Embodied Mind, Embodied Soul

In Philosophy in the Flesh George Lakoff and Mark Johnson presented an embodied theory of mind which brings together cognitive science and neuroscience, linguistics and embodied philosophies of mind (building also on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey). The book is nothing less than an attempt to redefine the mind and by doing this it offers an interesting and controversial criticism of some of the basic presuppositions about the mind, language, reference and meaning, found in the most of the analytic or Anglo-Saxon philosophy.

Basic idea of the book is this: The fact that human mind is inherently and necessarily bodied has great and not-yet-fully-recognized consequences for any philosophy. Think about it: Reason is inherently embodied. The very structure of reason and its categories (logic) are what they are because of our everyday functioning in the world as bodily beings. Structures of reason piggyback on the neurological and sensomotoric ways of our being, and the only "universality" reason actually has stems from aspects of our shared bodily in-the-world experience.

If this is true (and Lakoff and Johnson insist that empirical evidence for such a view is extremely strong), much of our conceptual inference actually is 'sensorimotor inference', even though it may be this "in disguise" - it doesn't seem this way for us when we think in abstract terms. Our concepts arise from our bodily engagement with our surroundings, other humans, etc. Think of the fact that we really can't describe almost anything without bodily concepts. For ex. rational understanding itself is, as a rule, described metaphorically: as "seeing" (as in "Oh, I see!"), or as "following" arguments, or "going through" reasons, or "arriving" at the conclusion, or similar. These are not only "colourful additions" to our descriptions of reasoning; metaphors are constitutive, inherent in our conceptualization of what rational understanding is.

Implications of such a view of the mind and of reason are indeed far-reaching. One of them is that any spirituality or theology that posits disembodied souls which can exist and think "without the body" is simply not credible. Of course, this is not at all obvious. One has to do a lot of examination and honestly see the implications of what we today know about the mind, about our concept formation and language use, etc. in order to see these implications clearly. Only think about the concepts which we use regularly in theology, like "beyond", "super-natural", God as "Highest Being" or as "King", as "Light shinning in the darkness", "Heaven", "spiritual growth", "deliverance from sins", "rising above temptations", "leaving the sinful man behind", "dying to self and sin" etc. All these concepts are of course metaphorical and most come from our very immediate bodily engagement with our environment.

Lakoff and Johnson, although themselves not theologians, do suggest some ideas as to what, in their view, an honest look at neuroscience of our brains, and a careful look at our actual language use etc. means for theology and spirituality:

"Embodied spirituality requires an understanding that nature is not inanimate and less than human, but animated and more than human. It requires pleasure, joy in the bodily connection with earth and air, sea and sky, plants and animals - and the recognition that they are all more than human, more than any human beings could ever achieve. Embodied Spirituality is more than spiritual experience. It is an ethical relationship to the physical world." (Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999. p. 566)

Although I have issues with some positions argued for in the Lakoff and Johnson's book, I couldn't agree more about what they say here about embodied spirituality. People who think in terms of religious traditions that see human soul (or spirit, for that matter) as a disembodied, thinking person which is only attached to the body for the period of our earthly life and then "freed" from the body at the time of death, can not appreciate the embodied view of the mind nor the vast evidence for it. However, by and large, the Bible does not have a problem with embodied spirituality - it should be a common knowledge that a predominant view of "soul" in the Bible ("nephesh" in OT and "psyche" in NT) seems to be NOT of a disembodied entity, but of the very much bodily human being (see a paper reviewing possible shades of meaning of both terms in the Bible, which range from "life" to "corpse").

Objectification of God

Is God an object? Most Christians would say, of course not. But, putting it more precisely: Can God be an object of thought, of emotion? What about an object of perception? These are puzzling questions.

Whenever I talk or speak about God, or have an intentional emotion directed at God, God is an object as opposed to me a subject, at least in the logical sense of the term. So, in religious language or directed emotion, one can not escape this minimal objectification of God. Jewish theologian/existentialist Martin Buber and Christian theologian/existentialist Paul Tillich pointed out that this very usual, unavoidable and innocent (on the surface) feature of theistic religions involves a nasty problem - more of a religious problem than a philosophical one, although it is both.

