Appreciative Awareness: The Feeling-Dimension in Religious Experience

Abstract

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE is the term which describes the encounter between the human person and God. The sensations, feelings, emotions, mind, and spirit are the arenas which mediate the experience to consciousness. Knowledge results which is at the same time both clear and unclear. Reason may cpme to know clearly the distinction between the economic and immanent Trinity, but the heart recognizes the triune presence. The experience always remains richer than Like a lit candle placed in the center of a dark room, the area close to the flame is clear and details are seen. But as one looks to the more remote areas of the room, the light cannot penetrate the darkness, details become obscure, and only large objects are discernible. The obscured objects remain no less real than the illuminated ones. The challenge confronting theology is the person who seeks to understand faith in the world today and who wants faith to issue into a deeper love of God. Therefore the question is not whether God manifests Himself to me in experience but how I communicate with Him. This article will examine the manner in which the person in the feeling-dimension of religious experience communicates with God. I am primarily concerned, then, with the knowledge of the heart. Bernard E. Meland calls it appreciative knowledge. Appreciative knowledge is best described by the analogy to art. In this aesthetic mode the feelings rather than logic lead the individual in the encounter. Thus the person cannot be a viewer but becomes a participant on the feeling-dimension. The analogy does not focus upon the relationship of creating but of appreciating art. The act of appreciating implies an interaction between the person and an which forms a context of relationships. Appreciative knowledge, then, depends upon recognition, a discernment of sorts, that perceives what the feelings convey in relationship with another, whether the other is an El Greco painting, music by Beethoven, or sculpture by Rodin. Hence the art object interacts