I just finished a paragraph I would like to reproduce as food for thought, as it demonstrates a theme that I have continually harped on as a necessary prerequisite for thinking seriously about religion, and for taking the fact of religion seriously against some contemporary critics who seem unwilling to treat it so. The paragraph is a summation of the first work of Edward Scribner Ames, philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, and pastor of a then-growing Disciples of Christ Church near the campus. Raised in the non-creedal, theologically insouciant tradition of his denomination, Ames found theology dull and irrelevant. Philosophy, especially the empirically minded variety of pragmatism just coming into definition and practice in the psychology of William James, provided a way for Ames to continue to take religion seriously, be an active, fervent minister, and shed much of the supernaturalism and speculative dimension of what he considered irrelevant theology. Ames' first major work, The Psychology of Religious Experience, is heavily indebted to both James and Dewey, but with a very definite personal flair. The following is from p. 230 of Dorrien's book:
[Ames] began his early major work, The Psychology of Religious Experience, with a Jamesian description of religion. The prevailing definitions of religion are either narrow or vague, he noted. Kant defined religion as the knowledge of one's duties as divine commands; Schleiermacher defined it as the feeling of absolute dependence; Hegel defined it as the knowledge posses by the finite mind of it nature as absolute mind. Ames did not cite James's specific definition of religion - "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude" - which had its own narrowness problems, but he argued that in contrast to the prevailing alternative, James was broad and concrete. For James, "religion" was a collective name, like "government". It did not signify any specific belief or attribute, but included many practices, beliefs, and sentiments. Religion was a name fore the many ways in which people engaged in religious practices. For James, as for Ames, there was no such thing as a single essence of religion. On empiricist grounds, Ames banished "essence" language altogether. He suggested that even such words as idea, image, and concept should be replaced by such words as reacting, associating, attending, feeling, perceiving, reasoning, and the like. IDeas are comprehensible only in the context of their history and by their effects, he explained, expounding a Lockean theme. So-called "ideas" are movements of imagery and feelings. Mental life is the cognitive process of mediating ends and smoothing the way for action. With Hume and Hames, he believed that just as there is no such thing as an essence of religion, there is no such thing as pure consciousness. Thought is always particular. We never merely think, but ablways think about something, just as we never merely feel, but feel cold or warmth or pain: "In the same way, consciousness is actually of this or that kinf, and there is nor more a consciousness in general than a tree in general."
In other words, to speak of "religion", or even "Christianity" without speaking in very specific terms about particular instances of religious practice or particular Christian communities of faith is to speak of nothing at all.
I find myself comforted that I am in such good company with a long tradition of American pragmatic empirical thought about the religious experience.