Buber's insistence that we can relate to God only in terms of I-Thou (Ich-Du) relationship, that is, directly and personally-experientially, is a protest against a modernistic objectification of God, either in theological talk, worship, or in emotions and in thinking in general. God can never be an "it" for a human being, always a real, honest "You". Otherwise, it simply is not God.

Another much older tradition in Western Theology (Christian, Jewish, and also Muslim), namely the mystical way of via negativa, insisted rigorously that we can say nothing at all determinate or exact about God (human language is inadequate, always approximate and inherently unstable in its referring). God as-he-is-in-himself is beyond all human descriptions. Most radical proponents of via negativa even claimed that we can't say neither that God exists nor that he doesn't exist - the meaning of the word "exists" itself is derived from the "known", from the things, objects and events of our experience and knowledge of in-worldly things, so the word "exists" is not, strictly speaking, adequate when applied to God. That's what the author of The Cloud of Unknowing says, for instance (See the Penguin Classics edition, where there are other works of the same unknown author included; The 5th Chapter of the Mystical Theology of St Denis is a particularly striking example of via negativa).

All this sounds far too radical to most Christians ears today. But even of one does not accept the whole view, there is an important lesson we can learn from via negativa, an important point which a mature Christian should, I firmly believe, take on board and always be aware of it. And this lesson is that God surely is beyond all human descriptions and concepts. Even more than that: God may be seen more like a context of our life experience ("Living in God", or "being brothers in Christ"), a certain reading of our existential feelings and changes in them, than an object of any of our experiences or thoughts. When we objectify God, speak or think about "him" or even sing about, and feel emotional feelings towards God, we are necessarily involved in human constructions. Nothing wrong with that - in any speech, thought or expression which involves language we are embedded in human constructions.

But, however necessary that is for any religious endeavour, isn't the most profound temptation one can think of exactly the one of taking our conceptions and objectifications of God as an ontological reality outside of human world? Our need for a clearly objective measure for humanity makes us push all our human constructions of God, all the worlds created through religious language, outside of humanity as well. But this is of our doing.

A Protestant Reflection on Pope's Visit

Watching Pope delivering a Mass at Westminster Cathedral I can't help being overwhelmed by the aesthetic/spiritual experience of the liturgy, especially the combination of the Choir's excellent singing together with the sound of the Orchestra, and the incredible architectural features of the largest Catholic Cathedral in England.

The events of Papal visit in Britain make me think of my attitude towards Catholicism. Coming from an atheist family, growing up in the secularized surrounding where the largest faith is Roman Catholic, and thinking as someone who has initially converted to a quite anti-Catholic form of Protestantism and has gradually become a moderate into my theologically adult life, I can only offer a highly coloured set of impressions.

While I am constantly discovering 'new' resources in Catholic tradition for my own thought and religious experience (in terms of music, architecture etc.), I am in a deep disagreement with Catholic version of Christianity. It is not just the RC stance social issues which are constantly flagged up in the media, like the simplistic rejection of women priests, gays, condoms and alike which I find troublesome. More problematic are the very basic beliefs in the authority of Roman Bishop, Roman Catholic Tradition (so clearly led by earthly powers of most oppressive kinds), the theological views on other Churches and Christians who are "extra-ecclesiam", naive metaphysical realism and a reluctance of Roman theology to incorporate the relevant insights of contemporary culture. Medieval essentialist views on human nature, cosmos and God are over and out for centuries. Christ-event, salvation and "living, moving and being in God" as real, experiential dimension of faith life today cries very loudly for different philosophical underpinnings than those offered by official Roman Catholic theology.

Of course, there are Roman Catholic thinkers who do engage with culture, science, with faith experience and God-reality in new and creative ways which rise above the traditional metaphysics to which traditional Roman Catholic Church teaching is enslaved. Charles Taylor, Tomas Halik (whom I 'discovered' quite recently, I am ashamed to say), and indeed, my superviser Mark Wynn, are among such Catholic thinkers which I really admire and learn from. But I see them, similarly as some liberal protestants, as walking on the edges of Catholic faith and expanding the very notion of Roman Catholicism.

I suppose that the main issue is still to what extent one can believe that Roman Catholic tradition contains by and large a correct, or at least a credible interpretation of God, Jesus, the Bible and the continuing manifestation and work of the Holy Spirit in the world and Universe. The British Conservative MP Anne Widdecombe has explained it very well, I think, as she was commenting the preparations for the Pope's mass in the Westminster Cathedral. She said that the crucial decision is whether you believe that the Pope really speaks the Truth when he speaks Ex Cathedra, and whether he therefore offers the proper interpretation of Christianity. Understandably, she said that this step, to accept the authority of the Pope, is the most difficult but crucial step from which everything else follows.

