Religion and Spiritual Integrity
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While it was mentioned in chapter 1, we want to be clear about the meaning of “religion.” Scholars in the moderWhat is Religion?n West attempted to identify the “essence”
of religion as a universal human phenomenon by focusing on the struc-tures of religious experience. Friedrich Schleiermacher, founder of modern Christian theology, writing in the early German romantic movement, defined religion as the feeling and intuition of the infinite in the finite. (^4) In
his magnum opus, as the “feeling of absolute dependence” on an unknowable ground (the “whence” of this feeling), which he called “God.” The Romanian phenom-enologist of religion Mircea Eliade defined religion as the experience of a The Christian Faith, he construed the essence of religion
hierophany, that is, a manifestation of the sacred as wholly other than the profane.guished theologian in the USA, thought religion was “ultimate concern” – that is, concern with what is of ultimate importance in life. (^5) Paul Tillich, an émigré from Hitler’s Germany who became a distin- (^6) Universalist
definitions of the essence of religion capture something significant about religious experience: human consciousness is implicitly directed toward ultimacy of meaning, consciousness potentially includes awareness of an infinite ground and what is unsurpassably important and real. Human
horizon of meaning alongside its awareness of discrete objects or other human subjects. This is denied, as we will see, by secular humanist critics of religion. This makes their positions morally committed to human well-being, but strident in the denial of religious transcendence.
current scholars concentrate on the particular religions as historical phe-nomena occurring within human cultures. Religion in general does not exist, they claim. Particular historical communities are what exist, and they Against universalistic approaches to religion like those mentioned, many
abound with dazzling complexity and difference one from the other. It is wrong-headed to attempt to define the “essence” of something as histori-cally complex as “religion.”tion is unique, and that its uniqueness is lost when we subsume that culture (^7) The particularist view is that each cultural tradi-
under general categories. According to the particularists, we falsify the data, we lose the particular meanings of cultural events and developments, when we coin general theories of such things as “religion,” especially where repre-sentatives of the living traditions do not recognize the concept. The denial of
any shared religious quality to existence is, as we will see, crucial to the out-look of religious exclusivists. They insist on the religious dimension of life, but too easily stunt the scope of moral concern to their communities.