5. Ritual
As we have seen in previous chapters, rituals constitute one of the most intensely
studied topics in the Cognitive Science of Religion. Two of the pioneering
cognitive studies of religion were written on rituals (Lawson & McCauley,
1990; Whitehouse, 1995) and the study of rituals has remained one of the
major foci of cognitive scholarship on religion to the present day (e.g., Boyer
& Liénard, 2006; McCorkle, 2010; Bulbulia & Sosis, 2011). Even more important
is the fact, however, that cognitive scholarship on rituals already yielded several
interesting applications to biblical materials. In New Testament Studies, the
introduction of cognitive approaches to rituals coincided with a renewed inter-
est in the broaderfield of ritual studies (Uro, 2010, 2011b, 2011d). Risto Uro’s
recent monograph (Uro, 2016) offers a thorough discussion of ritual theory, its
relationship to cognitive approaches to ritual, and the role of rituals in the
emergence of Christianity. The aim of the present chapter is to show how the
cognitive turn influences our understanding of rituals in the text of the New
Testament. The treatment of rituals in the present chapter carries on various
discussions from previous chapters, including the role of memory, emotions,
and evolution; it also initiates new topics that will be covered in subsequent
chapters, including morality, religious experience, and social networks. It is not
accidental that we arrived at the subject of ritual at the middle of our journey.
Ritual is action, which is governed by cognitive structures and impacts members
of groups and social networks. Conversely, rituals are embedded in social
structures and environmental constraints and influence cognition. In a sense,
ritual functions as a mediating mechanism between cognition, on the one hand,
and the social and natural environment, on the other hand. As we will see,
however, there are many ways to think about rituals, and a tidy localization of
rituals in the complex of religious thought and behavior is difficult to establish.
5.1 WHAT IS RITUAL?There is no widely accepted definition of ritual, a situation that parallels the
definition of religion in general. However, the case of ritual seems even more