I am utterly unable to accept any kind of authority in theological matters in this way, "across the board", so that the interpretations and teaching will be true BECAUSE the person or organization whom I accept as authoritative teaches so. And there are simply so many reasons why not to believe that Pope has this kind of authority. So, while it is not so so hard to understand why those theologians and philosophers today who have 'always been' Roman Catholic still work inside their tradition (usually not accepting all, or many RC teachings) and in so doing actually enable its possible future development (if they are not virtually 'banned' inside the Church like Hans Kung, for ex.), it is not clear to me that honest thinking and openness for any kind of truth can be sustained, in a longer term, with a conservative, authoritarian interpretation of Christian faith offered by the official Roman Catholic teaching.

Grace Jantzen, "Self" and Philosophy of Religion

Reading the book Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion by the late philosopher and theologian Grace Jantzen was an interesting and challenging experience. Being "forced" to honestly rethink so many features of the anglo-saxon (and, to a notable degree also my own) tradition of thinking about God - especially about knowledge of God - has been useful in many ways. The influence of patriarchal society, misogynist prejudices and characteristically male ways of relating to life, sexuality and the world, which Jantzen explores in her book, appear to shape the very foundations of this philosophical tradition, as she sees it.

For me, especially interesting was her critique of the structures of epistemology as these have been engraved into Western mind especially by the Enlightment philosophy (empiricist and rationalist, and later analytic philosophy). Jantzen has an issue with the assumption of the unproblematized subject, as she calls it: the presupposed rational, thinking self which was a taken-for-granted and stable starting point of any epistemology from Descartes and until 20th century. She emphasizes that feminist thinkers in particular have

“raise(d) the question of the materiality and physicality that subtends consciousness itself: the physical world and Descartes’ own body, without which he could never have developed consciousness and rationality. Descartes seems never to have asked himself how he became a conscious, rational subject, how he was born and brought up and nourished. ... His subjectivity, like everyone else’s, emerged out of his bodily development that had its origins in his mother’s womb...” (Jantzen, Becoming Divine, 33)

The lack of raising this question of development of the human thinking self or subject is symptomatic, she thinks, also for Anglo-Saxon (analytic) philosophy of religion as a whole. She accepts Lacan’s interpretations of Freud and of the empirical evidence of early childhood development which hold that self is “much trickier and more complicated than western philosophy has recognized” (ibid.). She summarizes Lacan’s position thus:

“the subject, far from being an autonomous self, is constituted by a rupture, an internalized otherness. It involves the enactment of the subject/(m)other division. We are long way from Descartes’ confidently rational cogito. ... Instead of fixed identity that subject simply has/is, subjectivity is something that is achieved not once and for all, but in fragile and fluctuating fragments. Moreover it is achieved only by repression and the splitting of the self, which is thus precisely not transparently rational.” (Jantzen, Becoming Divine, 37)

Of course, if this is true even in part, it has important implication for philosophy of religion, including (or especially) for any epistemological account of religious experience. I think Jantzen's critique is consistent with a sociological-constructionist argument that, since the language, concepts and norms significantly co-shape everything one thinks and does, the very notion of self or subject is likewise co-formed (significantly) by the community. The thinking (and perceiving) subject then, is not simply a stable given which could be taken for granted. It is unstable, fragmented, and “exists” as a unitary entity on the expense of repressed desires and feelings.

It seems then, that Anglo-Saxon epistemology of religion (and epistemology of rel. experience in particular) has some deep problems which it fails to address properly. But I think that here in fact lies also a possibility of a different kind of philosophy of religious experience, a more sensible one that the analytic epistemology of rel. experience (Swinburne, Alston, Yandell, and similar): if the subject is in important respects unstable and constructed, we should take seriously the claims of many mystics and some liberal theologians (Schleiermacher, but also the likes of Tillich and even Rahner in 20th cent.) that authentic God-experience in important sense transcends the subject (self) itself, or more precisely, the "subject-object structure". It is here that Jantzen meets Schleiermacher - very intimately in fact - although in her short treatment of Schleiermacher in Becoming Divine she is mostly critical of his experiential subjectivism (pp. 116-119) and of the privatization of religion he supposedly advocated (which is a questionable interpretation).

