Rels 205 Lecture 4.2

Sacral Sentiments

 Friedrich Schleiermacher

(1768-1834)

Schlieremacher’s Church

Key Works

Speeches on Religion to its Cultural Despisers(1799)

The Christian Faith (1821)

Ideas

1) Nature of Religion2) Religion not a science

… original and characteristic possession of religion, it resigns, at once, all claims on anything that belongs either to science or morality …

What is Religion?

… religion is essentially contemplative … The contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite …

An Affection

Yet religion is not knowledge and science, either of the world or of God. Without being knowledge, it recognises knowledge and science. In itself it is an affection, a revelation of the Infinite in the finite, God being seen in it and it in God ...

A Sacral Sentiment

Sentiments, feelings, or emotions, that evoke and/or express a sense of the sacred.

Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840)

Romanticism and Sacral Sentiments

Absolute DependenceBut the self-consciousness which accompanies all our activities … is itself precisely a consciousness of absolute dependence …

The Sacred

The sacred is that which is set apart, the Holy, as opposed to the secular or profane world of everyday life.

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917

“Set apart” - Sacred actions

Set apart - pollution

Rudolf Otto (1869-1937)

Professor at the University of Marburg

The Idea of the Holy (1923)

1923

The Holy

Arnold Friberg (b. 1913)

Exodus 3. Cf. Ezekiel 1-2

Natural Revelation

Romans 1.19

“For all that may be known of Godlies plain before their eyes …”

Romans 1. 21

“… knowing God they did not worshipHim as God …”

Anselm (1033-1109)

  Archbishop of Canterbury

Plato (427-347 B.C.)

Idealism

„Bear“

„Bear“

Romanesque

Ontological Argument

God is that Being “than which nothing greater can be conceived.@ Since existence is greater than non-existence, the greatest conceivable being must of necessity exist. Therefore God exists necessarily.

Thomas Aquinas (1224/27-1274)

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

Empiricism

„Bear“

„Bear“

Gothic

The Five Ways of St. Thomas Aquinas

Cosmological 1 - causationCosmological 2 - motionTeleologicalMoralAesthetic

John Pearson (1613-1686)

Anglican clergyman and theologian. He was successively Master of Jesus College and Trinity College, Cambridge, and was the Lady Margaret professor of divinity at Cambridge University. In 1672 he became the Bishop of Chester.

An Exposition of the Creed (1659)

Pearson in Cambridge and Chester

Sociology of belief

“Roman armies … met with atheism nowhere ... they showed no nation was without God.”

Peter Berger Rumor of Angels

Rodney Stark

Acceptance of miracles

“If then any action be performed which is not within the compass of the power of any natural agent ... it must be ascribed to a cause transcending all natural causes …”

William Paley(1743‑1805)

Carlisle

Paley’s Argument

Refined teleological argument:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer … But suppose I found a watch upon the ground …

… crossing a heath …

… see a stone …

… found a watch …

Examine the watch

A mechanism …

Man made …

Analogy – the universe

An intelligent design = a creator

Prof. John Leslie