by a religious elite, but the efforts and investment required on the part of the
practitioner might not be substantial. In such religious practice there is no
extended novitiate and catechesis involved.
Theological ideas might also vary along the volitional-resonant scale. For
example, reflecting on the experience of glossolalia will presumably elicit
different thoughts about the divine than centering prayer based on a biblical
passage. On the one hand, in a resonant setting the divine can appear as a
dynamic power that enters communities and quickly takes over the control
over the believers’minds and actions. On the other hand, in a volitional setting
the divine might appear as a source of wisdom that the believer attempts to
understand in an ongoing process of reflection. Above we have seen that
theological ideas and religious experience interact in complex ways. It seems
obvious that different religious traditions tend to emphasize different types of
religious experience: for example, Buddhists seek internal balance and enlight-
enment, Protestants read the Bible tofind hope and comfort, Pentecostals
value glossolalia and other signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is
important to note that when interpreting such religious phenomena with the
help of the Lobes Theory we are not locating religious experience in a certain
part of the brain. Keeping in mind the neurological, social, and cultural
complexity of the experience, the theory pays attention to characteristic
patterns of brain activity that occur in certain types of religious groups and
in their favored rituals.
7.4 THE LOBES THEORY AND THE
CORINTHIAN CHURCHLet us use the Lobes Theory to analyze the situation in the Corinthian Church
as reconstructed from Paul’s epistles (cf. Czachesz, 2012a). As we have argued
in section 5.4, the congregation had a non-centralized power structure, the
community did not hold to consistent doctrines, and rituals such as the
communal meals were weak in theological interpretation. In his extant (and
authentic) letters to Corinth, Paul draws a picture of the congregation that can
be interpreted as the profile of a community pursuing resonant religious
experiences. The great emphasis given to glossolalia in the Corinthian corres-
pondence is quite telling: it was probably this particular ritual that was the
main source of religious experience for the members of the congregation.^3 The
majority of the occurrences of“tongue”(γλῶσσα) in the New Testament is
(^3) Shantz (2009, p. 157) calls glossolalia“the predominant form of [...] spirit possession”in
Corinth.
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