Feelings: What Kinds are There?

Following a question posed in comments on the post "Schleiermacher on Feeling, Intuition and Religion", here are some thoughts on feeling and the types of feeling we might recognize or talk about. As I like to write and think that feelings are indeed very important in religion as Schleiermacher thought, it is important to be more precise.

"Feeling" is a tricky word. People frequently use it synonymously with "emotion" or even "passion". But it seems that the meaning, even in everyday speech, is not the same. One can feel "tired", or feel "cold", or "one with nature", and neither of these is really what we usually recognize or call "emotions" like fear, hope, sadness, anger, and happiness are. So, although most

English language speakers would say that emotions do involve feelings, there seem to be other kinds of mental states which we also tend to call feelings which are not, or at least not in an obvious way, emotional feelings.

Psychologists and philosophers (analytic philosophy of emotions, or phenomenology are fields of philosophy which deal with emotions, feelings or both) have, as is often the case, developed a bit more strictly defined meanings of these terms, although there is much disagreement about definitions of course, and

then again new confusions unavoidably arise regarding the more technical meanings of these terms. But, I will here start from a simple categorization of feelings which is uncontroversial.

Feelings can be either intentional or nonintentional mental states. Simply put, intentionality of a mental state is a "directedness at something": a belief is an intentional states because it is about something. Emotions are typically also thought of as intentional states - one is angry at John, hoping for a better job, or afraid of the approaching dog. There seem to be exceptions to this; like the emotion of simply "being happy for no reason", or feeling "dread with no particular focus", or similar. But usually, we eventually find out why we were happy, or afraid, or dreaded, even if we do not consciously recognize this sometimes. So, feelings which emotions involve - lets call them emotional feelings - are intentional states.

What is typically thought of as "bodily feelings" are for most experts also intentional states. One feels cold in the body, or is feeling pain in particular part of the body, or sickness in the stomach, or similar. So, bodily feelings, at least in majority of cases also seem to be directed at a particular part of the body or at the body as a whole perhaps.

But some philosophers and psychiatrists have emphasised (and still are emphasising) that there are felt states which are not accounted for by the above two kinds, and which can feature rather importantly in our lives. There are states which do not have an object to which they would be intentionally directed, but can be described as all-encompassing and often form a background for everything else we think or do. Examples would be: Feeling unreal, feeling intensively alive, feeling "not here", feeling complete (or incomplete), feeling connected (or disconnected) with life or with everything, feeing whole, at one with everything, and similar. We experience and describe states which are not focused on particular things or events in the universe, which are felt states, and sometimes consider them as very important features of our lives.

Heidegger has called some of such states "moods" (more about Heidegger's moods in one of the future posts), but recently a British philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe has proposed a category of existential feelings to encompass such states. He defines them in the following way:

“Existential feelings are non-conceptual feelings of the body, which constitute a background sense of belonging to the world and a sense of reality. They are not evaluations of any specific object, they are certainly not propositional attitudes and they are not ‘mere affects’.” (Feelings of Being, 2008, 39)

Actually, he has written a whole book (Feelings of Being) about existential feelings. Importantly, these feelings do not have the body or parts of the body as their intentional object, but are feelings "of the body" (including the brain!) and they typically indicate or arise from a relation of the body (that is, of a human being) to it surroundings. A few more features of existential feelings are especially relevant for a theological reflection on them: Existential feelings transcend subject-object relation (one finds oneself in an EF, does not "have" EF and EF, as mentioned, is not directed at an object); they may be short, medium or long term states of mind; they may be more "normal" or very extreme, like reported by schizophrenics or patients with Capgras delusion, or, for ex. by mystics in a positive way (always positive?); they constitute a background of all other states of mind we have.

Now, although these feelings may be related to and sometimes dependent upon the dynamics in our emotional and intellectual life, they themselves are not the same kind of feelings as emotional feelings.

I should probably stop at this stage, not to leave too long a post. There may be some other kinds of feelings, or categorizations which are better, and I am open for suggestions; this is simply the best way of thinking about feelings I know so far. In the future posts I am going to talk more about existential feelings, and about how this category can be very useful when trying to understand Schleiermacher, and the place of feelings in religions (especially Christianity).

