Thesis-religious experience

                                                      THESIS NO.2

          Authentic religious experience is liberative  and expresses itself in the community in symbolic language of word; ritual and action; and community/fellowship. However, when faith-contact slakens or is broken, religion degenerates into a world of ritualistic and fundamentalistic understanding of religion and promotes the legitimization of unjust social structures, casteism, sects and cults. Hence an authentic interpretation of religion is necessary. It requires exegesis as the first act, hermeneutics as the second, and praxis as its validation.

Here we are concerned about the authenticity of the religious experience and the validation of authentic religious experience.

          (a) Authentic religious experience is liberative and expresses itself in symbolic language, action and fellowship. We begin with an assertion that if religious experience is authentic then it must lead to liberation in humans and transformation in the world. This is based on the presupposition that God is interested not in bondage but in liberation. God is all goodness, truth and love. An encounter with such goodness can only result in goodness. At the same time we believe that the source of everything good is God. Hence wherever there is liberation there is authentic religion.

          Religion expresses itself in the community in symbolic language, action and fellowship. A religion begins with a religious experience  which is charismatic in nature, which needs to be passed on or handed down. Thus the experience enters the realm of transformation which is the written form of the expression for communication. Religious  experience is expressed in different ways; in thought, action and fellowship in the community.

          THOUGHT: is articulated both in written and oral form. The written codified form is called Scripture. Scripture uses symbolic language using myths and metaphors. Doctrines and dogmas develop as the result of the attempts to understand what the symbol implies and the myths explain. This is a systematic articulation of the content of religious experience for a community, making it normative. By trying to live by this norm, a person attempts to make ones own the religious experience that it contains. The codified Scripture attempts to evoke the originary experience in the believer. These dogmas and doctrines are meant to give identity to the religious experience against other experiences as well as deviation. The believing community uses it as a criterion to measure if a members' religious experience is in tune with the originary experience. Hence a part to safeguard apart type of religious experience.

          ACTION: Religious experience is articulated by the community in action. Action can be divided into worship and service. Worship is to do with how the community relates to the divine. It has the cultic aspect. Rituals are prescribed. In worship a human being gathers oneself and gives oneself for the relationship of the Divine. This giving has two aspects, sacrifice and prayer. Sacrifice implies dependence on the divine. Prayer is an expression of the desire to establish that contact  with the divine that gives itself to us in the religious experience.

          SERVICE: Authentic religious experience helps a person to share the concern of God. It evokes a response of commitment (Here I am, send me). Aspect of service depends on how God manifests himself and the form of service is always a response to the experience. This community is identified by the religious experience. Sometimes the community itself becomes the expression of religious experience. The community communicates its religious experience by its own way of life. Fellowship also helps the individual members to have an authentic religious experience. The community also checks the authenticity of our individual's religious experience. The community attempts to live out the religious experience through its members.

          An authentic religious experience has a prophetic dimension: One who has experienced God is ready to communicate his/her God experience to others. Such a person makes manifest how he/she has sensed God at work in a context. He/She speaks in the name of God. Having sensed now humans do not live their Divine experience, he/she poses a challenge. Such a person criticizes the values, institutions contrary to their call to be truly human. It is rightly said, "One who has had a profound religious experience must become a teacher or a hermit or an outcast." Thus the prophet becomes a challenge incarnate. Prophet makes us aware of our having gone away from God.

          In accordance with the prophetic dimension of religious experience, Scripture tradition challenge our way of living out our religious experience. When cult becomes ritual it ceases to be prophetic. There is a need to make worship a prophetic expression of our religious experience. (Eg. Eucharist Table Fellowship, revolutionary prophetic doing of Jesus, ushering in new order of social interaction). As far as the community is concerned the institutions must not kill the prophetic dimension of constantly critiquing the oppressive values.

          The prophetic dimension of religious experience makes us aware that (i) religion faces the danger of degenerating into ritualism and fundamentalism, promoting the legitimization of unjust social structures when it loses touch with the initial religious experience. (ii) there can be unauthentic religious experience resulting in similar consequences.

