
ample, the First Epistle of Peter offers an interpretation of baptism that
emphasizes efficacy:“And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—
not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good
conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ”(1 Pet. 3:21, NRSV). In
Christianity, it is usual to think about baptism as a ritual that actually saves
people from damnation. Paul provides a different reading of the same ritual in
Romans, elaborating on symbolic connections between baptism and the death
and resurrection of Jesus:“Do you not know that all of us who have been
baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have
been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised
from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of
life”(Rom. 6:3–4, NRSV). The aspect of efficacy is not missing from Paul’s
interpretation, either, when he suggests that“For if we have been united with
him in a death like his, we will be certainly united with him in a resurrection
like his”(Rom. 6:5, NRSV).
Let us note that whereas Sørensen identified ritual efficacy with magical
agency, other scholars do not necessarily see them as identical. We will take a
closer look at the problem of magic and ritual efficacy in Chapter 6.
5.6 ENCOUNTERING THE HOLYThe phenomenological tradition of religious studies emphasizes the role of
rituals in encountering the“holy”or“sacred”(Otto, 1920, pp. 13, 41; Eliade,
1959, pp. 68–94; Zuesse, 2005, p. 7834). This happens in a conscious and
voluntary fashion, with the purpose of repeating the experience of holiness—
in sharp contrast to the Freudian tradition of understanding ritual as some-
thing involuntary, a compulsion without practical purpose. Whether such a
conscious use of rituals to encounter the sacred presupposes a comparable
concept of the sacred is an important question, since it is arguable that the idea
is fundamentally connected to Christian theology and difficult to apply to
many religious traditions in the world. A further question is whether a
definition of rituals in terms of encountering the sacred even applies to all
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