Schleirmacher on Feeling, Intuition and Religion

Here are a few excerpts from Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion which deal directly with the role of feeling or intuition in true religion. All are taken from the Second Speech which tries to define religion, not as metaphysics nor as a system of morality, but as something distinct which has at its essence a particular kind of feeling. I want to refrain deliberately from commenting and interpreting these lines here. Let's experience these statements simply as they stand in all their enthusiastic force and naivete of German romantic rhetoric (admittedly, a wider context is missing).

"Religion's essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling." (22)

"every intuition is, by its very nature, connected with feeling." (29)

"religion is the sensibility and taste for the infinite." (23)

"religion wishes to see the infinite, its imprints and its manifestation, in humanity no less than in all other individual and finite forms." (23)

" (Religious) feelings are supposed to possess us, and we should express, maintain, and portray them." (29)

"Thus it was religion when the ancients, annihilating the limitations of time and space, regarded every unique type of life throughout the whole world as the work and rein of omnipresent being. They have intuited a unique mode of acting of the universe and its unity, and designated this intuition accordingly." (25)

"To present all events in the world as the actions of a god is religion; it expresses its connection to an infinite totality." (25)

"What is it in religion over which men have argued, taken sides, and ignited wars? Sometimes over morals and always over metaphysics, and neither of these belong to it. ... Religion does not strive to bring those who believe and feel under a single belief and feeling. It strives, to be sure, to open the eyes of those who are not yet capable of intuiting the universe, for everyone who sees is a new priest, a new mediator, a new mouthpiece; but for just this reason it avoids with aversion the barren uniformity that would again destroy this divine abundance." (28)

"we should do everything with religion, nothing because of religion." (30; italics added)

Page numbers from Schleiermacher, On Religion. (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Edited by R. Crouter, Cambridge: CUP, 1996.

William Wordsworth and Nature Mysticism

Adding a little but brilliant piece of poetry to the previous theoretical post.


. . . And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things." (Tintern Abbey)

For the whole poem, see Tintern Abbey and for some background and analysis (from which you are free to take only as much as you like, and ignore the rest) see Tintern Abbey analysis.

This poem reminds me, just as psalms and many other poems do, on Schleiermacher's suggestion that poetry and rhetoric are primary expressions of religious feeling, and that theology is "only" secondary.

Nature Mysticism: The Christian Way

Some Christians think that nature mysticism is a pagan thing, or pantheist at best. There is a reluctance against taking the spiritual experiential engagement with nature "too seriously" in Christianity. Revealed religion is pitied against "natural religion" which supposedly can't bring you to Christ and the forgiveness of sins.

Of course, nature does not speak or show the very specific historical name "Jesus Christ" to people's ears or eyes, respectively. Yet our living in nature enables a deep spiritual experience which can bring us in a real communion with God, renew our "hearts and minds" (to use the phrase of political rhetoric in a somewhat different way).

Caroline Franks Davis argues in her book The Evidential Force of Religious Experience that nature mysticism is deeply compatible with Christianity:

“Nature mysticism and other extrovertive experiences are often associated with pantheism, but there is nothing to prevent other types of theists from having such experiences. The difference is that whereas pantheists feel that what they have seen in nature is the whole of the divine, monotheists (or pan-en-theists) believe that the divine has transcendent aspects as well as immanent ones.” (Davis, Evidential Force of Religious Experience, p. 60)

One feature which is philosophically very interesting is that through experiencing the bond with all creation, the subject-object distinction in experience can be transcended (objects being the beings or entities in nature). The self, when it is experientially confronted with its own deep sense of createdness which it shares with all surrounding nature or Universe, can become loose at the edges, and therefore humbled in a very positive and healthy way. Self as a construction can "relax" and just be creation. And through such experience God's reality can be felt.

So, in Christian nature mysticism, the experience of “dissolution of the subject-object distinction” (in whatever degree) happens in relation of one with nature or universe, whereas the better known kind of Christian mystical tradition describes this dissolution happening when the self is submerging or being unified with God himself. In the extreme case of the ‘nature version’, it is experienced that one, the self, or “the subject” is "melted away" in union with creation. God is not an object of the experience (in either version of Christian mysticism), but in Christian nature mysticism God’s creative presence is realized through the felt experience of one’s belonging to and being related to nature or Universe.