          Unauthentic religious experience is a result of a person mistaking a finite reality to be the Universal Religion. Degeneration of the other type takes place when one picks and chooses ones own summery and pretends that it is sufficient. In such a situation the contact with the originary experience is slackened. There is a possibility of such a contact being totally broken as well. Fundamentalism and ritualism are the results of such dangers. Ritualism limits itself to stylized action and forgets the imperative of the service aspects. By doing this the community loses touch with the real jobs of day today's life. Thus such a community alienates itself from the rest of the humanity.

          Fundamentalistic understanding of religion is a consequence of the claim to the possession of whole truth. It fails to realize that ones religious experience is very much limited by ones own cultural and socio-political context. It does not take into account our inability to grasp the total truth. We can only apprehend  it since we are part of it and there is a mystery dimension involved in the core of reality.

          The degenerated religion promotes the legitimization of unjust social structures, casteism, sects and cults since it has lost the prophetic dimension of religious experience. Earlier we have affirmed that God is goodness, truth and love. Hence a religious experience must result in a liberative process. The charism of the foundational religious experience has to be routinized. In the process of getting institutionalized charism loses the spontaneous and creative characteristic. Instead it gains the stability of thought, practice and organization. At times the organizational interests overtake the charismatic. At the same time, we are aware of the fact that charisma die out by their very nature unless they are somehow routinized, i.e., unless they find adequate institutional expression. To maintain a healthy balance between charism and routinization a religious community must constantly reflect on its original purposes, the convictions about God and human life and the foundational religious experience which originally set the community apart. Thus the challenge is to re-institutionalize charisma in the light of the present context. This whole process is discussed in the third part, the need of an authentic interpretation of religion.

          The authentic interpretation of religion requires exegesis and hermeneutics of its tradition. For an authentic interpretation of a religious tradition we need to take its own history, Scripture, tradition seriously. Otherwise there is the danger of only partial handing down of religious experience.

          EXEGESIS: In the process of handing down,  Scripture and tradition gets affected by various factors like culture, socio-political, geographical conditions etc. Sometimes elements which are not faithful to the foundational religious experience may find their way into Scripture and Tradition. Such a look would enable us to separate the chaff from the grain. It would help us to understand the meaning of a particular code in its own situation or context and thus spare us from interpreting a text out of its context.  We are enabled to understand how the message has reached its present form passing through various stages of development.

          HERMENEUTICS: Interpretation is the central concern and problem of validation. Hermeneutics has to do with three worlds: the world of the reader, the world of the text and the world as text. Interpretation is a matter of the encounter of a triple world. Hermeneutics helps to correct the specific meanings from the reader's world by complementing and qualifying it by the world of the text. Thus hermeneutics produces new meaning in the new situation. Interpretation is the encounter between the worlds of the text and the reader. Meaning emerges through and from the fusion/encounter of the two worlds. All this results in the transformation of the world and the reader. In short Exegesis tries to take us back to the original religious experience and hermeneutics helps us to be re-newed and re-visioned by it.

          PRAXIS: Praxis is the ultimate criterion for validation of the authentic religious experience. Very often people mistakenly look for validity in dogmas and doctrines. i.e., Orthodoxy is stressed at the cost of orthopraxis. But liberation theology has made it clear to us that any authentic religious experience necessarily comes out with a program of action aimed at liberation. Such a program of action takes the prophetic dimension of religious experience seriously. Hence it challenges the oppressive structures and tendencies both within oneself and also in the society at large. It comes up with creative action plan guided by a part intentionality.

          CONCLUSION: In conclusion we can say that authentic religious experience awakens us to our authentic true self. Exegetical and hermeneutical methods are of great value in directing this experience towards transformation plan of action. This is what makes religion authentic and liberative. Our country India is characterized by diversity of culture and pluriformity of religious transformation. Increasing communalism and religious fundamentalism have resulted in extensive loss of life and property. In such a situation an authentic interpretation of religion has become an absolute  necessity.