Authority of the Bible

It is one of the central topics of historical protestantism. It was in the name of their faithfulness to Scripture as opposed to "papal apostasy" that almost all reformers carried the course of reformation forward in its early stages. But also, perhaps disturbingly, almost every new protestant denomination since then has begun its own life with a new "turn to the Bible", or at least professing it.

The "Sola Scriptura" formula will never loose its appeal in protestantism, as surely as "ad fontes" or "back to the source" calls always have their force in any religion. I think that it is quite clear that Christianity would cease to be Christianity if one would simply disregard the Bible as a source of faith and doctrine.

The role of Scripture in responsible Christian theology today is still a hot topic and rightly so. It is quite appropriate for a Christian theology to repeatedly return to the question of Biblical interpretation and of the understanding of its spiritual authority, as our circumstances in which we come to the Biblical text change, as well as our knowledge of many areas of life and the world including the socio-historical and linguistic worlds of the Bible, and sociological and psychological perspectives of human religious behaviour.

Nevertheless, one needs to be careful not to lift the Bible to the pedestal on which it can not stand after a longer, honest look. By doing so, textually conservative theologies of today (like evangelical, adventist, but even some interpretations of neo-orthodoxy and post-liberalism) can do the Bible and Christianity a great disservice. For example, inspiration of the Bible does not guarantee its historical reliability (although it might at places "make it" more reliable than other sources from that time). Rather, it means - among other things - that God can and does speak to individuals and to communities today and in all times through the biblical text in a very special and deeply felt ways. This is crucial and it is this what makes the Bible a spiritually unique book in Christianity. Gospels, for ex. are the closest to the earliest, most potent narratives about Christ and his meaning for humanity. The Bible enables us to get in touch, however remotely yet genuinely, with the faith of people who have been devoted and open to the same Ultimate Reality which is at work in people's lives today, two and more thousands years ago.

But because of its very nature, the Bible can not be the only source of Christian faith and doctrine, nor is it absolutely above and superior to the other sources suggested in history (tradition, reason, religious experience). I will give reasons for this claim in the next post.

Sociology of Knowledge and Christian Faith

It is more than forty years ago now since Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote a very influential work in the field of sociology of knowledge, The Social Construction of Reality. This book is frequently described today as a groundwork for the school of social constructionism. Just a couple of years later, another Berger's field defining work followed, The Sacred Canopy, which applied the general claims of sociology of knowledge to religious claims, doctrines and systems of legitimation of religious claims and practices.

Very briefly, Berger's idea in Sacred Canopy is that every epistemic community has its “plausibility structure” for any conception or belief. This holds also for religious communities which legislate what to believe and what not to believe, give reasons for this (which may be "pragmatic" as well as "cognitive"), and try to correct those who do not obey these rules. In more technical terms: the plausibility structure consists in social definitions of reality, the social relations which take these definitions as true, and the supporting “therapies” & legitimations with which the definitions are supported and members of the community “brought into line” if needed. Berger claims that this holds especially for religious definitions of reality and the corresponding religious knowledge claims because these are not supported by sense experience directly and are therefore even more dependent on social support than scientific claims (although see for ex. the works of Martin Kusch who argues that this also applies to science and its epistemic communities).

Not entering into discussion of the details here, I think it must be admitted - and anyone who has been a part of a religious community in a way knows this, I think - that such "plausibility structures" indeed exist in rel. communities, that they are enforced by the communal talk and taken-for-granted commitments, and that there are various ways of "therapies" for those who do not conform (not to say that these therapies and sanctions are in any way intentionally "evil" or that they are created or enforced consciously or methodically, but they exist and can be experienced).

Belief in the full-fledged doctrine of the Trinity, for example, is taken for granted in the most Christian Churches and, if one does not share this belief (even though one might share many other Christian beliefs, including the messiahship and God's Sonship of Jesus, construed a bit differently), is somehow out of the game, or at least "under pressure" to conform in order to become a full member of the community.

Berger was also a Lutheran and a lay theologian (he penned at least three books where he discusses his theological positions combining them with his sociological views). It was not a coincidence that his theological journey was from a Barth-inspired neo-orthodoxy in the early sixties, to a more Schleiermacher-inspired liberal theology from the late sixties until today. His conviction was that only a liberal theology, aware of a socio-cultural conditioning of doctrine, theology, Church practices and interpretations of Scripture, is capable of surviving the very insightful criticism from the perspective of Sociology of Knowledge. If the religious experience as lived through a certain kind of existential feelings is completely abandoned as a basis of faith or "proper theology", Berger thought, then theology or even Christian religious commitment has lost an important - or the most important - foundation of faith which alone can (at least in some respects and only through "signals" in the world) transcend the temporal and socio-historical determinateness of religion.

While there are several simplistic assumptions which Berger made in late 1960s (for ex. the assumption of inevitability of secularization understood as a process towards a loss of religious commitment in contemporary world), his application of sociology of knowledge to religion does pose an important challenge to theology and philosophy of religion which is ignored only at their own peril. At the same time, some forms of social constructionism present very fruitful opportunities for religious affirmation and theology today because constructionist critique of atheist a-theologies and empiricist criteria for justified belief are equally weighty as its critique of religion and theology.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (instead of an intro)

Let's open this blog with a specific topic, skipping the intro altogether. The topic is hopefully fitting, however, for the opening of a blog on liberal protestantism. I want to consider some features of the thought of the great theological father of the liberal tradition, Friedrich Schleiermacher.

In today's world of post-liberal, post-modern, radical orthodox theologies - and even more so in evangelical, Conservative Roman Catholic and several other conservative Christian systems of thought - Schleiermacher has become a favourite example of a theological apostate. A good recipe to start a theological essay these days is to sketch a "schleiermacherian" position, and then to sharply distance oneself from it by showing its "obvious" shortcomings, its naive view of doctrine and religion, and after that proceed to whatever version of conservative or post-something theology one wants to defend.

Not only are many of these treatments of Scheiermacher heavily biased, insufficiently informed, or simply erroneous; more importantly, they do not show any understanding of the valuable insights and relevancy of Scheiermacher's views for today's situation and dilemmas of Christian theology.

For a start, let me propose a short list of some - by no means all - still relevant claims of Schleiermacher that are habitually ignored or misunderstood, but which I find illuminating insights that can and should inform responsible Christian theology today. I will have more to say on Schleiermacher in the future posts, but we got to begin - this blog, as well as an engagement with Schleiermacher - somewhere (so this list may seem quite arbitrary).
1.) For Schleiermacher, religious experience or "feeling" is essential for Christian faith, doctrines are derivative.

This much is well known. But is it understood? Well, it has to be viewed together with other claims of Schleiermacher, like:

2.) The primary, original expressions of faith-experience are the poetic and the rhetorical (preaching, exhortation). Doctrinal systems are developed as a result of rational reflection upon the first two expressions of religious feelings.

3.) God can never be "an object" of experience, as one object among others. God as an ultimate reality is "the Whence" of all our knowledge (theoretical reason) and action (practical reason).

4.) So, importantly, the feeling of "absolute dependence", which is Schleiermacher's term to denote the most basic and genuine religious feeling, transcends subject-object structure. Rather, this God-consciousness, as he also calls it, is immediate, pre-linguistic and pre-conceptual, and puts us in touch with the Ultimate reality which is God (however, see the bullet-point 6.).

5.) This feeling not only "accompanies our whole existence" (The Christian Faith 4.3), but also colours it and in this way structures it. This is very similar to the claims about existential feelings made by fenomenologists such as Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, and also to Wittgenstein's notion that how we experience the world determines what we experience.

6.) However, Schleiermacher was well aware that, "if there is religion at all, it must be social, for that is the nature of man, and it is quite peculiarly the nature of religion." (On Religion, p. 73). So, religion can only be "positive", particular, or situated in socio-historical reality: this means it is necessarily embedded in language, within the life co-shaped by traditions, doctrines, communities and practices. There is no other way a religion, or Christianity, could exist! It can not exist in isolation or just in abstraction. (This proves that George Lindbeck's accusation of Schleiermacher that the latter ignores cultural-linguistic realities and defends a possibility of a non-particular "general religiousness", not situated in time and place, is wrong).

My point is that there is more to Schleiermacher than Barth's or Lindbeck's caricatures of the former's theology. Much of contemporary Christian theology suffers from a far too hasty repudiation of the liberal protestant tradition.